Ignacius

Long ago, I GMed an open RP about a fantasy town called Volins. I probably had 15-20 people somewhat regularly playing in a completely custom world. Sort of The Wire before there was The Wire, it was about the way villains worked together. We essentially played criminals working for a criminal syndicate against a church organization and a helpless police force. It ended with a massive battle at the church after a fiery speech about war from the leader. However, it was a feint. The highest echelon of the criminal organization basically left their organization to die, using it as a distraction to grab power in the larger worldwide syndicate. Lots of people's characters died. Many felt betrayed. The fiancee of the character I played, a high ranking character, suddenly found herself allowing my character to kill her to escape the gang pressure and a horrible situation so that my character could live. And he went back to working with his boss because there was no way out. I was told that several of the thread stories were the saddest my players have ever experienced, even this long on. And that last scene, TangentRomanaw. Probably two years worth of character development led to that night. It was brutal. Also one of the best RPs I've ever done. We aren't always defined by good guys winning. "Good guys" sometimes doesn't mean very much.

"Oh come on, baby, anyone can buy a gold crown... That ain't shit.... Baby? Baby, are you listening?"

I don't always listen to J-rock, but when I do, it's usually Gazette.

Orleans listens to some gnarly shit... 6msn9Kbfvps

I'll put it this way, RPers aren't usually going to have a problem if they know what they're getting into, but things like race and gender are written into the character and are taken, up-front, as read. Trying to do an end-run around them is usually not worth the trouble. Sometimes, it's not such a problem. In WoW, for example, the Death Knights are, by lore, meant to be dead but there is a loophole to state that they may not be. People playing live Death Knights tend to catch some flack, but not much. It usually doesn't come up in introductory conversation. However, sometimes it can be a problem. Also in WoW, I played with someone who played a female character who was meant to be a slim male. That really didn't work that well. People automatically assumed the character was a woman (despite his RSP and protestations). Most people he met automatically assumed he was a male and, when politely "corrected", weren't interested in playing with him. Just because having to go OOC within the first few minutes is NOT good. So generally speaking, you can minimize the issue in some situations, but you'd better be ready to have an IC reason to roll with the punches. For example, if your Au Ra is actually a Padjal, you HAVE to have your character ready to accept that IC. Hell, you might WANT that misinformation, to have people think you're an Au Ra when you're not. Making up your tribe is comparatively easier, though. That's not written on your character. You should be fine.

-Orleans is usually seen reading a book. They aren't military treatises, tactical manuals, or books from famous warriors. His usual fare is poetry and philosophy, with a healthy dose of legal opinions to keep him current. -Orleans carries business cards calling him an "Assets and Personnel Management Consultant." He treats his job like a business, to the point of keeping accurate tax books on all taxable income, always asking for receipts so he can write off what's legal, but he even asks for receipts for what isn't legal so he can keep accurate records. -Orleans was actually born to criminal enterprise as a pirate. However, as it turns out, his job in that capacity wasn't just as the thug he is today. Orleans has degrees in maritime and criminal law and in finance, and were he to renew his license, he would be a certified attorney. -Orleans dislikes having discussions with a door open, even if there is no chance of being heard outside it... or even if the discussion is perfectly innocent. -Orleans maintains insurance policies on all his "employees" and tends to insure his ventures in some capacity, as long as he can still conceal their sometimes illegal natures. -Orleans has a love of Benedictine, but can't often find it. To him, the mark of a bar worth anything is whether they have Benedictine. Should they not, Orleans instantly distrusts the establishment's basic ability to function; it's just a "hole in a wall". -Despite having many of his companions and employees as Miqo'te, Orleans instinctively dislikes and distrusts them. He instinctively assumes they are unprofessional and prone to flashes of emotional fancy. -Orleans instinctively leans back and crosses his legs when sitting at a table, as a learned habit to hide his height. Orleans is shockingly tall for an Elezen, topping seven foot nine. This makes sure he's a bit less conspicuous in public and less identifiable on sight. -The brand of cigar Orleans smokes is thin and black, but few know it's imported from a loyalist Garlean artisan. Orleans maintains an account under a black alias to be able to import Garlean goods (it's actually one of the ways he makes money). -Most warriors have sheathes for hidden knives, but Orleans might be the only one with a concealed sheath for a steel-barreled and durable fountain pen, in case he needs to sign something or write official correspondence while armored. In fact, he is never without a pen, to a rather strange degree. Even when showering, he keeps a pen in a case with his towel.

WoW sort of requires it, and still sort of does, but not the same way. FFXIV has the main story quests, which you need to advance. WoW tends to have questlines which run through zones, but contemporaneous to each other, so you don't need to complete them all. You do need to have your character at a certain level (usually two levels below the former cap) to enter a new expansion's content. So sort of? I guess? There's a level limit, but there's nothing like the MSQ which in XIV you must complete to carry on.

