'Conventions, customs, consensus, or the lack thereof?'

[Kaerli_Stronwylle]

(Since my predecessor's response was inadequate, here is my full list of roleplay likes and dislikes.)

Likes:

• A balance of casual and intense roleplay.
• Lucid and eloquent writing.
• Intrigue, diplomacy, and war.
• Heavy use of religion: it is as important, if not more, in Planeshift than in our world.
• Earned power.
• Customs of courteous roleplay behavior.

Dislikes:

• Characters who roleplay skills at expert level or above in magic AND melee at the same time. It is godmodding.
• Poor writing.
• An excess of unearned power.
• Incorrect roleplay of death. It is a horrific and draining experience.
• Discourteous attendance to the rules and customs of roleplay.

My apologies for this in the thread, but I feel a couple things need clarification:
First: defined earned/unearned power.  I'm not sure if you're referring to mechanics leveling for combat/magic, or something with RP.

Second: I have never, ever been able to get any sort of consensus on the rules and customs of RP to begin with; nor have I had anyone actually sit down and talk me through what they see the rules and customs as and explain to me how they all work.  Can we start there?

(P.S. the reason I might seem so irredeemable as a godmodder is partly because nobody's ever been able to make the logic of some of of the definitions of godmodding make intuitive sense to me.  As to railroading...well, I expect people to be as stubborn about their characters accomplishing their goals as I am about mine; talk to me OOCly though, and we can usually work something out.)

[Rigwyn]

For game/rp rules, I would start here:  http://www.planeshift.it/roleplay.html

Lilura was here

[Suno_Regin]

I'd just like to say that I've never seen you as a godmodder, Kaerli. I remember when, relatively quickly during one of our RP fights, one of my characters practically broke your leg. It was the logical thing to happen, because it made sense to both of us in the context of the positions/actions of our characters. You RP fight similar to how I do, I think, which is simply determining how feasible it is for certain things to hit/miss you and how your actions can more easily disable the opponent.

Looking at it that way, other players will easily shun us. This is why I usually give my characters a strong start in the fight, and quickly as the fight goes on, they blow off all their steam. Sometimes I simply get hit for the sake of getting hit, because I know that, after a while, certain players will say "you just dodge everything" and be done with you, when on the contrary, your anime-esque 50 ft. leap into the air isn't going to get you anywhere in actual combat.

Regardless, just look from the outside in, and you can usually determine the best course of action. Making sure that everyone is having fun, even if others don't play the same we do, is what comes first, so it may require taking that dire hit that the other person hopes to connect.

[Rigwyn]

Imagine a story about two warriors who get into a fight. They stand there all day unsuccessfully attacking each other and missing all day. At most, one might score a superficial scratch that is conveniently ignored.

How many pages of this repetitious, unproductive fighting would you read before you put the book down or started skipping ahead? Some is ok, but this in itself is not very entertaining.

For most folks, this is terribly boring. Don't do it. Skip all the blocking and dodging and start exchanging blow for blow. When you get hit, make sure you are damaged in some way. If there is no consequence to being hit, then its no different than if you didn't get hit at all. I'm not saying that you should not block, rather, an excessive pattern of blocking, dodging and being unbelievably lucky will turn people away. Refer back to our friends above who keep swinging and missing ... and boring everyone in the process.

In general, there is an expectation that you do not godmod, go all god-mode on us, or metagame.

[cdmoreland]

The devs seem to be working for rp. In the 3 years I have played they have made it harder and harder to level stats and combat skills, reduced to almost nothing the advantage of crafted weapons and armor, except for enchantment. It's very hard for a new player to get any levels without a lot of help from others.

I have never liked text based rp. Taking 15 minutes to read someone's description before you can even start to interact wit them seems silly to me. Waiting for long periods to get a response in chat destroys the flow for me.

[Lumi]

Agree with both Waesed and Rigwyn.

All i can think about for "RP rules" is have fun.

