Koko

We don't disagree. We're just going from different sides as to how we write backstories. At the end of the day, I improvise my characters first, then write the backstory second. You write the backstory first, play later. If both can lead to fully realized characters (and they can), I don't personally mind how people go about it.

Absolutely all of my characters have been created through improvised backstories and interactions and I've never had an issue creating or finding RP. You do start with a vague concept of a backstory, it's just not detailed because nobody but you actually cares about your backstory, not even the people who asked you to write it. In RP servers, a backstory section in applications is just a reading comprehension & writing exam. Ask the people who proofread your backstory to tell you what it was 3 days later and nobody knows. You do need cohesion and a feeling of permanence and of a running storyline, but you can build that within a week of casual, low-impact interactions around your character's local area as you play instead of sitting down and writing the story beforehand: Find out what personality you give your character through play → Reverse engineer what events, history and circumstances led them to be this way. At the end of the day you're still building a backstory, you're just starting from a different point.

I improvise most of my backstory. All of my characters unless a faction demands a deeper connection to the concept grow from an initial elevator pitch and I test out what feels right, and make things up on the fly that ultimately become a cohesive backstory. I personally do mostly passive RP so I spend a lot of time thinking about pointless details as I play.

quoted for truth

Great, I've played with fantastic African characters who had African names, the name is not the issue when it comes to the characters I'm talking about. Keep on doing good roleplay if that's your thing, my reply is obviously not about you if that's the case.

Most of the people I work with IRL are from a variety of African countries, me thinking "they have funny names" is not the issue at hand. Many people RPing African characters are doing just fine I'm sure. Others on the other hand are regularly trolling and interrupting RP with memery, as I've personally experienced multiple times. Obviously the trolls are the people I'm complaining about here.

I don't disagree, but I feel like this is also par for the course for RP in general. The amount of first generation Irish immigrant characters I've seen over the years who wear flat caps, speak Gaelic fluently and have an IRA tattoo or w/e on their arm is just living proof to that. Same for any character that's got an unusual country of origin. In the same way, minorities played by some european balkan kid are often defined by the superficial, and you'd struggle to find many people being able to explain their character without mentioning their nationality or culture. A lot of people really think that making your character an ethnicity/nationality is a character trait without actually going beyond the most surface level and trying to understand the actual culture rather than making "I'm from XYZ" your whole character identity.

As someone who plays as a black character in mostly EU/daytime hours, honestly it's just ass to see how much of a caricature so many black characters are. Some people's portrayal until US players log in is honestly a watermelon joke short of straight up blackface. Doesn't help when there's entire groups of people in South Central basically RPing like Ugandan Knuckles as a meme. This is also true to other minorities. I'm Hispanic IRL and I've been told my Hispanic characters weren't "hispanic enough" because I just RPed a regular hispanic guy (often including my own cultural/life experiences and going as far as RPing fully in spanish with other spanish speakers in the server) instead of as a raging stereotype.

My cope is that we're a proto-cyberpunk dystopia and mallrats and DM gangs fit that aesthetic too well to RP otherwise. Everything is IC if you just accept the "elite" lives off of ERPing and cancelling each other on socials (OOCly) and that gangs just have a powerful crime intranet (Discord dealing).

I usually start with a very vague, one-sentence description of my character that is the basis and that defines the overall theme (the topics that are most important to explore in the story. Basically: what the movie would be about if my character's life was a movie), and then just go out into the world and take it from there. Examples of characters I've played can be things like: "Young black athlete from the hood loses big sports scholarship, has to figure life out" "Puerto Rican addict pretends to be a mallrat for money and fame (he hates it)" "Nerdy Native American ends up a Park Ranger to connect with his heritage (too scared to arrest anyone)" "Older Jamaican immigrant, started college late because he had to work for it, wants social change" With this I have a very general idea of the themes I want to play: sometimes it's a hood come up story, themes of immigration and poverty, sometimes it's to explore themes like social media, impostor syndrome and how fake and shallow influencer culture is, or sometimes I'm just inspired by trying to think of a character that is a great supporting character for the stereotypes of a group (I wanted a nerdy Park Ranger because your average LEO character is a tough ex-Marine with an iron jaw). I also don't make backstories to start with other than the very minimum outline of their life until then, and through RP I let my characters react to the world and then I take that first personality that comes out and I improvise bits of background little by little as I play, seeing what would make sense considering their behaviour.

I applied to be a landlord for businesses years ago to act as a soft IC version of PM, meaning I was very, very active at the time and we were locally tired of seeing businesses be abandoned and we wanted to control and measure activity around parts of K-Town without having to lose these places to PM limbo for months (and IC it was also a money laundering scheme for RP) since small businesses are the meeting point of gang and civie life. This was not something PM was considering at the time and I was denied but I think there's some value to the idea. I'd just like a system through which we can gain a modicum of this sort of control over a small area by dedicated people to rent out businesses that they can kick people out of if they don't meet activity requirements. It kills block RP to not have a sort of sense of unity and general buzz and activity where people are held accountable in keeping the business open, especially RP niche corner shop type businesses. Now of course this isn't doable in a general scale, but I'd like to see people who have in-game business experience use it to promote local characters that want to be active by renting out these properties and police it a bit. But for this to work you have to make sure there's a clear system to flag any landlord that's just not active and impeding the system from working.

Yeah just take that information and let them know you have it by calling their pho-- oh.

Got corruption perms in FD just to get to hang out around gangbangers without snitching, shoutout to being terrible at your job but also just wanting to live a regular life.

This and honestly, there's a hard ceiling to what money can actually buy you and that will keep you busy. If you have a fleet of supercars at that point to the average person you just blur in as the millionth rich person with expensive car as far as public perception goes. Everything else worth buying into will likely be vetted by PM via application.

