Snoof

Big +1, though I'd go a step further and open it to other RP ideas that require OOC planning, like say I'm roleplaying a wealthy older business (wo)man and I think it could be fun to find somebody to RP my trust fund demon spawn.

This thread is fantastic. Good to see he's still kicking! 👏

I made a suggestion to open a 'Looking for RP' section on the forums like 1½ year back when I first joined because I was having a similar issue, but some people were resistant to it for whatever reason and I don't think it was ever seriously considered. It's a shame because we're actively discouraged from speaking to each other OOCly too much while we're on the server, so unless you hang out with people in your faction Discord a lot (assuming you're even in one) it can be really hard to form connections that survive past characters. Oh and even if you do make them that doesn't automatically mean they'll be into whatever idea you wanna do next unless it's basically the same thing you were already doing, which is probably a big part of why people seem to end up doing the same type of RP over and over again here.

Act 1 - Who?

((Hello! Thanks for visiting my slightly pretentious little corner of the forums. The following thread will tell the story of Luna Chavez - a homeless teenager suffering from a slew of mental illnesses and addictions - using an experimental 2nd person narrative combined with traditional screenshots to give you, the reader, deeper insight into the mind of the character. I hope you like it!)) Hello friend

You've got throngs of people who spend 5+ hours on the server nearly every single day. Whether people like to admit it or not because of how 'lame' it sounds, that makes the RP and the lives of their characters a big part of THEIR lives through time-investment alone. It's really not as crazy as it sounds for people to get a bit too invested, especially not these days since COVID made RP a replacement for a social life to a lot of people. Doesn't make it right, obviously, but I do kind of see where they're coming from. GTAW and their status in it is just really important to them. There's also the problem that the two elements GTA:W combines (Heavy text-based roleplay & GTA gameplay) don't really play that well together in this regard. Usually in heavy text-based roleplay if I'm having some kind of conflict with somebody, we're writing it out together and steering it towards a conclusion that we're both comfortable with, thus leading to better OOC relations between you and your enemy and a more reciprocal conflict where you're more willing to give each other some ground because there's a level of trust there. In GTA:W, if we're enemies, we end up being actual enemies because we're effectively playing a game against each other. If I get shot down I don't go 'oh wow my character just got shot in the story, this is getting intense', because in all likelihood I'm going to get executed while I'm down there and have to respawn and act like nothing happened, carrying the frustration of knowing I just lost at a game. When you use gameplay for conflict resolution, people naturally want to win and when they don't, it sucks. There's obviously lots of good things that come from it too, but people have been getting pissed off at video-games for as long as they've existed and adding significance to the PC's being dropped by making them actual characters that lose things when they die (whether that be their actual lives, the last 30 or so minutes of RP or assets like guns/drugs) only gives people more reason to get upset over it.

Oh and I get the visual argument too, but that's just kind of fucked for everyone. If we had to restrict our characters to be what they can be within the rules of GTA 5's character creation, we'd all be stuck playing 30+ year old junkies of uniform height with terrible skin. Game's just kind of ugly in places and we have to deal with that.