I'm not sure I agree that us not accepting certain difficulty and length considerations are necessarily good for us gamers. It's something we say we want, but we have a tendency to complain about the effects of it. I mean, it makes sense. You want to achieve. You want to have the time you spend mean something. However, you also want to HAVE it, not to be working on it. So we've tried to make things easier to achieve and, conversely, more and more people are achieving it and the experience is becoming somewhat less meaningful. So we complain that games aren't meaningful anymore, that they're just transitory experiences. There's just dissonance between what we get from our short-term gains and our long-term expectations. It's the same with game difficulty. Everyone says they want a game that's difficult, that takes skill to master, that isn't afraid to kill them when they make a mistake and for those deaths to have consequences. But when we're given those, we also tend to think the game is too grindy, too hard, new-player-unfriendly, etc. So we complain about these and the game gets easier. Then we complain that there's no challenge in games anymore. Unfortunately, we may not necessarily like what we're getting anymore, but we're getting what we're asking for (and largely what we're paying for, in the case of F2P games essentially being the video game equivalent of the shows on TV to sell us toys as kids). Which is a shame especially to MMORPGs, since they were supposed to be communities. They were meant to be the future of gaming. And now, since they can't really offer us content that can keep us occupied for years and engaged in the story, they're one-and-done. Most games these days are like TV shows and movies, entertainment content that plays out in front of us that, in this case, tends to require button presses to advance the story. It's not as satisfying, and we know that, but it's largely what we asked for. In a way, I'm beyond really being frustrated about it and I'm just watching it all as a somewhat dissociated observer. We just don't, as a gaming audience at least, have much room to complain that the games we play aren't as engaging. By and large, we ordered that removed from gaming so we wouldn't be inconvenienced, not realizing that the interesting parts of the game were the parts that weren't built to cradle us.

They could just run a sync on all areas. So that walking into the first zone of 4.0 syncs you to 52 if you weren't there already, then the next, 54, und so wieder. That way, if you didn't do Heavensward, you can play whatever unrelated story is theoretically in 4.0 and level 50-60 without ever touching Heavensward, but also those who played it aren't running train over the zone as level 60s.

Orleans actually has business cards, with expensive and delicate calligraphy, that describe him as an "Assets and Personnel Management Consultant".

We're talking about dick jokes in antiquity. We really don't need you complaining about length. Sorry, didn't realize you get length complaints outside of the game too heyooooooooooo No, but you're honestly not the first person that have asked me to hurry up and finish.

We're talking about dick jokes in antiquity. We really don't need you complaining about length.

The Graffiti of Pompeii also has good examples: http://classicalwisdom.com/dirty-world-ancient-graffiti/ “The one who buggers a fire burns his penis.” Or the poetic dissing of the Romans, this one starts off with 'I will sodomize and face fuck you' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 No doubt someone got a kick out of it, or it wouldn't have been written down. This is actually one of the great ironies of how we perceive wit - the prevalence of this material in the work of people considered wits. Lord Rochester was specifically called a court wit, and his poetry is full of dick jokes and impotency. Swift is one of the great satirists, with such memorably cutting moments as Gulliver pissing on a palace to put out a fire, engaging in what we would consider revenge porn against his intellectual opponents, and, of course, the whole incident with the baby-eating. One sees a shift in 19th-century Britain in which this material can be referred to only obliquely, and we are still grappling with that shift today. Hey, that's nothing. Robert Herrick wrote some of the earliest English tentacle porn in history, a poem called "The Vine". He's only just now being received as a well-written man.

The Graffiti of Pompeii also has good examples: http://classicalwisdom.com/dirty-world-ancient-graffiti/ “The one who buggers a fire burns his penis.” Or the poetic dissing of the Romans, this one starts off with 'I will sodomize and face fuck you' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 No doubt someone got a kick out of it, or it wouldn't have been written down. It's around. I think Verad's point was that "wit" was sort of an upper-class distinction made from their literacy, and that their version of "Tiggy likes it in the butt" probably wasn't wit in that time. There was lower class wit. In fact, poets were not always, contrary to popular opinion, gentry. Shakespeare actually did write during a time when being a middle-class or even lower-class poet was worthwhile, and they actually could be called witty. John Donne, for example, is probably one of England's most famous poets. He was born a Catholic in 1572 (not the best time to be a Catholic in England), to a family of Welsh ironmongers living in London. He lived poor for a healthy chunk of his life. Today, he's pretty highly regarded as having been a brilliant writer, probably one of the first well-known satirists. He was also pretty well regarded as being quick-witted and intellectual. Which isn't bad for someone who grew up in such a state in England. Still, he at least got famous. There are probably people of varying levels of wit all around you, but few people are likely to be publicly recorded that way.

