Another devblog and another week on the Sea of Storms. In keeping with my original intent of these devblogs to be something informative and relevant, I will be addressing some annoying role-playing tendencies. The chief amongst them being when someone avoids role-playing with others. It’s really simple, when you log onto the Sea of Storms you should, hopefully, be logging on to role-play.
Now, I realize that some people play the Sea of Storms and enjoy some solo play. I enjoy quite a bit of solo play myself, as do channelers, shady types, and older players with thousands of hours logged. So a good rule of thumb is, if you remember your last role-play in detail and had fun, then you’re doing fine. Normally this equates to something like one role-play a week, which is a fair number with an active schedule in your daily life.
Logging on to the Sea of Storms with the intent to role-play is important, since it’s the basis of the game. However, logging on with the intent to role-play then turning down role-play with certain characters is what turns you from a misguided player into a wanker.
The crux of this problem is set firmly on the player's shoulder. When someone asks to role-play it’s not your character saying no, your character addresses a role-play situation after you’ve started to role-play. Players avoiding certain characters is improper use of OOC/IC information, but it’s one that we typically let slide. Still, when a mercenary, whitecloak, male channeler, or Aes Sedai asks you to role-play you should never turn them down simply because doing so would threaten your character in some way.
All you’re really doing is deciding that you know ICly that character is this or that. So based off that IC information you’re deciding as a player to avoid role-playing. Personally, I’ve always found it to be something of a self imposed handicap. Stories are born out of division and conflict, on many levels ranging from physical, emotional, and philosophical. By choosing to remove this conflict and division and waiting for event immortals to generate these situations you’re depriving yourself of superb role-play.
I’ll give an example in hopes it helps make my point. As Jeshin the mute, I role-played with Alisa Sedai every chance I could. She knew I was a male channeler and had told me that when my madness progressed that she’d either find a way to help me or gentle me. I knew OOCly that eventually I’d go insane as my taint went up and Alisa would do her thing. This didn’t stop me one bit; characters aren’t meant to live forever. They’re meant to exist as experiences and stories. If their story ends that’s just their story ending. To finish the Jeshin and Alisa example, she eventually kidnapped me to the White Tower when Samiel declared dragon. I managed to escape and join Samiel. The point is that it was a great set of role-plays and gave my character an amazing experience of nearly being gentled and escaping.
A couple things worth noting.. Just because you don't feel like RPing doesn't mean that you have to. RP is what is going to take you farthest at our MUD but we are still a MUD, not a MUSH or other such thing. There is a delicate balance between the code aspect and the IC aspect, and it is important to realize that. There will be times when it actually might make more sense to avoid RP and focus on improving your code setup.
ReplyDeleteTo perhaps clarify the point Jeshin was trying to get at here, I'd also rather address this IC/OOC thing. It's not really a big deal if you avoid someone because you don't like them, etc. The only time you'd be forced to RP with someone is basically if you walked out on a RP in the middle of it previously and left something important (e.g., death, capture) unresolved. A lot of times it is absolutely true that a lot of the player will bleed over into the character, and if you don't like the player...well RPing with one of their characters is going to be pretty awful. So don't bother! That's what I say anyway. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun.
Oh, and secretly I totally ducked RP with someone once for like a year. They finally did catch me though. You can't really duck someone forever, that's for sure.