Basically all is a question of balance once again. IMO the best way to know what your char is capable of is : participate to REAL IG pvp event. Why? Because then you will see that your char basically CANNOT cast magic AND throw sword around while shouting an arrow.
Once you did that, your RP-fighting should be easier to "balance".
Same thing for stats : even if you maxed all of them (which i didn't), you can dodge an hit but that will surely tire you and let you take the next one right in the puncha. >.> + you can wear an HA and be immune to axe blows but eh you will be sweating and falling on your knees of tiredness in few hits.
I hope it did make sense. That's is just the way i found my char limits.

We forget that Mastering a skill RP wise is very LONG ! Years of IG time. So it obviously left "scars" on our char, whatever that is.

Well i don't know if you ever saw a samuraĆÆ moovie or even Kung-Fu one. But even a Master in those, does have a weakness. He's harassed by his consciousness or, he is kind of evil and think he's superior which is dangerous, and so on.


On RP text part : IG is supposed to be a theater like RP, and NOT a novel. I prefer improvisation, but that's just my taste. If planed RP then ok, a storyline but please not the dialogues !

[novacadian]

The devs seem to be working for rp. In the 3 years I have played they have made it harder and harder to level stats and combat skills, reduced to almost nothing the advantage of crafted weapons and armor, except for enchantment. It's very hard for a new player to get any levels without a lot of help from others.

Points well taken cdmoreland; however my meaning was if everyone was on the same page with RP that all development would have been moving in that direction. Not to now make it harder to level but having it that there is no need to level or allowing the players to choose the level of the character at creation. These are just wild examples which are not meant for debate; yet my point is that nothing has been developed to aid and ease RP on PS. It is as if dev has been designing a game for another group of players entirely. No need to take my word for it... there are a number of threads complaining of this very thing from old hard core RPers on this very forum.

The kicker is that new players now come to PS and see a game that is skill and stat based with PvP capabilities and are then told by players that none of that matters. It left me scratching my head for a very long time. As to how this ever happened is still unknown to me. A collosal waist of time if dev really wants this to be an RP game in my opinion. Logic tells me that they want it to be skill/stats based. The new crafts keep coming fast and furious of late that are all skill/stat based.

[Volki]

The devs seem to be working for rp. In the 3 years I have played they have made it harder and harder to level stats and combat skills, reduced to almost nothing the advantage of crafted weapons and armor, except for enchantment. It's very hard for a new player to get any levels without a lot of help from others.

You are wrong on this. Harder grinding means less time spent roleplaying. Just because the two are opposites does not mean increasing the time to grind helps RP. It draws people away from RP because they must spend more time grinding.

If the devs thought that making the game harder would be beneficial to roleplay, they were dead wrong. It was a very poor decision.

[Taya]

To those who really think we should only RP as per our stats/skills:

Put as short and simple as I can manage:
1 - If I play a 100+ year old dermorian/nolthrir, is it even slightly realistic that they will have no skill in anything?
2 - It might be realistic to play an unskilled young character who just set out learning whatever thing they want to learn but then, due to the varying interpretation of the flow of time in game, that character will never be 100+ years old.

So should we have a world where a character who lived so long and is still physically not into their old age (dermorians and nolthrir live to about 200) is basically useless? Or should we all resign ourselves to eternally RPing young characters? Other option is to permit yourself no RP at all until you level things, and if PS is about RP that seems a bit like missing the whole point of everything.

[bilbous]

 I use arbitrarily strong language to try to make my points but it should be understood it is just rhetoric.  Still it would be nice if you worked on a skill you claim to have once in a while. Just as the larger part of the realm's non-player population is merely hinted at so can your skill be. It is that hint that lends credence to your story.

Why should a game player try to honor your role play conventions if you are not willing to honor game mechanics? Don't try to say you crafted Excalibur if you can't even make steel. Don't try to say you made a mystical elixir if you have never been seen at an alchemy station. That is what invisible minions are for.

