Something came up during an RP session last night that I wasn’t sure how to deal with, and I was hoping to get some advice from people. I want to emphatically state before I say this, that I am not attempting to blame or call out anyone for anything, just that I am looking for advice in dealing with a situation better than I did.
Essentially my problem is, how do you best respect the wishes of other players on the outskirts of a plot, when their decisions damage or derail the story you are trying to explore. In this case, I play a law officer in Ul’dah, and my character has a sort of romance plot going with a character who plays a criminal. However he had managed to hide his activities, until last night, when he admitted them willingly. This sort of culminated in my character having a crisis of whether or not to arrest/punish him, or try to change/accept him.
What happened next though, was that a character who plays a Flame, who both of our characters knew but wasn’t involved in the plot, heard us talking about it, and decided to arrest us both. This was without consulting us OOC in any way. Eventually it culminated in her essentially killing the person I was RPing with, and dragged me off to jail, at which point and started talking to the player OOC, and more or less said, “Essentially if you don’t have a plan for me to get out of this, I’m going to make oneâ€. Their plan was to have me be in jail for a day or two, which was something I wasn’t comfortable with, and also they had left the other character dying in the street. So I told the player I was going to escape, and they basically went “Fine, whatever†and walked away, leaving me to sort of just handwave a lot of stuff and rejoin everyone to bring the plot to some sort of a stopping point (It was 2am my time). When I spoke to the player OOC, they seemed upset that I didn’t respect their characters decisions, and that I was “Ignoring the Consequences of my actionsâ€, and that I should have expected to be arrested.
The person who arrested my character is someone I respect a lot as an RPer, but they just weren’t really involved in this plot. How do you deal with with situations like this? Are you obligated as an RPer to always accept other peoples actions in your stories, when they are not technically a part of them. In this particular instance, our plot had some ground rules that serious injury/ imprisonment / death, needed to be agreed on before happening. The other player did not know the ground rules of our plot, and essentially proceeded to do all of those things. How responsible are characters outside of a plot for figuring out what is going on before getting involved? Is it ok to OOC tell people what they are doing doesn’t really mesh with the story that you are trying to tell?
If anyone else has experiences or thoughts on the matter please let me know, I am really unsure about this. I do a lot of walk-up RP myself, and sometimes shoehorn myself into other peoples plots without checking, so this is relevant to me from either side of the problem. One more time, I am not criticizing the other person's actions, it’s just that I am trying to figure out how I can respect peoples actions while still keeping a story on it’s rails.
Essentially my problem is, how do you best respect the wishes of other players on the outskirts of a plot, when their decisions damage or derail the story you are trying to explore. In this case, I play a law officer in Ul’dah, and my character has a sort of romance plot going with a character who plays a criminal. However he had managed to hide his activities, until last night, when he admitted them willingly. This sort of culminated in my character having a crisis of whether or not to arrest/punish him, or try to change/accept him.
What happened next though, was that a character who plays a Flame, who both of our characters knew but wasn’t involved in the plot, heard us talking about it, and decided to arrest us both. This was without consulting us OOC in any way. Eventually it culminated in her essentially killing the person I was RPing with, and dragged me off to jail, at which point and started talking to the player OOC, and more or less said, “Essentially if you don’t have a plan for me to get out of this, I’m going to make oneâ€. Their plan was to have me be in jail for a day or two, which was something I wasn’t comfortable with, and also they had left the other character dying in the street. So I told the player I was going to escape, and they basically went “Fine, whatever†and walked away, leaving me to sort of just handwave a lot of stuff and rejoin everyone to bring the plot to some sort of a stopping point (It was 2am my time). When I spoke to the player OOC, they seemed upset that I didn’t respect their characters decisions, and that I was “Ignoring the Consequences of my actionsâ€, and that I should have expected to be arrested.
The person who arrested my character is someone I respect a lot as an RPer, but they just weren’t really involved in this plot. How do you deal with with situations like this? Are you obligated as an RPer to always accept other peoples actions in your stories, when they are not technically a part of them. In this particular instance, our plot had some ground rules that serious injury/ imprisonment / death, needed to be agreed on before happening. The other player did not know the ground rules of our plot, and essentially proceeded to do all of those things. How responsible are characters outside of a plot for figuring out what is going on before getting involved? Is it ok to OOC tell people what they are doing doesn’t really mesh with the story that you are trying to tell?
If anyone else has experiences or thoughts on the matter please let me know, I am really unsure about this. I do a lot of walk-up RP myself, and sometimes shoehorn myself into other peoples plots without checking, so this is relevant to me from either side of the problem. One more time, I am not criticizing the other person's actions, it’s just that I am trying to figure out how I can respect peoples actions while still keeping a story on it’s rails.