We have no lower-class zingers because people chose not to record them as much as they couldn't be recorded. Their speech was low, and to be corrected, because it lacked the linguistic markers of upper-class wit. They might have referred to vulgarity directly, rather than obliquely; their wordplay might have lacked the appropriate grammatical structures to be worth recording (a serious concern in 19th century Britain in particular, where correct speech is seen as a marker of moral character) or it might have been accidental. What value, then, was there in recording them? Now this is admittedly much more true for Britain than for the United States, where it's possible to have a "folksy" wit and the lower-classes, or the rural ones anyway, are seen as respectable in their own right. But a lot of our markers for witty speech come both from the educational opportunities for the upper classes and how they policed what speech was considered intelligent. That we perceive wit as a sign of raw intelligence rather than education is a holdover from that period. Knowing that the notion of wit in the modern day is an accident of history and culture, why are we telling people they can't be witty instead of questioning our own perceptions of wit? Because wit isn't inflicted, it's received. Lower class wit, just because no one recorded it, didn't suddenly cease to exist. It had nothing to do with proper speech, even in England (especially because the nobles and countrymen weren't even speaking the same language). If my friend turns to me and says something witty about a local building commission, his wit didn't just vanish or never exist, his wit just wasn't recorded for everyone to hear. So it's existed since the dawn of complex conversation. It was certainly already happening, pretty much in the form we receive it as today, in ancient Greece (which is where we got the tradition). And when you say you want your character to be witty, as per the OP, you're writing towards that standard. And when you fail, it isn't a matter of just broadening our horizons to make "lol u dum" a superlative repartee considering the writers' perceived education, either it resonates or it doesn't. And when it doesn't, and someone keeps pushing it, of course people are going to call it trolling. They'll OOCly tell this guy to stop, that they're trying to RP, that interrupting them to troll them isn't funny. And they won't care whether that player is trying as hard as he can or actually is trolling them because they can't judge the writer, just the effect. However, as you can see, that effect clearly depends largely on the writer's ability. If he thinks he knocked it out of the park and everyone else found him boorish, he's not witty any more than I'm six feet tall. He just doesn't understand the effect as it's received. If people thought he was intelligent, but unlikable, they're likely to RP with him figuring he's being played straight up. If he doesn't sound intelligent but wants to, he's not meeting his goal. And, again, the issue is whether we should say he's witty as long as he's intending it to be read that way. Can you, essentially, meta in subjective conversational perception. I'd say no, not in an open social context. You can only shoot for the top and understand if you can't make the bar you set that it isn't the audience's fault.

Not quite! It is, historically, a snob's argument, the same way that Shakespeare couldn't have possibly written his plays because there's just no way anybody in the middle-class could have written things that sharp. Perhaps you are not consciously being a snob about it, and that is fine. As for time, well, you went to architecture school, and I to a liberal arts degree. Clearly the time is self-evident. Wit isn't necessarily the tool of the snob. Just recall that wit was the province of the literate and the educated, and for the better part of a few thousand years, the only people getting taught to read, in fact taught at all, were the rich and privileged. Off-topic I guess, but again, not quite correct. This was not the case in all cultures, and in fact, was mostly the case in Europe. Tribal societies schooled all their members in what was known, and in their history, local geography, culture, etcetera. China practically invented the standardized test for the sake of admitting government officials for employment and further education (though whether or not it was aimed at the masses or the few varied by dynasty). The Aztecs implemented mandatory schooling for all over the age of 15. These are just a few examples. Intelligence, wit, and education aren't class-specific all the time, everywhere. It varies greatly, and it might help our view of this topic as a whole to stop viewing it strictly through that lens. This is quite true, and I thank you for pointing it out. To clarify, when I'm speaking of wit, I'm speaking primarily in the British and American contexts. That said, I think your point can lead to another - there is no real "wit," in this case, because wit is a culturally defined concept. The idea that speaking with a quick retort is a marker of intelligence may hold no weight in a culture where that's considered to be a marker of thoughtlessness. In this view, being witty in RP is simple: You already are, to somebody. It even dovetails nicely with the idea that wittiness is based on reception. Which would be fine, except, as the OP has expressed, we aren't talking about someone's reaction to their own wit. The idea is whether someone who isn't possessed of it, in the view of anyone, can force that view on the audience by saying their character is "witty". Which, yes, happens. If you think you're witty, and all you're doing is interjecting relatively dull and not particularly enjoyable observations, you will most likely get downplayed or frozen out of conversation. Which is a particular problem for people who want to play a genius, but will routinely have other players running circles around their best-applied logic in conversation. You can think you're as witty as you'd like, or quantify it however you want, but the aim of RP is to publicly air that wit, and therefore it has to be received by the audience. And if you fail, you fail. If one person is fine with it, but nine people roundly think you're just trolling the conversation, you've made a pretty grievous error. The problem is that most people who try to punch above their weight aren't recognized at failing to be witty, they're labeled trolls and discarded. We don't even think about them again, they were just people who dropped into conversation being crass, crude, and not particularly enjoyable company. Nobody is going to reverse that opinion because the character is meant to be written as a genius when the character, because of the player, pretty clearly isn't.