Treat my arguments as specious if you like, it is certainly true that I have little knowledge of how you roleplayers currently get on with each other but we are all here together, more or less. Avoiding people because they don't meet your expectations is a little elitist.

[Rigwyn]

Why are you guys even arguing about this?

Those who understand do. Those who don't don't. There's enough room for role players to do their thing and levelers to do theirs... same for everyone in between.


( That was kind of hypocritical of me to say given my past argument... but its the truth. We should move on )

[Taya]

bilbous, I'm not saying no one should level things or that anyone at all should be able to make whatever wild overpowered claims about their abilities that they want. It wouldn't work.  I've always been as much mechanics player as RPer (within ten levels of maxing a way isn't skipping mechanics even slightly after all), but I just don't see it as important in the same way you seem to.

Anyway, it's not arguing really. I am actually interested in hearing how someone with this approach to play would handle the situation I outlined.

It seems quite relevant to Kaerli's query about unearned power as well. I just feel that the perception of whether someone earned their power within RP doesn't have to be about stats and skill levels. It can come from there or elsewhere, but one way or another, be it by mechanics or something else, you have to make your claim to power believable or people are not going to RP along with it very happily.

[bilbous]

1. Choose your character creation with the skills you wish to portray in mind and work them at whatever pace you are comfortable with, taking the people you meet there as hooks to hang a story on.

2. Every day is Groundhog day and a chance to start your growth anew. When you enter the game don't come into your abilities wholesale but wait for appropriate occasions to jump to a higher orbit. Once you hit your stride you will have left the nucleus that was at your lowest energy level and manifest your destiny.

3. Ephemeral characters need no justification but necessity.

Do I need to break out Prolix Fanfaron to decry the state of the realm again? COACT may be old and forgotten but it could still rise again.

Maybe I need to reform the Order of the Odd Cod again to spread the randomness. It actually had a non-me member once but I suspect (s?)he just joined in order to change the guild name for ulterior purposes. I liked to change it randomly fairly often according to a contrived schema anyway so I didn't mind.

Planeshift is more than a game to me, it is the forum and the bug tracker and to a lesser extent the Irc channels. It is an outlet to expound on my ideas pertaining to a generally laudable endeavor. I am a wandering lighthouse and these are the rocky shores I return to illuminate, and in turn be illuminated by.

Klaatu - So Said The Lighthouse Keeper

[Kaerli_Stronwylle]

Having read the thread and a couple of the linked posts...I have come to the conclusion that I simply don't have the same notion as others as to what the game rules are.  It strikes me that there's a very sharp 'endgame breakpoint' as a character progresses in PS, even: basically, your character progresses more-or-less linearly and reasonably in capability (skills) for a while, then the positive feedback loops of Tria and PP start to kick in.  This causes a character to 'pile up' Tria and PP faster than they can burn it on normal training (raising the skills they practice day-to-day).  This combines with the severe frustration levels that a base-stats char incurs (squishiness, repeated mana shortages, stamina issues, and load limits) to drive many players to raise stats.  However, once you raise stats beyond a certain point, a second positive feedback loop kicks in, as raising stats is much more efficient at improving a char's all-around capability than raising skills is.  This results in a char that basically leaves the RPer with no choice but to play him/her vastly under mechanics stats/skills to maintain any sense of RP balance; yet to do so denies reality in the sense that they can do things in the mechanics that they simply cannot acknowledge in their RP.  Can you see where this is a double-bind?

[Rigwyn]

If you try to tie the mechanics to role play too much, you will run into all sorts of silly problems. The mechanics once made it possible to climb up to the crystal with just two sacks. Does that mean that we should role play being able to defy physics like this? If the devs fix this behavior, then do I now have to include in my role play and excuse for why I can no longer perform this bizarre feat?

Ultimately, a lot of these things boil down to using your judgment.