Defining good roleplay

[Phased]

2 minutes ago, RufioCas said:

imagine making ppl wait for 2 mins for you to type out your /me like you're practising to be the next shakespeare

 

12 minutes ago, Blowin' Hollows said:

The main gripe I have with overly long /me's is the fact that it stalls role play.

 

I want role play to have a good flow to it, if you're a slow typer and your /me's are novel-like then I will simply lose interest in the role play and fall out of the immersive state I am in during the scenario. The whole point of role play is to take you into a whole other world where you feel immersed in that world. I don't want to be in the London England during my role play, I want to be in Los Santos, USA. Shorter /me's help with that, both with the amount of time it takes to type it but also the amount of time it takes to read and understand what you're trying to dictate your character is doing in their /me's.

 

Additionally (and also a little away from the main threads point), you can have amazing /me's, portray your character as a fruitful individual, but if your mindset is whack then in my opinion you're not a great role player. You need to have a good mindset towards role play. LEO role players OOC goals shouldn't be to catch criminals, likewise, criminal role players OOC goals shouldn't be to make as much money as they can and cause pure pandemonium to the city they reside in. There's a few more examples but I'll leave it at that to keep it as short as possible.

 

 

I'm glad to see this is the more popular opinion, it's just unfortunate that it's being portrayed by the script and staff in game that that is the expectation.

[SweetDaffodil]

Quality > Quantity. 

Edited January 27, 2021 by LovelyLilac

[Guest]

It's not about the /me's, you can make them as fancy as you like but if your character is unrealistic then I would rather be offline and RP in my head.

[CloutToken]

I have always been of the opinion that shorter /me's are better in the sense that they keep the flow of roleplay going and cut out any extraneous text that takes longer to type as well as read. I'd like to develop a story and I don't exactly find much appeal in doing over a hundred characters for every /me. Exceptions apply depending on the circumstances, of course. If it's a vehicle needing to be fixed, or a drink is being made at a bar, there's nothing wrong with adding a bit of extra pizzazz to it, but simple actions shouldn't really require all too many words.

[bonk]

Just now, Syke said:

I'm glad to see this is the more popular opinion, it's just unfortunate that it's being portrayed by the script and staff in game that that is the expectation.

 

 

I can definitely argue that there are some great staff members that hold an amazing mindset towards role play, but as with any community there are also some that are not up to par with say the community or those exemplary staff members.

 

With rules that are not strictly defined there comes administrators (who mind you have the right to do that) punish for things that they feel are incorrect, not that they know are incorrect. This will then lead to inconsistency with punishments, as you said, some will attempt to punish you for not writing your /me's in depth because they feel as if it is "lazy" or not proper role play, some will give you leeway on that and understand the fact that role play is not meant to be stalled due to the reason I listed above.

 

I've actually had friends who have been limited with interviews/interactions with factions/groups because of them not typing out 250 character /me's so this hits home. it's definitely a role play standard that I'd like to have get rid of, but it's up to the wider community, not me.

 

[Edelweiss206]

It's context based and understanding your position and others is helpful enough to bring character to your character. Let's just take the bare bones trucking action: 

 

/Me unloads a crate.

While correct, it's just utilitarian and robotic, personally it just conjures up a robot, I just see factorio inserter arms. It offers nothing other than telling everyone else what action your character is doing, but in some cases, that is enough. 

 

/Me drags a crate into their arms, then sets it on the floor.

It's still to the point, but offers more understanding of how the person is doing the job, finding the action. I'd use this if I'm surrounded by a lot of people, it's a repetitive action that is going to fill up the screen. However it still sets the tone for how your character is doing that action.

 

I've common 'trick' I've seen people all over do is splice their /me's with what their character is thinking, while yes it adds character it's done in completely the wrong way, you can infer how the character is acting but it's not the way to go about it. 

 

/Me looks at their beer sadly, thinking about their dead friends.

Ita a bit stereotypical, but a common enough occurrence in LS, but it's a mindset being used to infer an action and being to the letter of the rules, metagame. 