Not quite! It is, historically, a snob's argument, the same way that Shakespeare couldn't have possibly written his plays because there's just no way anybody in the middle-class could have written things that sharp. Perhaps you are not consciously being a snob about it, and that is fine. As for time, well, you went to architecture school, and I to a liberal arts degree. Clearly the time is self-evident. Wit isn't necessarily the tool of the snob. Just recall that wit was the province of the literate and the educated, and for the better part of a few thousand years, the only people getting taught to read, in fact taught at all, were the rich and privileged. I figured it was sarcastic because it hasn't been that way for a long time. With universal education comes the concept that wit is actually the province of the intelligent. We just weren't teaching all the intelligent to read or write, so we have no record of the zingers told between the cobbler and the ferryman. However, these days, wit is perceived as a trait of raw intellect, not education. Knowing a statistic that might derail someone's argument is effective, but not necessarily witty. Being able to logically deconstruct someone's argument in real time without the statistic certainly is. Wit is just a measure of mental reaction time, sort of the time it takes to process a response. That makes it VERY obvious in conversation, even in RP-lapse, who thinks of a good response in a few minutes, who needs a few hours, and who needs a few days. And none of these three people are more effective, more knowledgeable, or even more right. Wit, and by extension intelligence, are measures of speed. They're not easily faked unless you can insert a good response six posts down the line, and that's only if you can come up with the response while it's relevant. That's not as easy as you might think it is. Hence the line I drawled about time. Maybe if I gave people a few days to think up the best response possible, they could mimic it better, but giving people a few extra minutes before typing generally doesn't turn someone who isn't very good at turning phrases into a rhetorical machine. It's not as easy as you might think it is. Some people really have a hard time with it.

I think he's being sarcastic, Oli, it's fine! I went to architecture school, nobody on this forum has a chance of making me feel bad if they tried. The KSA was the mental equivalent of the agoge. I think the better response is: Wit, at least real wit, isn't easy. Real wit is relevant to the discussion being had, and it's cooked up on the fly. That's relatively hard for most people to do consistently, even with the time granted by RP post-lapse to do. Much easier than one might think! All it requires is a healthy dose of snobbery and classism. Oh God, but who has time for them?

Wit, at least real wit, isn't easy. Real wit is relevant to the discussion being had, and it's cooked up on the fly. That's relatively hard for most people to do consistently, even with the time granted by RP post-lapse to do. I don't doubt you think it's very easy, but believe me, you don't have to see people bombing too often to realize it's not universal. Granted, it's also something you have to exercise, so people used to writing conversationally, rather than in isolation, tend to develop that a bit better. It's not easy for everyone, though. Most people can only think of a really good comeback after a few hours (I think Ed Byrne did a bit on that). Just recognize that, yeah, some people can't really do it. They're not bad writers, they're not necessarily humorless, and they can be very entertaining. However, some people just can't turn a phrase or cast off a decent one-liner that references the spot. And it's hard for quite a few people to fake. For some people, it does come very naturally. If you're one of those people, be thankful.

