Doing "research" ICly

[Scarlet Fisher]

I'm interested in hearing how other RPers with research-oriented characters manage and keep track of their characters' accomplishments.

 

It seems that a lot of my character's research ends up happening behind the scenes, and it's hard to bring other people up to speed on her work without it seeming like I'm lecturing them. Further, I often keep things super vague to avoid making "discoveries" or "inventions" that break the lore or fall into power-gaming.

 

Does anyone else with a research-oriented character encounter similar issues? How big a deal are they and how do you resolve them? How do you get other RPers involved in your research (especially if they are non-researcher types!).

[Valence]

Even if my character isn't really a researcher per se, I generally tend to keep it at purely applied science rather than big theoretical research and whatnot. So I mostly get to play with what already exists in lore and my fun is mostly finding new ways to play with it, or find new toys.

[Erah'sae]

I'm interested in hearing how other RPers with research-oriented characters manage and keep track of their characters' accomplishments.

 

It seems that a lot of my character's research ends up happening behind the scenes, and it's hard to bring other people up to speed on her work without it seeming like I'm lecturing them. Further, I often keep things super vague to avoid making "discoveries" or "inventions" that break the lore or fall into power-gaming.

 

Does anyone else with a research-oriented character encounter similar issues? How big a deal are they and how do you resolve them? How do you get other RPers involved in your research (especially if they are non-researcher types!).

 

I haven't done research RP in this game, mostly in others.  This sort of thing really works well for forum RP as you can treat it as an exchange of research notes and let others ICly hop in.  The forum works well as an archive since you can reference old posts, etc.  ICly these could reside in a library somewhere or as archived missives between research groups.  This also lets you 'show your work' so to speak.

 

We also mostly stuck to theoretical research as we have no actual input on the creative process for the game.  A few lines of dialog in a patch and your theory can be rendered moot.  (Which is awesome for RP, btw.  Then you get a lot of re-evaluation of the subject matter, etc.)

[Ryslo Suramlo]

Our group (Self Plug here I guess) Knights of Eorzea have been handling research as a observation thing and a lot of hypothesis when it comes to being in game. We'll go into a dungeon, observe it and discuss what it was we are seeing. Its been a lot of fun too even though OOCly we know the information we are giving each other could be entirely false. We know the 'lore' when we go into a place but discerning what things were used for, why they built a structure the way they did or something as simple as how's this light fixture still operational make their way into our conversations.

 

Its just been real fun doing that sort of RP trying to draw out deeper clues to the past from in game items rather then solely depending on readily available LORE pages or articles on the web. You can make it a real good RP experience if done right.