Do you think criminals are way too open about their criminal activity?

[Mahitto]

100%. It gets ridiculous at times, too. I was role-playing around South Central yesterday and got approached by four people, on bikes, in cars etc., offering me drugs. Even a guy in a Blista shouting at me that he can sell me weed and cocaine. They're the exception, though, not the norm, but it's definitely a problem.

[caballero]

7 hours ago, liq said:

Realism IS indeed fun. It's when an other player's idea or sense of realism clashes with your own. It becomes an issue when some people can't have cake at all.

 

What I've seen helps is to buy in to people's stories if they're marginally researched and competent role-players. For as long as it's sensical, give in to the notorious gangbanger, rumored mob enforcer, tenured cop, whatever. It helps tap in and connect with others. What currently happens is people hold each other to different standards and no one's willing to cut the other part some slack. It usually has to start with you — buy in more to people's stories and they'll do the same. It helps immersion, better portrayal and good role-play. Bottom line, don't treat every Italian character as if they're in the mob, every Black character as if they bang, etc, unless that's the story they're selling. And if they do, then buy in to it.

Exactly. 

 

The real issue is that this affects how characters interact with eachother and social relationships' progression overall. 

[Vash Baldeus]

11 hours ago, Ink said:

Criminals on GTA:W are rarely subtle. It's so glaringly obvious which characters are criminals that it's really difficult to portray any sort of suspension of disbelief with your character. As a player of a legitimate entrepreneur, I really try to realistically have my character treat criminals as "just people" but it's so common to bump into criminals ICly and so many of them are so cliche and obvious about it that it's hard to portray that my character would not recognize it.

 

More than half the organized crime characters on this server are outrageously stereotypical and it's usually pretty clear what movie the player of those characters is trying to copy. Oh, there's your Goodfellas/Sopranos wannabes! Oh, look at The Departed cosplay! Here come the Brigada/Eastern Promises dudes! Seeing criminal characters that are believably human is a rare opportunity by the few, select talented roleplayers which make this hobby and this community worth the time.

 

It's also really common that whenever I try to roleplay legitimate business with people RPing criminal characters, they reveal that they're incapable of any roleplay but crime. Most real life organized criminals, especially in the USA, tend to be legal personas first and foremost and criminals second--especially the higher up the chain of command you go. The percentage of RPs where I've tried to engage in realistic business RP with criminal factions only for them to turn around and start chewing the scenery with incredibly cliche and unrealistic extortions or other such scams is almost 100%. 

 

#notallcriminalRPers, #butdefinitelymost

Sums it up quite nice.

 

[Koko]

This is honestly just endemic to all RP mediums. If you RPed in any sort of fantasy setting, you will have likely been able to point out in any given room who was RPing an "Assassin/Rogue" trope by just walking inside: black hood, dark clothing, daggers, brooding in a corner, and they'll likely share in a second (while trying to sound "Hollywood Vague") that they kill people for money. Now, in actuality, a competent Assassin would look exactly like you or me, and you would never notice they were there.

 

... but of course, this is a medium for escapism and fantasy. It's boring for most players to select a concept and to not be able to signal it to others; to just look like a normal guy. If you are a mobster, you want to present as such, and you want to be recognized as such. It takes a lot of restraint to be discreet, even if in my humble opinion in the long term it pays tremendously in terms of the RP quality it generates, and the possibilities of levels of depth and involvement with different characters. It's always more interesting to me to present as a normal everyday guy as a criminal, to then slowly let the mask slip as people get closer and closer to you, and to see what that revelation does to a relationship.

 

Gang RPers suffer from this, again, when most of their RP happens to boil down to generating conflict of some kind. It ends up feeling like an OOC deal. People being bored and deciding that all of their portrayal boils down to just pressing people, starting brawls and eventually shootouts, while driving around like the Uber Eats of drugs.

[Kadyus]

Yes

[caballero]

1 hour ago, Koko said:

This is honestly just endemic to all RP mediums. If you RPed in any sort of fantasy setting, you will have likely been able to point out in any given room who was RPing an "Assassin/Rogue" trope by just walking inside: black hood, dark clothing, daggers, brooding in a corner, and they'll likely share in a second (while trying to sound "Hollywood Vague") that they kill people for money. Now, in actuality, a competent Assassin would look exactly like you or me, and you would never notice they were there.

 

... but of course, this is a medium for escapism and fantasy. It's boring for most players to select a concept and to not be able to signal it to others; to just look like a normal guy. If you are a mobster, you want to present as such, and you want to be recognized as such. It takes a lot of restraint to be discreet, even if in my humble opinion in the long term it pays tremendously in terms of the RP quality it generates, and the possibilities of levels of depth and involvement with different characters. It's always more interesting to me to present as a normal everyday guy as a criminal, to then slowly let the mask slip as people get closer and closer to you, and to see what that revelation does to a relationship.