There is no "in their place". There are simply things that are beyond our ability. I will never win Wimbledon, as the famous example goes. I'm 30. I could start playing tennis now, I could even get good, but there's not a cold chance in Hell of me ever becoming one of the world's best tennis players. Likewise, you can try to become a better writer, but if you're starting to say, "Anyone can be witty if they try," you're setting someone up to continue making the same mistake. It wouldn't be a problem, except failures at wit are something we are intentionally raised to groan at. Think about it. What if I slid up to a woman at a bar and I said, "Honey, did it hurt... when you fell from Heaven?" It is recognized, universally, that this is a cheesy pickup line. This is not a good way to make a serious attempt at being charming. At best, people recognize that cheesy pickup line is a humorous attempt to use that recognition to break the ice. At worst, I just tried something I researched on the internet that was supposed to pick up women and it failed. But, from reading it, you have no idea what my intention is. My intention is irrelevant. Now, imagine that happening, with someone writing this as genuine, over and over, and not understanding why women aren't fawning over his character. Yeah, people have limits. You have to be witty to write witty lines, and some people just don't have it and never will. Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics of my friends' issues, but let me be emphatically clear, she was to insightful discourse what that pick up line was to charm. It was so bad, people thought she was just trolling them and were freezing her out of conversations I had invited her into. Is it pretty? No. I explained it as gently as I could. I object strenuously to your characterization of putting her in her place, particularly since you weren't present for the situation. But I don't do this just as a forum moderator, I do this with people in bars that other players are ignoring. Those are the people who really need the help, and most of the time it's because they've absolutely overreached themselves. There's only so much you can do, and all the hoping in the world doesn't make it any easier to sit through. I certainly can't force people to just take her intention as-is even when the way she wrote her character, at her best, was absolutely not getting her intention across. I'm alright with being disagreed with in my approach, but for someone to try to say that if you just try hard enough, you'll become as witty as you want, I can't agree with that. I've seen people try as hard as they possibly can for a fairly decent length of time and not get better. At some point, we have to face that reality. You have to be able to tell someone that, "I know you're trying, but it's not coming across. But you're great at this other thing! Look, you aren't any less of a person for not having this trait you don't have. What did you get the best response doing? Maybe we could focus on that?" There are better ways to do it than to say, "Look, I know you're trying, but it's not coming across. You just need to try harder! I'm sure you'll get it." Because you can be reasonably sure that there will be quite a few people who we want to retain as RPers, but won't ever get what they're aiming at. The heartfelt example was touching, I suppose, but I'm not convinced. In the end, rather than helping your friend learn the skills necessary to sell their concept, you told them not to do it. If that's your approach, I'll decline from following the same line of reasoning. Sure, good feelings alone can't make you succeed in anything, and people have their limits. What does it say to your friend to tell her she's reached hers? I'll be as blunt as I need to, but if prefer to actually inform and structure writing towards a goal, because that is what I actually can offer help with. I would (believe me, I was essentially a remedial English teacher for a while) but I cannot make her able to respond to a quick quip. That's partially a skill, but is absolutely part of a naturally available ability that you can't work out. I don't hold her in any less esteem because she isn't the rapier wit of a conversation. She just isn't, and isn't going to be. That's nothing for her to be hurt or embarrassed about. There's no way, unless you believe a few years of Brain Age would help, to make her anywhere near the genius she'd want to play. Normally, people would just not play with her, which was a shame for the community. She was a great player. Now, the reason I use her is that she's the one person I can say was not personally intelligent and had to scale back a character from a wild genius to a more technically proficient professional. The character was far better (and more likable). Now, intelligence isn't common. Now, I do this fairly frequently, but it is NOT about intelligence. Lots of people playing "geniuses" get away with it not because they can get away with it, but because they never say "genius" and we never hold them to that standard. They aren't particularly witty; we aren't particularly shook up about it because they don't drop a line unless they're sure about it and it's not that often. And, to be fair, most of the RPers I've met, if they aren't above average intelligence, are at least average enough to give a good account of themselves. I'm not sure if it's about freezing out the below-average players until most are gone or if we just attract people with naturally higher intellect, but I rarely find myself having to re-explain concepts to people repeatedly because they just don't get it. No, this is an issue of mine because of charisma, which is so much more common, so much more damaging, and so much more of an education issue. Because someone acting smarter than they are and failing can be a little irritating. Someone trying to be funny when they're not is worse. Someone trying to be more charming than they actually are is downright infuriating and times and outright insulting at worst. If I had to finger-point to the biggest problem facing new RPers, it's walking into a situation with more swagger than they can back up. It's something that can be increased with some experience, but charisma is something you simply cannot outrun because there are VERY few guides on the internet that will turn you into a stunning conversationalist. And while people punching above their wit might get scoffed at and ignored, someone screwing up while hitting on a woman in a bar poorly could get them blacklisted from RP events. We do NOT have this pleasant of a reaction to someone punching above their weight of charm. I approach both the same way; they're part of the same problem. People want to play movie characters, who have intelligence, wit, and charm. Charm is the hardest to replicate if you don't have it. Truly intelligent people can get away with a lot just by being quiet when they have nothing to say. Truly charismatic people are only ever judged by what they say. And, unfortunately, we fail those people. If a guy wanders in and tries to pull the stunts on women in a bar that his brothers' friends said they pulled on the women in the dorm in college, we tend to just call those people pigs. Believe me, they may not be. And people without real personal charm cannot play a charming character, for the exact same reasons as we're discussing. The only difference between the two is that we're taught to pity the less intelligent and dislike the socially brutish.