/Me looks down at their beer, a vacant glare as they go eerily still, clenching the bottle tight.

Is the opposite,its actions to infer a mindset, people can assume something is wrong, or at the very least the person is in an off-putting situation that can open to naturally asking about the issue.

 

Of course this can be taken way too far, it's called purple prose, writing way too much and in too much detail while going 'nowhere'. While most actions or /me's you do won't go nowhere, you may just be over-engineering them, let's overwrite the action above while trying to keep within the GTAV limit

 

/Me wraps this fingers around the bottle, eyes dilating as they focused on the neck. Their skin goes pale as blood drains from their face, fingertips turning red as they squeezed down harder still. They become cold and statuesque, glaring at their drink.

255 characters on the dot (if my counter is right) now I'm not going to say this is a good or bad /me, it's very dependent on the situation, you have to help set a scene of things for people to interact with, what the general players are going to notice. If I'm in a busy bar with 10+ people in, the bartender is serving people and there's two conversations going, I'm not going to drop that on random passersby. But if it's just me with say...a psychologist, who has handed me a drink of water and this is how I react to it, things that THAT specific person can play off of, then it's more than acceptable. Likewise I think it'd be bad RP if you went to the shrink and just did:

/Me takes the water bottle sadly. 

 

TLDR you need to learn WHEN to put detail into certain actions, But you need a base level so you're not just a machine or an NPC. 

[Phased]

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong I'm not saying every member of staff stands behind it, but the general experience overall, and the way some of the text presents in game do.

[Garras Up]

Good roleplay isn't defined by how many words or details you put into your /me's, how many fancy words you use in your /me's or anything like that, it's defined by whether or not said roleplayer can portray what they're trying to portray believably, and whether or not OOC has any bearing in regards to it. I know cunts who can rp their asses off, yet only type short and to the point /me's, I also know various players who literally cannot roleplay whatsoever, but love to write 250,000 word /me's to disguise their trash roleplay.

 

I appreciate minor details, but if you expect me to sit there for 10 minutes while you type of 250 words to describe how you pick up a spanner, you got me messed up. I don't need to know half of your character's life story as they do something, I just need what they're doing described to me so I can respond.

 

All in all, short /me's over long /me's. Short /me's allow for you to get your point across without needlessly clogging up people's screens with BS and worthless details. Don't get me wrong though, there's some situations where longer /me's are cool, but there's others where they're just un-needed and stupid.

Edited January 28, 2021 by Garras Up

[alina2137]

Good roleplay isn't defined by how you write your actions, it's defined by how good your character portrayal is. If your character is worth someone else's time then you're doing a good job. If your character is a bland fruity lesbian who drives an Elegy and that's her only personality trait, then congratulations... you've fucked up. Fucked up in the book of most roleplayers and you will now be stuck to the small group of people on this server commonly refered to as "mallrats" - people who don't care about what roleplaying is and who are here solely to ERP, drive riced cars, occasionally get into cop chases in order to get a wide banana on their face and log out for the day.

I did not make this comment to diss what people roleplay or don't, I made this comment because these are characters who do not contribute to the server in any major way. These are characters made for the purpose of bringing OOC joy to the player behind them and that itself contributes to their roleplay being shit. I am not trying to sound like Neitzsche here and say that life is suffering and whatever, because yes - you can be a good roleplayer and still have fun doing what you do. There are plenty of civilian roleplayers who have interesting lives and who take advantage of the world around them to develop and have a lot of fun, this is not bashing on any roleplayers besides that tiny group of people that makes things look bad.

Ever since my "career" on this server stared, said server had one big problem - character portrayal. For example, gangbangers would value their portrayal over their development to the point where they'd just take a CK eventually (around 3 weeks into a character @ age 17-20 IC) and then come back on a similar character just to go around and shoot people and do gang rp-er stuff. So called mallrats - these guys were always so into development that they would grind assets for 10 hours a day through (back in the day) mining etc.