 

Gang RPers suffer from this, again, when most of their RP happens to boil down to generating conflict of some kind. It ends up feeling like an OOC deal. People being bored and deciding that all of their portrayal boils down to just pressing people, starting brawls and eventually shootouts, while driving around like the Uber Eats of drugs.

Yep. It seems acceptable and I suppose it comes down to however the player wishes to portray it. 

 

Edit: I do believe that keeping it on the low when meeting someone new can also produce a lot of roleplay in the future with said person, and it'd just evolve from there, I think it'd be a beautiful character progression. But as I've said, it depends on the person who's portraying the character. 

Edited October 25, 2021 by Santanaa

[Topinambour]

2 hours ago, Koko said:

It takes a lot of restraint to be discreet, even if in my humble opinion in the long term it pays tremendously in terms of the RP quality it generates, and the possibilities of levels of depth and involvement with different characters.

  

14 hours ago, DLimit said:

My last character? People literally OOCly PM'd me like "No way! I thought he was a chef!" when the man was laundering kilos worth of cocaine money. 99% of the people, ICly, saw him as just "A Jamaican Rasta-mon that ran a restaurant". They weren't aware of his operations. My new character? Everybody knows that he's a criminal simply because he's a gang-banger. All relative to the character and situation.

 

Those two kinda hit it on the head, that said...

Kinda like @DLimit I had a rather low-key illegal char. While most people knew she smoked weed, and had a couple dubious friends, the few who saw her interrogation room and realized what her kill tally was were like "holy fucking shit, I thought she was just a funny lesbian mallrat". And like @Koko said it's really rewarding, BUT...

 

It can be super, super difficult to start your character. In most situations, openly signaling you're an illegal archetype makes it rather easy to join any illegal faction. However, if you're passing as a dumb funny mallrat lesbo who smokes weed, most criminal factions will not take you seriously at all - which is fine, it makes TOTAL sense! But it also means it will take a VERY long time to gain their trust and start going into "serious" illegal RP.

 

A lot longer than it would, for someone who's wearing classic gang colors / mafiosi suits + italian name / etc. And not everyone is willing to spend 6+ months doing research and relationship building RP, just in order to *start* doing some fun illegal shit. Using an archetype means you can create a char, and start doing illegal RP after a week. Being more discreet and lowkey is rewarding, but you need to be in the for long run 😕 With the risk of a random CK throwing all your efforts to the trash, before you can even begin being involved in the illegal scene.

While I don't mind at all, I can get why a lot of people wouldn't be fans of the idea. 

[Taina]

9 hours ago, i dont wanna od in LA said:

Ppl brag about committing crimes all the time, nothing out of ordinary here. 

 

Mostly jokes but there were enough actual confessions in this thread 😂

 

And since gang characters have been mentioned, it's not hard to come across RL gang members hinting at their crimes (or even flaunting them) on social media so it isn't farfetched to see some gang rp'ers being open about their crimes. Dumb? Yes. But not unrealistic, imo.  

 

I think it only seems like a problem because too many people do it, which just points to a lack of creativity in RP when nearly every character is doing the same exact thing. But that's not exactly a problem that's exclusive to gang rp'ers. We can say the same for nearly every category of RP on the server.

Edited October 25, 2021 by Taina

[peasoup]

1 hour ago, Topinambour said:

It can be super, super difficult to start your character. In most situations, openly signaling you're an illegal archetype makes it rather easy to join any illegal faction. However, if you're passing as a dumb funny mallrat lesbo who smokes weed, most criminal factions will not take you seriously at all - which is fine, it makes TOTAL sense! But it also means it will take a VERY long time to gain their trust and start going into "serious" illegal RP.

 

A lot longer than it would, for someone who's wearing classic gang colors / mafiosi suits + italian name / etc. And not everyone is willing to spend 6+ months doing research and relationship building RP, just in order to *start* doing some fun illegal shit. Using an archetype means you can create a char, and start doing illegal RP after a week.

 

This is pretty much it. The alternative is metagaming, which, tbh, a lot of people do. I see namechanged characters, a couple of days old, already dealing drugs to their former faction members, or to the same people they had been in business with before, and so on. They know who the criminals are, so they can start immediately talking crime, and they often know the people OOC, so they get IC trust almost immediately. It is what it is. Try something different or outside of the OOC buddy network and it's a hard road ahead.

[Callum]

I roleplay a civillian taxi driver, Abdul Ghailani. The amount of people that get in the car and try and sell me cocaine is unbelievable.

 

I've had several people openly talk about LSPD raiding their crew, houses and catching other members with "bricks" on their person, whether it's bullshit and they want to seem cool, I don't know. But it's a problem. Do I get CK'd if I 911 that, because I'm disregarding my life against potentially a hard earned criminal? (that actively boasts about making a fortune)

 

tl;dr. idiots that cant roleplay and forcing conversation.