(03-02-2015, 01:22 PM)Gegenji Wrote: Alternatively, perhaps they see their progression in the dungeons and such AS their grand tales of adventure, and prefer to have the RP as their downtime. Their return from their hunts and their delves, to relax and unwind over a pint of ale and a story or two. I would figure such a person wouldn't want to leap headlong again into adventure after just coming down from one.
This is a particularly interesting point, IMO, that gets back to a fundamental difference in how RP is viewed in MMOs. There's one camp that sees the things that happen in game -- braving dangerous monsters and traps, griping over that idiot "conjurer" who kept forcing a retreat because he couldn't heal his way out of a paper bag, and so on -- as potentially IC and potentially part of a character's story. Usually, this is all "genericized" so it's not just running the same dungeon over and over or doing things only The Warrior of Light could do.
In the other camp, you have those who feel that the content of the game is a game and should be treated as fully OOC. They feel it shouldn't be included in a character's story for a variety of reasons (provides too much power to the character, doesn't fit with concept, too difficult to make generic, or simply don't like it), and they typically prefer creating their own stories that are completely separate from whatever happens in the game.
Unfortunately, the positions of these two camps are rather difficult to reconcile, and the clash between them is at the root of a lot of battles over what constitutes "correct" RP. The first camp gets chided for having characters that are too powerful and for doing too much hangout RP without any real tales of adventure, and the second camp gets chided for trying to make every character mundane and ignoring what's happening in the setting.
This is a conflict that is as old as RP in MMOs.
The nice part about hangout RP (at a tavern, an FC house, or elsewhere) is that it's the one thing both camps can agree upon existing. It's the neutral ground of RP, where those with disparate views on RP and disparate character concepts can get together and interact. That's part of why it's so popular, IMO.(03-02-2015, 01:22 PM)Gegenji Wrote: How a character treats a loved one can speak loads, and the interactions between them can leave to quite meaningful results... either in marriage or even a nasty break-up. Character progression doesn't have to come from the end of a sword.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
EDIT: Oh. Right. Staying on topic... sometimes I've "pulled the punch" of what my character would do IC in order to keep a story from crashing to a halt. More than once I'd had the opportunity to kick a person out of a group ICly for something they've done, and I've had my character opt not to do so because of the OOC consideration of ruining someone's story. I've also had my character not know things that they should have known in order to keep a story moving or to give someone else the spotlight. I don't have any hard and fast rules for when or what I do in this regard; I just try to intuit when it might be beneficial to a story, then act accordingly.
The Freelance Wizard
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((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