It was a mere example. I'll give you a more realistic one. This character called him/herself a "strategic genius". However, all the "strategies" he came up with were often extremely reckless and stupid. Instead of sneaking into an enemy camp, they wanted to storm in and rescue their friends while murdering everyone there. My character has a weakness to aether--First thing this person did? Send her off to the likes of Mor Dhona, of course. Kill enemies? Blow up a bomb at our home to send them off. This person had ideas like this--And referred to him/herself as a "strategic genius" Fair enough. I won't argue semantics at this point because I don't know the situation. And it seems like this one individual was just a bad example and not a majority. I haven't seen anyone say they were a genius character ooc and expect it to be acknowledged, so I suppose you've just have some really negative experiences with people like that. I haven't run into it, hell, I rarely talk to people OOC and just let their IC do the talking. Neither here nor there though. But yes, this entire topic has gone off topic I think, and it is a sensitive subject. In any case, it is possible to play a genius if you aren't, if you're willing to do the work. It just sounds like that individual wasn't willing to do the work. Seems more lazy then lacking in intelligence. But that's me. To be fair, I think people confuse knowledge and intelligence. Some of the most proficient people on the planet aren't geniuses, they just tried exceptionally hard to excel in their subject. My mother very clearly explained to me one day that both she and her sister went into nursing. Her sister was very obviously more intelligent. She could pick up concepts in one reading that might have taken my mother two or three passes, and my mother always had to run through processes and lists because she couldn't just do it mentally. Yet my mother is almost unquestionably the better nurse, and that's because she worked harder. She read it two or three times until she got it, whereas my aunt might not have read it until right before the test. She had processes, so she never skipped anything. She worked HARD to be the nurse she is, and she's more knowledgeable than most of the doctors she works with. You do not need to play a genius to play a master artisan. You don't need to be Einstein to be a master blacksmith or to be an award-winning scientist. Intelligence is a raw trait. It's often obvious in conversation. It is NOT a measure of technical ability. It often helps, but it's not the hallmark of all great scientific minds. There is absolutely no shame in not being particularly intelligent. It's sort of that last bastion of elitism. We can now have plus-sized models but people can't say, "You know what, I'm not a genius, but that's never meant I haven't been the best at what I do." It just makes it hard to play someone with that kind of intelligence because it takes often hours to come up with good responses and solutions that it might take certain people a few minutes. That doesn't make people worse as people. There are people of great intelligence who could come up with quick and effective solutions, but never do. They may seem smart in conversation, but that doesn't mean effective or accomplished necessarily.

There is no "in their place". There are simply things that are beyond our ability. I will never win Wimbledon, as the famous example goes. I'm 30. I could start playing tennis now, I could even get good, but there's not a cold chance in Hell of me ever becoming one of the world's best tennis players. Likewise, you can try to become a better writer, but if you're starting to say, "Anyone can be witty if they try," you're setting someone up to continue making the same mistake. It wouldn't be a problem, except failures at wit are something we are intentionally raised to groan at. Think about it. What if I slid up to a woman at a bar and I said, "Honey, did it hurt... when you fell from Heaven?" It is recognized, universally, that this is a cheesy pickup line. This is not a good way to make a serious attempt at being charming. At best, people recognize that cheesy pickup line is a humorous attempt to use that recognition to break the ice. At worst, I just tried something I researched on the internet that was supposed to pick up women and it failed. But, from reading it, you have no idea what my intention is. My intention is irrelevant. Now, imagine that happening, with someone writing this as genuine, over and over, and not understanding why women aren't fawning over his character. Yeah, people have limits. You have to be witty to write witty lines, and some people just don't have it and never will. Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics of my friends' issues, but let me be emphatically clear, she was to insightful discourse what that pick up line was to charm. It was so bad, people thought she was just trolling them and were freezing her out of conversations I had invited her into. Is it pretty? No. I explained it as gently as I could. I object strenuously to your characterization of putting her in her place, particularly since you weren't present for the situation. But I don't do this just as a forum moderator, I do this with people in bars that other players are ignoring. Those are the people who really need the help, and most of the time it's because they've absolutely overreached themselves. There's only so much you can do, and all the hoping in the world doesn't make it any easier to sit through. I certainly can't force people to just take her intention as-is even when the way she wrote her character, at her best, was absolutely not getting her intention across. I'm alright with being disagreed with in my approach, but for someone to try to say that if you just try hard enough, you'll become as witty as you want, I can't agree with that. I've seen people try as hard as they possibly can for a fairly decent length of time and not get better. At some point, we have to face that reality. You have to be able to tell someone that, "I know you're trying, but it's not coming across. But you're great at this other thing! Look, you aren't any less of a person for not having this trait you don't have. What did you get the best response doing? Maybe we could focus on that?" There are better ways to do it than to say, "Look, I know you're trying, but it's not coming across. You just need to try harder! I'm sure you'll get it." Because you can be reasonably sure that there will be quite a few people who we want to retain as RPers, but won't ever get what they're aiming at.