Mirroring what's said above: if people feel like their characters are unjustly searched then that's an IC issue you can bring up even in court, and many, many cases default out of undue process. A lot of cop RPers struggle with the ideas of Reasonable Suspicion etc. Now, I get it: court RP is ass, and at the end of the day even if you win you've been through the punishment anyway waiting for a hearing. That does need some thought. My character on the other hand is a sworn officer (FD) that was built in part to be a red herring for cops and legal RPers. He talks, looks and has a name over his head like any other south central hood resident, lives on Forum Drive but is a legal character. I've definitely been regularly profiled on the server and taken it up IC. It's just part of his reality as a black person in Los Santos. I'm not sure what the chief complaint is. Are you saying that cops are excessive in their policing? It seemed like you were making a point about how response is disproportionate considering it allows other crime to happen (mind you, some clever criminal groups in-game often use this fact to great effect), but now it just seems like you're complaining that cops are being unreasonably invasive or overstepping in their searches. That's something you can bring up IC from a political standpoint, several people have RPed police watch groups.

There are just some forms of crime that are a lot more visible and all-out than others and simply lead to more direct escalation to violence. If an LEO /panic's, at that point there's no information on what has happened or the scale of the threat, but it likely means they're being shot by multiple people. At the same time, traffic stops are one of the highest danger scenes for your average patrol cop due to the chance of getting sniped to avoid the charge and losing the gun. Car chases often end with the evading character getting cornered and opening fire, and LEOs are expected to RP crashes even when evaders scale up a mountain. Standoffs or other violent threats on the other hand often look like *nothing* to a patrolling cop in a car because characters have no body language. You could be the victim of three people actively cornering your character aggressively and unless there's a weapon out it just looks like 4 people talking until you see everyone chicken running to fight. Same with car theft, if you're scoping a car out to a cop you're just stood around. It's just mechanically hard to fix unless cops walk up to every citizen Judge Dredd style to see if they're complying.

Name them, in PMs if you want, I'll make sure to report them myself if that's actually a thing. Me personally I've got nothing to feel called out for so I'll happily help you solve this issue.

The faction I'm a part of was addressed, and obviously people went on to discuss the idea. I'm just clarifying what the faction actually looks like to avoid misunderstandings it ain't that deep lmao

You mentioned the behaviour tied specifically to my faction by name in several posts and the conversation derailed to discussing Firefighter portrayal. Since I disagree with the basic idea of course I'm going to argue my point against that, just for the sake of everyone reading this thread lmao.

My firefighter lives in Carson w/ Forum, and until he was promoted to Firefighter III (the last position before being a Captain) he was driving an Albany Primo, which is literally one of like 3 cheapest chars in the game. With my promotion I was told that I could now comfortably buy a car around $100k and I bought an Alamo for pennies in the second hand market. All my material assets have a value of like $110k, just 60% of the starter $200k literally everyone gets for existing. Most Firefighters I'm aware of drive cars that would cost 15k to 40k irl, and I'd be happy for people to report cases that escape asset checks. Mind you internally FD members have been the first to call for asset checks because most of us RP considering ourselves working class, and it annoys us just the same to see sports cars beyond whatever a Mazda MX5 is in-game outside our station. That and the fact that a significant majority of FD doesn't or barely does off-duty RP (you'd be surprised at how many FD characters don't actually own a home in-game) so chances are the cars you're seeing belong to Volunteer Firefighters who can have pretty much any other job and work for FD on the side. As an aside though, when it comes to LA, Firefighters are repeatedly cashing in overtime that in the case of Captains every year has cases going beyond half a million dollars a year (and Firefighters always top lists of sworn personnel overtime pay in LA), which is insane but here we are. EDIT: Regardless, I'd RPQM any Firefighter driving a Tesla though for not RPing PTSD of how insane it is to put out the fire in a Tesla with a battery that just decides to spontaneously combust and needs 20.000 gallons of water to be extinguished.

Yes but IRL you and your car don't get to disappear from the world every time you go to bed, cameras are everywhere, forensic evidence is usable, main streets are regularly full of people and when you go to jail for armed robbery you can easily be looking at at least 10 years in jail instead of a couple days, and when you get shot by the police you don't respawn at the nearest hospital. Realism is such a pick-and-choose argument in this game as is. At this point staff is just trying anything in order to have a playable game world. I don't necessarily agree with all decisions being made but we have years behind our back seeing how a very large chunk of the population will run with the realism argument whenever convenient and will use it to RP a movie.

This is my main takeaway from people on the forums discussing it: it really doesn't matter what's discussed here since it's always the same dozen of us on every thread. The people doing dogshit robberies only come to the forums when they're reported or when their clique links a thread asking for it to be dogpiled to stop a discussion that affects their playstyle.

My favourite part about a robbery is having to sit for 45 minutes every time while waiting for an admin because one side made a negligible mistake that wouldn't have changed the outcome and mostly wasn't even done with malice anyway and now we need a Judge Judy moment.

I'm all for new avenues of RP for people and for people to go deep into concepts that interest them. I love doing gym/fitness/sports related things on my characters, and it sucks that most gyms are essentially a script fight lobby. Good luck!

Again, this stems from a part of the population's constant efforts to read the rules to their biggest mechanical advantage every single time until the completely non-RP metas are squashed with more brazen rules that harm legitimate criminal RPers. The last few robbery attempts I've experienced were people spinning the block, not directly parking the car in front of someone but across the street, or playing into the technicality of "I'm outside of their vision" because you go a few meters ahead past a corner, and indeed running towards them on foot to play on the technicality of the rule, which is essentially the old vehicle robbery hop out with just an additional step added in.