The sight of well thought out characters with personalities, goals and reasons to exist in the GTA World universe was rare, but this is not the case anymore. Any character who provides anything to the server environment is a good character. So as long as you're not a porn addict roleplaying a lesbian for the sole reason of ERP in your interior 95% of the time, you're good in my book. And this is not to derail the topic and make it an ERP discussion. ERP is RP, do whatever the fuck you want as long as you provide anything to the server, even on the side. So long as you exist and drive slowly enough to be considered traffic and not a speeding mallrat, you're already contributing to this server and to creating an immersive environment. It is the little things that come together to shape this beautiful world.

People must understand that roleplaying is roleplaying, this is not an RPG game or a Second Life gamemode in GTA 5. If you're someone who wants to have a Second Life experience, then go to Second Life, we don't want you here.

The majority of problems on this server come from the fact that there are newcomers to this scene who do not understand what the fuck they're getting themselves into, or they misinterpret certain rules, values and such, therefore creating these bland, shitty, and absolutely worthless characters. There is no such thing as shit roleplay when we think about how it's written. How you write your lines does not matter, so long as you portray an interesting character. What seperates good roleplay from bad roleplay is the character itself. If, and I'll repeat myself for the conclusion: your character is here for the sole reason of grinding, ERP, providing you with OOC stimulation in cop chases and/or other dumb shit, then you are not welcome here.

We are not elitists, this is simply what roleplaying is about. Standing up for the core values of roleplay is not elitism, it's our desperate moves to try and keep this server running with some sort of standards whilst there's people out there in this community trying to bring in their own standards that do not even match with the core rules, values and goals of the RP gamemode.

[Edelweiss206]

4 hours ago, hentai! said:

Good roleplay isn't defined by how you write your actions, it's defined by how good your character portrayal is.

I'm not using you specifically because you've gone into detail, but this point has come up a lot and it's something I want to touch on. Yours was just the latest.

 

While you're right, you can write a load of bullshit and it come up to nothing, there is still one problem with this thought, this is a text server, you have to use your words to portray yourself. There has to be SOME level of detail there for people to work with. This server has a LOT of people and it's spread all over, asking for a certain level of English is unfair and we have an application for the server, ontop of this with the huge range of what people are playing, in time the server ironically becomes cliquey and you start to hang out with a very specific group: the gangs, the mallrats, the nightclub crawlers, bikers, the skinheads and everything in between.

 

I think good RP comes from two positions, how you interact and build up your smaller social circle within your group but more importantly that a lot of people forget, how to interact with people OUTSIDE of your circle, this could be as simple as robberies or muggings, buying drugs, bumping into different people in a bar, whatever. I think it's this side that's not being focused on and in my opinion it's shown up a lot in this thread. 

 

People not in gangs think that gangs are just RDM fest's with just thrown out slang and arguements between everyone 24/7 and are unapproachable.

 

In the same way you have the people who see richer or more well off characters driving around in specific cars and doing nothing but partying or hanging out with the same crowd as 'Mallrats' when it makes sense for that sort of person to be around that sort of person. 

 

Let me be incredibly blunt on this. Outside of your social circle, no one gives a fuck on your 'character portrayal', no one gives a fuck on your backstory, or your past, the actions you've done on the server within your group because at this point because your character to them is a faceless nobody. Your a gangbanger, a mallrat, a cop, a business owner. They've never met you before, or maybe seen your name flash by as you've driven past them.

 

/Me points their gun at *name*

"Run dem pockets."

/Me pat's *name* down

/B /showitems please

 

What makes you any different to anyone else who could have robbed them? What character does this mugging show? You see these sorts of logs get posted in reports A LOT, only for the person on the forums to drop half their backstory. "Oh I'm a methhead fiending for meth he's not had some in so long he's going through withdrawal he's not thinking straight he just grabbed his gun and went psycho on this person for the five grand."

Well that's great, that's an incredibly valid reason to have that happen, it's a great way to take your character, it gives something within your social circle to do, to work on, to interact with. But how the fuck is anyone outside your group of IC or OOC friends going to know that if you make absoloutely no indication to it in your RP at the time?