I really don't see how it's any more pressing of a logistical issue than any others we have on the server. People aren't actually getting thrown in jail for that here because it's understood that here it's the rule rather than the exception that the parents are not coming to collect their child because they don't exist. It's also not normal for people to be sentenced and locked up an hour after they committed the crime, but that happens too because much like the teen RPers don't have the resources to provide the emergency responders with all the things that would make their work more immersive, the responders can't reasonably be expected to be able to provide a completely realistic experience of getting caught and locked up to the criminals. This isn't even a problem that can't be easily fixed WITHOUT further restricting what people can RP; The rules on NPC's could easily be relaxed to allow people to RP their parents coming if that's what you wanted. I mean, who does that hurt? I get not wanting to let people have active NPC's interfering in every day RP because the culture of the server is to treat RP like it's a competition and pretty soon you'd have people summoning their 6'10 dad from thin air to chokeslam their enemies every time there's a fight, but under circumstances like this arrest one that we're all dwelling on super hard for some reason even though it's only like 1% of the RP these characters engage in and other ones where it makes sense for them to be around, like if you enter somebody's family home, then I really don't see any negatives to letting people use them. As for CPS, you could easily just go the LS-RP route of having a CPS center somewhere on the map where these children of constantly incapacitated junkies can end up. You don't NEED to (and probably never will) have a ton of people working there for it to serve its purpose, nor does it have to be some big hyper-professional operation with its own forums full of tons of lists and 5 paragraph reports of every time somebody goes to the bathroom, you can just kind of have it exist and let people make of it what they will like the homeless shelter. I can sympathize a little more with the emotional arguments like 'I don't like seeing child characters get hurt' and 'Getting cat-called by underage characters is uncomfortable' because y'all are coming from a good place and... yeah, not really gonna argue with the second one; A rule against that might be a good idea, especially since the character doing the cat-calling is trying to incite a reaction that the 'target' can't give them without breaking the pedo rule. As for the first one, yeah, it can be unpleasant - it SHOULD be unpleasant, really - but it's one of those situations where you have to stop and ask yourself how much you really want the server to protect you from unpleasant things. Police brutality is unpleasant and a point of trauma for some people, and yet we're not gonna OOCly ban it from the server because the RP it can create is just as interesting as the act is unpleasant. Same with gang beatings, shootings, stabbings, casual racism, misogyny, etc. etc. etc. Without all these things that objectively suck, the server would suck. My standard is if it's something you can show (not imply, SHOW) on T.V or in a game, which violence involving teenagers definitely is, it should be ok on the server too.

I don't know what thought process leads y'all to thinking people who are currently unpleasant to interact with will somehow stop being so if you make their characters older. The problem is poor portrayal; Shitty RPers. Banning underage characters because some people do them poorly isn't just unfair to the people who portray them well, it's also a completely ineffective way to treat the problem because you're attacking a symptom instead of the disease. It's like trying to treat somebody suffering from withdrawal by giving them aspirin for their headaches.

I feel like part of the problem with this is people feeling unsure of what they're actually allowed to do with NPCs. Obviously most people aren't going to have player parents simply because there's very few people who'd rather play the gangster's dad or the gangster's mom instead of the gangster themselves, but using human NPC's to do anything is muddy and foreign territory for most people here. If I was put in that position myself I just might decide my character's parents were passed out in an alley too, just because I'm not sure to what degree I'm allowed to have NPC's acting on my character's behalf and I don't want to fuck up somehow.

It's 16 at the youngest UNLESS you're roleplaying with specifically a street gang faction, in which case the min age is 12.

Totally get wanting a skateboard, but I dunno if the script where even the hype video is 85% it spassing out and making the rider eat various amounts of shit is the one you really want.

Seeing people I don't know in my neighborhood makes me murderously upset.

She's just so beautiful

Congrats on 500! Hell of a milestone.

105k

95k

85.000

Offering $75.000

Having an OOC relationship with your character's friends and allies is all well and good though it can definitely result in some favouritism. Personally I'm of the school of thought that favouritism isn't necessarily a bad thing though, so long as it's treated as favouritism ICly, e.g. the new homie starts rapidly rising through the faction's ranks because he's the shotcaller's son and that character is biased towards him rather than the new homie goes straight to the top because he's the funny guy on Discord. What seems really underrated around here is having a positive OOC relationship with your character's enemies. People treat 'the opps' like they're just a bunch of NPC's for their characters to gun down and all you get from that is two sides of people competing to see who can interrupt more of the other side's casual RP by running in guns blazing and making sure everybody's in the death state before they leave to make absolutely sure nothing gets developed from it except for that hard ass video they're gonna upload later of them shooting horribly desynced people down while they're typing.

Emotes shouldn't be long just for the sake of being long, but a good long emote that's actually trying to tell me something is worth waiting for IMO. Mind you, I come from a background of long-form paragraph based RP where people go in turns and giving each person in the room 5-10 minutes to type is the norm so I've got monk patience when it comes to this stuff. I find it far more frustrating when people start machinegunning me with short posts, particularly during a 'stressful' situation like a stickup. Like do you not see the speech bubble above my head? You caught me off guard; let me react.

120k

110k

100k

Really enjoyed this.