How To RP: A Tutorial On The Fine Art Of RP’ing
NOTE! THESE ARE NOT RULES BUT GUIDELINES TO HELP YOU BE A BETTER RP PLAYER
Note! This article concerns itself with forum based text role plays. Though other types of role plays exist; they are beyond the scope of this article.
What is RP’ing?
RP’ing stands for Role Playing. You assume the role of a character from a videogame, movie, book, anime, or their own character (known as an OC, short for Original Character) and you interact with the other posters who have done the same via forum posts. The interactions build a story around a basic framework set by the creator of that RP, who is known as the Gamemaster (GM for short).
Your first RP:
To find an RP that appeals to you, look through the forum. It is best to look in the actual RP topic to best get the “feel” of it.
To join, first make sure that the RP is still open for registration. If it is, sign up with your character using a character profile. GMs may have varying formats for their character profiles, so check carefully before signing up. Note that some GMs may require your character to be approved by them before you can post.
Once you have been approved or once you have made your character profile if approval is not needed you may now post your first in-character (IC for short) post.
In-Character Posting:
Remember, when you post IC, you are no longer yourself but that character. When you react to something in game, you should react as your character would, notas you would.
Example: If you are a lighthearted person but your character is unfriendly.
Your IC posts should reflect this. You shouldn’t be posting about your character having a friendly conversation with another character but you should be posting about your character ignoring other characters or insulting them.
Bear in mind that you (as the player) may know something that your character doesn’t.
Example: Your character passes by another character. You know from the latest post that the character has a pistol concealed in his jacket. But your character does not know that.
Without a good reason to find out (the other character draws his pistol and starts shooting or it falls out of his jacket); your character doesn’t know that the character he passed is armed.
Another thing is: BE AWARE of your character's physical limits and be realistic (to the RP's setting).
General posting guidelines:
Post in the third person. First and second person should be restricted to IC dialogue.
Type out your actions instead of setting them off with asterisks or some other punctuation mark.
Example: He kicked down the door vs. *kicks down the door*
You should ALWAYS leave your interactions with other characters open ended. This allows the other players to respond as they please.
Out of Character Posting:
This refers to you posting as yourself. Generally, this is restricted to communicating with the other players. It is usually set off from IC posts with the tag OOC (short for Out Of Character) and by parenthesis.
Etiquette:
The most important thing to remember is that GMs have supreme authority in their RP. If they tell you something is disallowed, do not argue with them. It is disrespectful and you can get in trouble if they report you to the staff.
Also, GMs can eject unruly or disruptive players. If you have been ejected from an RP, do not post in it. If you do post in it, the GM can report you to the staff and you can get in trouble.
Regarding posting, do not hurl your character into an action sequence and leave them there. If you must take a break isolate your character from the rest of the others.
Godmoding (also but incorrectly called godmodding) – this covers a wide variety of behaviors. This behavior is usually considered to be very rude.
Passive godmoding: this consists of warping events to your benefit when the RP doesn’t go the way you like it. It can also refer to the creation of an extremely strong or downright invulnerable character or gifting a character with perfect equipment or abilities.
Arbitrarily giving your character new powers is a form of passive godmoding.
Active godmoding: this is broken into 2 types:
Autoing: This refers to interacting with another player’s character or an interactive object and deciding the outcome. Although this mostly appears in combat, it can show up in dialogue in the form of one player “putting words in the mouth” of another player’s character.
Example: Character A throws a knife at Character B, killing him.
This phrasing does not allow the player who plays Character B to do anything.
The appropriate phrasing is: Character A threw a knife at Character B.
This phrasing allows the player who plays Character B to dodge or take the hit.
Character-Jacking: This refers to taking control of another player’s character. (NOTE: This maybe done if consented to by the player who's character is being taken control of. However, it is extremely rude if done without consent.)
Note: Godmoding may not be prohibited by the GM's rules. Remember, GMs set the rules for their RP.
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Update log:
12/20/08 (20:01 - 8:01 PM) - Added extra info on "Character-Jacking" [(NOTE: This maybe done if consented to by the player who's character is being taken control of. However, it is extremely rude if done without consent.)]
5/7/09 (21:31) - Added extra info.
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Let me know if something needs to be added or if you have any questions.
Combat Resolution in RPs
and Why Godmodding is Bad
The intent of this post is to analyze the guiding spirit of forum style RPs such as the ones on Furtopia, and show how and why godmodding and similar RP activities that are frequently banned in RPs go against the spirit of the RP itself.
