Guide To RolePlay

by Yuudai_Tanaka Sun Jan 02, 2011 10:33 pm

Hi everyone Smile

Without any extra introductions – This is a basic RP guide, meaning every player who counts himself as a standard role-player should know these basics. This guide might be long for some people, so I've divided it to chapters. You can read the chapters you think you need refreshment in, but I suggest that you go through the entire guide – It's really not THAT long.

RP Guide by Avihai Livski (Ray_Yuizienga):

Chapter One – All About RP: Background and definitions.
Chapter Two – Building Up Your Character: Building your character history and look, and how to use it well while role playing, character limits and limitations.
Chapter Three – Role Play, Role Play, Role Play! Server commands, must-perform acts role-play situations, unnecessary acts of role-play situations.
Chapter Four – Summary: Right Is Not Just A Direction: What is right and what is wrong in the RP world.

Enjoy!

Chapter One – All About RP

Yes, we all know that RP equals Role Play. The word "Role" is clear as sun, but the world "Play" could be kind of ambiguous for some people. It is more "Role Act" rather than "Role Play", and this should make things a bit brighter. Taking a character, which has background, history and qualities, and put it in situations of social communications, making it respond and act to various events according to its general personality – That is a precise definition of Role Play.

A few definitions of RP you should know before starting to play in any server. Knowing these definitions will also help you to avoid admin jail as a result from disobeying rules:

IC – In Character. Everything you say, do, and know is considered INSIDE the role-play world, and has nothing to do with you as a player. In the server, there are many commands which server you for IC only; the primary are /me and /do, and simply talking by using chat without any commands (for expansion about commands, check chapter three)

OOC – Everything you say, do, and know is considered OUTSIDE of the role-play world, and has nothing to do with your character. The server holds primary commands for OOC: /g, /b, /pm.
Mixing IC/OOC – Mostly happens when you confuse between commands of IC and OOC.

Meta Gaming – All about separating between OOC information and IC information. Abusing the Information you know OOC about a character in IC. The best basic example would be calling the character by its name in IC before it told you its name. Someone people use the names that float above the characters' head to call them in IC. Well, in real life, people's names don't float above them, meaning this thing is OOC. Using OOC information (floating names) in IC (calling in a character's name before your character knows it) is meta-gaming.

Power Gaming – Based mostly on the command /me. Coming to someone at night and typing, sentence by sentence the next lines, is wrong and is considered power-gaming:

Player 1: /me sneaks behind the person.
Player 1: /me grabs the person tightly.
Player 1: /me starts to suck his blood.
Player 1: /do S/F? (<- This line refers to "Succeed/Fail?", demanding Player 2, who you've taken actions on, to take the call and respond.)

Taking more than one or two actions without giving the person a chance to resist or respond by typing his own /me or /do is power-gaming. And no – Giving the call if your action succeeded or failed to the other player after typing five actions in a row does not make this less of a power gaming, simply because in real life a person would have tried to resist to the example above already between the first and second action. The right situation would be more like:

Player 1: /me tries to sneak behind the person. (<- This is where you give a reasonable time-space for the other player to respond. If player 2 stands doing nothing in a quiet street, he will probably hear or feel you. However if he is concentrated on tying shoe laces or hearing music in his earphones, he probably won't notice you. Let's say he didn't notice. In this case, player 1 can continue as wishing)
Player 1: /me starts grabbing the person tightly. (<- This is where player 2 has to respond fast. This time, give him a reasonable, however shorter, time to type his reaction)
Player 2: /me lifts his foot backwards and attempts to kick balls.

And so on, and so on. This continuous typing will be solved as soon as a /try command will be, hopefully, added to the server. The /try command results your actions with succession or fail randomly. I shall not expend about it now, since it does not exist yet.
It is unnecessary to mention that if you were player 2 in the example above, you should avoid power-gaming as well.

Rabbit Jumps – For the inpatient players, running around in San Andreas is slow. However, using jumps to escape or moving faster is prohibited. In real life, you wouldn't jump around in the street to reach faster to your destination on foot.

Drive-by – The best lame way to kill people on GTA. No excuses for this one; stopping your car near a character, shooting and than driving away is definitely NOT role-play.

Ninja Jacking – Talks about jacking a vehicle by simply pressing enter. This refers also to empty vehicles. Just RP the vehicle jack with /me commands. It's not that complicated – Just think of the process in real life, and type it down.

Deathmatching – There is a specific reason why there's an obvious separation between DM servers and RP servers. Deathmatching is NOT role-play. One of the clear definitions of deathmatching is starting a killing spree on other characters (or simply killing a specific character) without any neither real nor logical reason. You don't just pull your gun and kill someone because he bumped you on the street or sneezed on your girlfriend. There is a simple rule that claims you must inform a person ICly with the reason you are about to attempt and kill him. If informing the character ICly is not possible (for example, I don't get how coming and saying all your reasons and plans to a character, then shooting him is somehow logical), than you must inform the player OOCly afterwards.