This seems rather arbitrary. If nine people don't think Scott is witty, but one person does think Scott is witty, then the only conclusion we can reach is that Scott is witty (but only to a certain segment of the population). You can not simply accept the opinion of the majority as fact simply because the majority hold that opinion. You most certainly can not do so in a subjective realm such as humor or wit. Well, unfortunately, "witty" is hugely subjective and it is therefore determined by the audience. One out of ten people might think Orrin Hatch is funny, that doesn't make Orrin Hatch funny. And, very tellingly, if I told you Orrin Hatch is funny, that DEFINITELY doesn't make him funny. It's not arbitrary (if anything, what I said was entirely related to proportion, so by definition it isn't arbitrary). Give you an example. If I say I'm going to play a "witty" character. I show up and someone tells my character off. If my response was, "lol u dumb, suk it", not a single person in this thread is going to say that's a witty response. It doesn't get better if I write, Character A tells you off in a biting way that humbles you. No one in a group setting is going to buy that. In neither case would it be made better by insisting that the character is witty because, and this is important, that's metagaming. And that means that, even in physical reactions, you cannot impose an expectation upon the audience. It's certainly not going to happen in a conversational context. Now, you can find some wiggle room, but wit and humor DO have definitions and they are 100% developed by reception. And the above examples weren't provided for hyperbole, I'm using a pair of examples that we, as RPers, understand completely as being insufficient for wit or humor. That's entirely subjective, because there ARE people who would find both of those to be sufficient. However, in an open RP setting, neither of those is acceptable. It's no different if someone's character says "You don't stand a chance" and the response is, Character A laughs, "Fool, I have something for you to suck on!" It's no more witty. We certainly recognize it as not being witty. And having someone try to pass that off as wit is a failure. Here's the point of all of this, this is all absolutely true no matter whether the player was sincere in his attempt or not. Humor and wit, if they're based on any one thing, are not based on the intent of the speaker. It does not matter whether that was the best the player could do or if the player intentionally meant for the other players to recognize the bad flub of wit to show his characters' lack of intelligence, we recognize that the statement lacks wit. We, as an audience, define that as being witless, humorless, and pretty much groan-worthy whether it was intentional or not. Now, you're not likely to get 100% of people to call it that (I'm sure there are some people playing CoD where that's considered particularly acute) and you'll never get 100% of people to universally agree on anything (I hear there are people who don't like the Painkiller album). But we do define that, and that means that the relative wit of a person can be limited. That limit is set by our wit. We decide what poor, average, and genius are based on whether we find it pathetic, we could do that, or we still have no idea where they got last thirty seconds of awesome statements. Certainly, if the most intelligent people disappeared from the face of the Earth, things will be considered genius that are considered pedestrian today, and that's one of the reasons why trying to intentionally play wit is such a risk. Because you can fail spectacularly, and your failure will be determined by your audience, not your intention.

