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Mandatory Descriptions for players


Barriss

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Short Description: Most RP servers far and wide have flavor text/description commands that are put in place for players to detail in brief what their character looks like, sounds,etc. Criminal RPs take advantage of this by choosing to not describe their characters.

Detailed Description: I know personally speaking to people who have been long-time community members, to admins have expressed their disapproval over players not having descriptions. It's not entirely a needed component to RP but it allows your character to be an individual to others. Non-Criminal RPers don't see much of an issue to this, sometimes they have joke descriptions. But having a description doesn't necessitate that you are a criminal. However criminal RPers can take advantage of this easily. Dressing up in all black or an extremely generic colored outfit and masking up without a description can very easily allow you to commit crimes and get away with them. I find this as slight vergence into powergaming and well just bad RP in general. Not everyone is going to look, sound, and act all the same. People have been easily captured IRL due them being a specific height, they have a limp when they run, or some other crucial feature. Most criminal players I've seen on the server(often are made up of groups of friends who going to be actively using discord or similar) roll around with no descriptions.

How will this improve the server: I fully believe that if there is an enforced description policy for all players to come up with a basic description, it could promote healthier RP.  Criminal players would now have to effectively RP smarter to avoid getting caught. As it stands my experience and witnessing groups of not-descript people robbing/murdering are often people RP poorly and are mainly here to cause some grief. As well it will help newer RPers or people to the server to make their character stand out more.

 

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think this was suggested before, but yeah... heavy text based roleplay is what we have signed up for to say the least. must be mandatory indeed
also part of the problem is server not notifying the command exists, there could just be a message every login like /notifications for the people not using their descriptions 

Edited by Flow
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9 minutes ago, zaXer. said:

If we hide name tags and use IDs instead, yeah. 

I know in other places they only have nametags appearing within a specific range and/or looking at the person directly. I don't know the inner workings of RAGEMP but that could be a solution. It can also cut down on meta-gaming too.

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1 hour ago, ChromaticDeath said:

Nametags are a non-issue. You can't use someone's nametag to describe them, doing /me describes <person> is not allowed, so that's not really a matter. Besides, you can't pick up anything about a character from a name other than ethnicity, anyway.

The only way that you can use the name-tag is when you address them in a /me or a /do directly when interacting with them. Otherwise you should ALWAYS use their clothing, scars, tattoos, ethnicity, accent they spoke in, any other defects on them etc. Also /examine & /attributes should be MANDATORY, I always check people to see their appearance and such when interacting with them and maybe 7 our of 10 times it's empty and not even set. I might believe not everyone know how it works, or that you can make several lines of /attributes.

 

Regarding the idea of hiding Name-Tags entirely and adding an ID or manual naming system will introduce a load onto the server and probably instability, as things are we are good, I'd rather have other things fixed and Quality of Life issues resolved along with RageMP pushing updates to fix their client.

Edited by Vash Baldeus
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Regardless of how you feel about name tags. Descriptions must be mandatory to all players. The only time I've ever seen descriptions never used by characters were often on servers that had throw away/reusable event characters.  To my knowledge, I've yet to see people who are just that, characters used to promote events.

Off that, when I mean a BASIC description it implies information that anyone can rationally gleam as a normal human being.
"5'10, Grey Eyes, Medium length brown hair, speaks with a Liberty accent. Visible Dog, Gun, Lion, Swastika, Floral tattoos on arms if uncovered. Walks with an odd limp."

What we can take from this description is that this a guy who is tall, but not too tall. He walks in a funny manner due a limp, he has medium length brown hair and grey eyes. Tattoos are often helpful to identify people as it's ICly,OOCly, and possible IRL to find someone because they have a certain tattoo on their body.

NOT
"Tall, Muscular, Speaks with a Southern Accent, Tattoos, Blue eyes, Black Hair"

We cannot gather anything from this description. This is an intentionally vague, boring and thoughtless description because it wrangles in dozens of different players. You're tall, but how tall are you? You're muscular but are you ripped or just toned? You speak with a southern accent, so does half of Sandy Shores. You have tattoos, what person on the server DOESN'T have tattoos.


There have only been a few criminal characters I've met, seen, or have gotten screenshots/videos of that have descriptions. These are often for the majority well RP'd characters. Those who DON'T have descriptions or incredibly vague/broad ones are the people who often show poor RP, have intentions to grief,  and seek to gain script items. This is something you'll see commonly in games like Garrysmod for example. Because if there isn't a rule to have a description then people can and will seek to abuse this rule. As I said before, it will be near impossible to find someone who is wearing black shoes, black pants, and a black hoodie with a black mask on. While IRL people get caught all the time, even from grainy 24/7 store cameras because they met a broad description such as being short, or worse this specific brand of hoodie.

Edited by Barriss
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Wait, so your problem is not whether they have a description or not, your problem is how they decide to describe their character? I do see how not having a description can be a problem, but then again, if they do, I don't believe you are the one to decide how they go about it. Also, you're not gonna know the difference between someone being 5'10 or 6ft just from looking at it and if you just straight up did "Yeah, he was exactly 5'11 and let me describe every single tattoo he has." instead of just explaining the ones that would catch your eye, I am very sure it'd be some sort of metagaming in it's own right. Some characters also has a ton of tattoos that would require a blank A4 sized piece of paper for them to explain. Also, I don't see the need to explain my characters eye color or hair color necessarily, since that CAN be checked ingame by simply looking at said character.

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People do need to have a set description for their characters. It does not need to be a novel, though. Just a few short segments about your character's physical appearance (if they are of a certain weight, if they have any visible gang affiliated tattoos, if they have any specific identifiable features like scars or physical deformities). These can help people recognize one another in game ICly, and can provide more depth to a character's story. It is best to have this be mandatory and have new players write up their first major descriptions during character creation rather than these same new players waiting until they are told to make one to write up a description.

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3 hours ago, Artz said:

Wait, so your problem is not whether they have a description or not, your problem is how they decide to describe their character? I do see how not having a description can be a problem, but then again, if they do, I don't believe you are the one to decide how they go about it. Also, you're not gonna know the difference between someone being 5'10 or 6ft just from looking at it and if you just straight up did "Yeah, he was exactly 5'11 and let me describe every single tattoo he has." instead of just explaining the ones that would catch your eye, I am very sure it'd be some sort of metagaming in it's own right. Some characters also has a ton of tattoos that would require a blank A4 sized piece of paper for them to explain. Also, I don't see the need to explain my characters eye color or hair color necessarily, since that CAN be checked ingame by simply looking at said character.

I'm not asking you put six paragraphs of what your character looks like. But I am telling you not to be lazy and intentionally vague. Somethings I did list were erroneous(hair, eyes, skin) for a slightly detailed description. But if you opt to leave those out since it's a defining physical characteristic then go right ahead. Nor am I saying you're going to know the EXACT height of everyone you meet, but you can ballpark it(as you would IRL).  If I'm 5'6, and I have friends who are 5'8,5'10, and 6'0 then I can assume that the person who towered over me was between 5'10 and 6'0. But the person who wasn't even a head taller than me was somewhere between 5'7-5'9.  To which one should say.
"Yeah, my friend Bob is a few inches taller than me." compared to "Yeah, my friend Bob is a bit tall."

Gotta realize this is contextual information that people use literally every day.  Not some special power that only the gifted can have lol. If were to get robbed in person I could guarantee you that I'd be able to roughly describe the person without needing a recording(because amazingly this happens out in the real world. Shocking)

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