Chapter Two – Building Up Your Character

There are no actions without a plot, a story, a line which guides everything. There is not much to say, as this is the part where you could bend the routine and go extraordinary – Don't be afraid to use your imagination and build the history of your character. For those who enjoy writing and being creative, I suggest you make it rich and interesting. For the others, you could just make general guidelines, and make it look more like a biography (Character name, birth date, hometown, relationships, etc).

A few tips, because there are actually no strict rules for this one:
- You don't have to focus on crime. People think that they'll have the best RP if their character will be born in a poor neighborhood and turn to be a gangster or if their character will be violent. There are many fascinating and Role-Playable character sides, other than street gangs and organized crimes.
- When you are done with the final version of your character story, you may want to improve your Role Play. You could do this by presenting many sides of your character while interacting with other characters in different situation. For example, if your character had a burning accident when it was a child, you could type /do A crumpled skin appears to cover the left arm. This is just an example, so you may as well go wild with your imagination and creativity about how to expose your character's life to other characters ICly.
- General Tip: I warmly recommend you to post a brief of your character's life or features (This, of course, will be visible for other players to see on forum, but it still counts as OOC). I also recommend you to write a short description of the outer look of your character (like in the example of the burning scar) – This section will be read by players and can be used ICly, since it's about how the character itself looks.

Bottom line is: Be creative, use your imagination, and spice up your RP!

Chapter Three – Role Play, Role Play, Role Play!

The server offers plenty of animation which help you role-play your characters actions. These animations can be revealed by typing /animhelp. Yet, the most used of RP commands are /do, and /me (/me is way more popular, but /do commands are also great).
The point of this chapter is to teach you how role-play better by letting the other players imagine your actions, as if it was all real. Yet, you need to know not to exaggerate with descriptions. Let's make few examples; You could test yourself and try and tell which /me commands (which manually typed by some player) are useless, and waste time.

/do Has a cigar between his lips.
/me smokes.
/me taps his cigar.

In this basic example, only the first line could have been written. Since the other player notices you have a cigarette in your mouth, he could suppose that you're smoking (unless you ask him for a lighter). The third line is also useless, because of the fact that you could use the /tapcig animation instead (which, obviously, makes your character look like it taps a cigar). Using animations instead of /me commands can save expensive time, especially when it's about RP cases of life and death (I guess no one is going to type /me reloads, /me aims, /me shoots etc in a middle of a battle).

Another important thing, which I only rarely detected through my years of RP experience, is the use of /me and /do in means of showing emotion. And I'm not talking about writing /me is angry and face becomes red.

Try to put more emotions into your commands, when it's needed. For instance, if you are getting robbed and your character is not brave enough to stand up to four robbers at once, you could type something as: /me starts to sweat, arms are shaking. /me drops his wallet, a cold shiver passing through his back.

I also suggest developing your character's body language as well. As for my personal example, when I used to play a specific RP server I developed a body language in which the characters around me could know when I was lying (something like /me blinks twice, or /me licks his lips swiftly).

Also, I find that many people often find themselves in situations where they are bored, and deprived of roleplay from others. To this I suggest you create your own roleplay environment, and the number 1 rule to this is, BE CREATIVE. Here are a few things you can do (though there are many more):

-Start your own business
-Sell stuff out the back of your car
-Steal cars rply and sell the parts for money
-Go to a bar and have a drink with your friends
-Organize an illegal street race
-Organize an illegal fight club (or legal)

There are more situations which depend on the type of character you are roleplaying, whether it be a trigger happy gangster or a money hungry businessman.

Chapter Four – Summary: Right Is Not Just A Direction

I hope you guys (and girls) have learned something from this guide and are going to use this in order to improve their RP.
A short summary, then -

Things you must never do: Meta-gaming, Power-gaming, Rabbit jumps, Ninja-jacking, Drive-by, Deathmatching, any other act you would not do in real life and does not find itself under one of the above definitions.

Things you must always do: Keep it real. Stick close to things that could have been done in reality and never behave disconnected from reality when it comes to terms of role-play. Also, always listen to admins and respect the server rules. Always learn new ways to improve your role-plays.

Things recommended to do: Spice up your role-play, making it way more fun; by expending and deepening the life of your character, its actions and emotional sides; by trying to expose other character's different sides; by thinking out of the can; by going creative as hard as you can.

I want to claim that this is definitely not the final version of the guide, and it will be updated from time to time, as there's always a place to improve.
You may bring up your own suggestions and ideas of what to correct, to add, or to improve this guide and RP in general.
For those who need help with building up character stories, I have plenty of ideas, so you may turn to my e-mail (which appears in my profile).

I hope your enjoy the server,
And may you have a very awesome new year! Smile