Except that we very clearly ARE answering those two questions. It not only IS the audience's place to judge whether a character has a certain faculty and whether the player is displaying it correctly, but that WE ARE ALREADY DOING IT! We are already gatekeeping; we will freeze out a player for doing exactly what is being stated in the OP. The problem is that we won't tell the person that, we'll just freeze them out. It happens all the time. There's nothing worse for your RP than trying to tell someone that your character is something that you aren't pulling off. They simply get shunned, and we at best assume they're not very good company and at worst simply assume they're trolls. And this is an exceptionally important point to make, because it is not the responsibility of the community to sacrifice our own fun and performance for someone else's performance. If you feel that's a good use of your time, that's you're prerogative. However, you are making every single person that might enjoy RPing with you have to grind their teeth and suffer through a far less entertaining hang-around. I'd never ask nor expect anyone to sacrifice their fun so that someone else doesn't feel slighted. This is an active and social activity that we all engage in as a contribution. There's no storyteller to say that someone's witty. If the player's not witty, and it comes through in the character, it's disrespectful to tell someone that they're in the wrong for not playing along. It's their time, and if the player is limiting the character's potential wit, charm, and intelligence, then they're under no compunction to laugh at jokes that aren't funny or nod at wisdom that isn't wise. Hell, we aren't doing that here between players, why on Earth would it suddenly change between player-character interactions? The point is that you can play what you want, but you can't complain when you're shunned, skewered, or ignored. And it's probably better for us, as a community, to make sure that, if a player tries to get around his lack of wit by saying, "My character has wit," that we correct them. You can't make a debonair and charming ladies' man if you are as charming as bog water, you can't make an intelligent character if you can't even think around a basic problem, and you can't play a witty character if the best you can come up with are Xbox Live insults in debates. There are limits to what a player can do, and other players shouldn't be sneered at and shamed for acknowledging that. It's their bestowal that is not only being talked about here, but demanded by your argument. That sounds like a problem with you and not them. Since I generally respond to everyone who specifically addresses me. Obviously I can't rp with literally everyone I meet, and some won't rp in a way I'd consider great. Still, if I find that if a player rps in a way I don't like, they usually end up doing something ICly that would make my character avoid them anyway. Part of your statement bolded for emphasis. You're already the gatekeeper you fear, and that's exactly what I'm saying. If a player RPs in a way you don't like, a LOT of people end up doing anything to avoid them. The blacklist is, by far, the most popular (and least rude), and you'll see that any time you bring this up. "Just ignore them and move on." Well, the problem is with the first part of your statement. Even the player being shunned will feel like the problem is you, not them, and that in and of itself is a big problem. If you're shunning people who aren't RPing in a way that you like, but you never bring up what it is they're doing wrong (or, better yet, en masse like this so that people understand it), they'll never learn. And they'll be shunned by a larger mass. And, believe it or not, the actual effect of someone trying to exceed their limit of wit and intelligence becomes a big problem, very fast. Not the least of which because, as the OP suggests, this is metagaming at the very least to say other characters should have a certain reaction to a character rather than engendering it and giving them a chance to react. It's also exceptionally grating for someone to be playing someone who, for example, throws out a wisecrack that isn't wise and barely counts as a crack, it's just a poor interjection. This is the kind of thing we're talking about, and it's exactly the kind of thing that will make sure you sit alone at a table in a bar. We can ignore the problem, or we can try to teach the discipline, but we can't command the audience to respond a certain way. It's no different than having a guy auto a punch on your character and then say, "Well, he's fast, so you can't dodge it." Melodramatic hyperbole aside, you could indeed look at it that way. Me, I'm just not self-important enough to think I am responsible for uplifting unskilled writers, and mind my own business. If they seem receptive or like how I play, I'll gladly go out of my way to help them, and like I said, I don't ignore any player who directly addresses my character when IC, period. (Unless the chat eats their post...) No player is entitled to continuous, involved story lines, but if they earnestly asked, I'd seriously consider it if I thought they could sharpen it up a little. But that's neither here nor there. I think all of this is immaterial, as its predicated on subjective assumptions. I am not the rp community, whatever that is. You definitely aren't. The RPC isn't, even. if other RP venues have taught me anything, it's that those who want to learn how to write better will do so, and those who don't still find people to play with regardless and can have entertaining stories of their own. I've seen people grow a lot by punching above their weight... If not discouraged from doing so by others in the first place. I feel somewhat sorry for your friend. However, that's the problem. You are, very outright, saying that it's not your business and you won't offer help if someone doesn't ask. That's your right, you are not responsible for helping anyone. However, you did say that you're not going to go out of your way to help, in your case for your modesty's sake and because you don't feel people will listen. And yet you feel sorry for my friend, because she was frozen out of RP for punching above her weight, but because I told her what everyone said behind her back. Which simultaneously made you exactly the sort of issue she was facing, none of the eventual solution she received, and yet ironically also pitying the help she got. All for perfectly acceptable and well-meaning reasons; you're not a bad person and you're trying to be as polite as possible. But man do most people who punch above their weight get sawed off quickly at the knees. Not by advice telling them to definitely cut back and to build the character, not the result, but by people who say nothing, freezing people out of RP without explanation with the assumption that, once people see they're being frozen out, they'll ask someone to improve as a writer (in this case, beyond their own cognitive ability). I'm not sure how else I can explain that this is, while seemingly the best course of action, extremely unhelpful. Most people, when they start, want to play Mary Sue and part of that is punching FAR above their weight somewhere. Most people who pick it up fall right back out because no one in our multitude tends to step up to teach, but we're all willing, as a group, to ignore them. It's a difficult balancing act, but it does mean telling people who get frustrated that no one's receiving their "witty" character as witty probably because the things they say just weren't that intelligent. We're all passively fine in our role as gatekeepers, but we're usually uncomfortable taking up an individual role as educators. We're a lot more comfortable watching people drown on dry land. I mean, by the logic I'm reading, we're not even comfortable talking about personal limits even though we're perfectly fine telling each other that if someone's not fun to RP with, we can burn them out. Now, it might not sound appealing in the short term pointing out that someone might not be able to write enough wit, intelligence, or charisma into their character and they might want to back it off a bit, but in the long term, it's likely to keep people around as RPers instead of having them blame the entire audience and leave. And if someone can't be witty because they simply cannot write good responses, that's probably outside their scope. I really understand where the intent comes from, but it's really not as helpful to tell someone who isn't witty that they're totally fine instead of telling them that, you know, it's really not a personal deficiency to fall short of Mark Twain. These people aren't bad because they bit off more than they'd ever be able to chew once or twice, they likely write something else quite a bit better. You never hear about this when someone plays a schizophrenic and fails to be accurate or recognizable; it's rare someone encourages them to keep going with it regardless of how bad or offensive it is. It is true that people can try to write far above their ability and fail, and it's also true that most other players will, when someone's annoying them this way, freeze them out. And it's likewise true that few people will tell someone that the latter is related to the former for fear of hurting their feelings.

Not entirely, but certainly that's the bar for entry into subjective and comparative traits. Scott could actually be a TERRIBLY played character, he could only ever be used as a comedian but could then never grow or develop, as he's stunted. We don't know that from the scenario you painted. However, the question of whether his character is "witty", yeah, that's up to the audience. It's like saying you're "funny". You can try to be funny, but it's up to the audience to decide if you're actually funny. Similarly, you can try to play a witty character, but it isn't up to you to say if the character is actually witty, that's a function of the audience. It's your responsibility as the player to get that across. I certainly don't believe the opposite to be true. If one person thought Scott was funny out of 10 and most simply put him on ignore because his jokes aren't funny, not only is the character not "funny" no matter how much the player wants him to be, he's probably not funny because the player isn't really that funny. And you know what, not everyone's funny. That's okay. But you can't fake laughs at a character who isn't funny just because you're told the character is a comedian and he's being played as funny.