GNS Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory) models various forms of RP (and preferred RP styles) as belonging to one or two of three categories: Gamist, Narrativist, or Simulationist. In short summary, a Gamist RP is played with intent to win, a Narrativist RP is played with intent construct a collaborative novel of sorts (this includes elements such as theme and dynamic characters), and a Simulationist RP is played to mentally simulate a fantasy world (this more heavily emphasizes character/world consistency and character immersion). Different RP mediums are more compatible with some of these styles than others, and different players prefer some styles over others.
Forum RPs here, particularly "serious" forum RPs, tend to be Sumulationist with a touch of Narrativist. With only one exception (a RNG based RP hosted by Landrav and Avan), none of the serious RPs I've seen here have been Gamist to any measurable degree. In other words, the goal in an RP of this type isn't to win; rather, the goal of RP is the creation of the fantasy world itself.
Simulationist and Narrativist RPs are bound to have conflict; just like Gamist RPs, these RPs are also largely founded on conflict. In a Simulationist RP, the conflict would be resolved by what would happen if the situation were to actually take place. Take this character for example:
Name: Riél
Species: Anthro (Black Wolf)
Age: 19
Appearance: Riél wears very simple attire: a plain shirt and pants with a belt. A grey spot that covers his right ear and a sizable portion of the right side of his face is his only physically recognizable attribute; aside from this spot, his fur is completely black, and he appears to be completely ordinary.
Background: Riél is an interrogator for the criminal justice system of [City], who begrudgingly accept his employment on account of his superior ability to act in that capacity.
Skillset: Riél is a master interrogator. To him, knowledge is safety, power, and influence, and other people, or as he calls them, "targets", are sources of such knowledge. Because his style of interrogation could just as easily involve him taking a beating as giving one, Riél has high endurance as well as moderate unarmed combat skills. For the most dire of circumstances, Riél carries an extremely well concealed whale's tooth formed into a dagger at his right hip, but he uses it rarely and usually foregoes other weaponry because he prefers to give the illusion of being unarmed.
Riél's an interrogator by profession, and a master of that art. He also has experience in controlled, one-on-one brawl from that context. Therefore, he can almost always tell when other characters are lying (he'd have to, given his competency at his profession), and he would also have above average but not excellent in traditional one-on-one combat (on one hand, he brawls daily as part of his job, but on the other hand, he could summon guards to help him at any time at his workplace and only fights one-on-one there). However, he would probably fail at any contest that would be based on wealth (though not poor, he's not in the elite class), politics (he's only used to working on one person at a time, and has no relevant experience), or multi-man combat (he's used to only fighting one person at a time). In order to RP well, it would be appropriate to have him succeed at tasks that he could not realistically fail at as well as let him fail at tasks that he could not realistically succeed at.
In the case that conflicting character strengths do not make the resolution of a contest obvious (for example, two combat based characters face off), the resolution of that conflict becomes more complex. The contest becomes a play-by-play, and each independent action's success is determined based on what would be the most reasonable outcome given the definition of the characters. There is a *very* slight amount of competition here; the goal as the player of a character is to have the character engage in actions that would most play to their strengths and maximize their chance of success (for example, for the case of Riél, those actions would be "get the opponent alone" and/or "get the opponent talking"). Again, it's worth reiterating that reasonable expectations are the most important thing to adhere to; it's better to let your character fail at a task than to break previously defined rules (character scope, world mechanics, previously defined actions and attributes, realistic expectations, etc.).
Most play based rules in RPs I've seen here revolve around this concept, as breaking these rules also breaks the realism for conflict resolution. Godmodding usually makes a given character more likely to succeed at a given task at the cost of that character's consistency or consistency of world mechanics. Character jacking and autohitting usually make a given character more likely to succeed at a given task at the cost of other characters' consistency. Having a character act and escape a conflict before other characters have a chance to react gives a character a pass against failing at the cost of realistic plot/storyline resolution.
I realize what I've said is long. I'm taking the time to discuss it because many RPers become downright agitated when players have characters break realism for the sake of having their own character perform comparatively better in the RP. This in turn helps to kill the RP as invested players leave in frustration. RPs take a lot of time to set up and require a large communal time commitment, but have a huge payoff in fun. It really *stinks* when they die, and it's really sad for everybody involved when RPs die sooner than they should.
Hopefully, this long winded explanation should shed light on why exactly things such as godmodding, autohitting, and character jacking are frowned upon so strongly in RP.