"Balthie" Wrote:Nanovelich, I'm not quite sure who you are, nor will I be speaking my mind about the prospect of wipes. But I will say this.
It's rare to see such a comprehensive and well written rebuttal, and I appreciate it. You're fine with the formatting, mate.
I've been informed of who you are whilst typing this post, and I'd like to extend my thanks. You work has been invaluable to me perhaps hundreds of times in the calc.
Thank you, and you are welcome. Both of those mean a lot to me.
I'm going to make this post short, because I want to point something out that was mentioned earlier that I did not address in my first post. I'm not fully committed to this idea that you need someone's consent to kill their character. I do believe there should be a consent to have your character killed off, but allow me express exactly what I mean by this.
If you involve yourself in a situation where your character is likely to die, that's giving consent. I say this because I've been on plenty of servers with consent rules and often saw the same problem. People would play overly meddling protagonist-like characters but would cry 'no consent' at the first sign of trouble.
If you do this,
stop it.
I want to see more villians, like Sawrock and Snake have said. Yes, wholeheartedly, but I don't want to see the villain stick handed to complete tools through a wipe system. I want to see more clever, politically-motivated characters who are going to pressure people to act not because they're running around murder-raping everything in sight but because they're going to make life completely unbearable. Villains who are in it for the long-game, not the weekend thrill.
Someone who's going to seize Cellsvich by the balls and force anyone walking out of the pawn shop to pay a heavy 'adventurer tax' and possibly seize any assets they might have wanted to keep. Not run around murdering people in B.D.P.'s to just steal their gear. It's a stretch of an example, but I hope you get the point.
That's why I hold the need for consent with death in roleplaying as this: consent is putting yourself in the situation.
If you're a bystander to something going on, whether it's some ruffian abusing another individual or the sudden outbreak of necromancy, you should have the opportunity to escape with your life. In the former case, you should probably be able to keep off to the side and not have to suffer being shot just for being around, though if it was meant to be discrete, I'd understand the villain's motive. In the latter, sticking around is giving your consent.
Not everyone wants to put their character's life on the line, so I understand the desire for consent-requirements, but these shouldn't extend too far. I myself like to play non-fighters, and it would be really annoying to me to have them killed off for being in the wrong place at the wrong time without there being a very solid reason behind it. However, for my characters who do fight, I accept that they might just die when they step into a situation that is either escalating or has already escalated too far.
You should too.
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I'm guilty though of something.
"Balthie" Wrote:Perhaps if we bite the bullet and risk looking like a dick every now and then, simply saying "hey dude, that's a little immersion breaking," and having a few kind words with someone who does it might make some progress at the very least.
I'll state this here, because I've seen so many cases of it since coming back to SL2 go unquestioned by the rest of the community that I was at odds with myself for even holding comment. Many of you might dislike Soapy coming out with things like the PSA: Knowledge, and I prefer to keep from lecturing anyone on what they should or should not be doing. However, I approve of the message Soapy put there, and I feel that this point needs to be vocalized:
Your playby, the image you use for your character, should have nothing to do with your character.
Plenty of us are aware of this fact, but apparently, this runs horribly rampant on SL2. Of everything I've seen and tolerated, this is probably the most revolting of my self. It's not that these things happen. I'm not surprised. It's just how much they happen, and how little anyone seems to advise people even through the gentlest of means. I could name names, but I don't have anything against these people. I would prefer they learn and improve, because that's what I did long ago, and I'm sure plenty of us have committed similar misdeeds in the past.
Dropping the occasional reference, hidden under plenty of in character context? That's fine.
Using music from the source material of your playby?
Stop it.
Quoting something from anywhere in the source material of your playby?
Please, stop it.
You're allowed to do whatever you want with what's in your playby's appearance that you can't work around. Don't roleplay things that your playby has stuck to their person verbatim. I had a friend in the past who used Ene from Kagerou Project, and they explained the marks on her face as Glykin scales. This kind of stuff is fine. If it's an item, finding a way to incorporate it into the roleplaying environment is fully understandable.
Don't use Shinobu from Bakemonogatari, roleplay her as a vampire, and have a bike helmet that is a bike helmet for no good IC reason. This is an arbitrary example I made up from stuff I found in my collection of playby material. If someone's used Shinobu, I've not seen it, and this example is not about you.
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As a bit of an aside, let me say this as well. Plenty of people do this, even Snake, who knows II bare him no ill will.
Using 'related' playbys is kind of unsettling.
When it comes to something like Touhou, running into another Touhou is just, "Well, what did you expect?"
When I see people, using playbys from the same source material and having history with each other, implying that either:
A) They made those characters together and agreed to this 'unison' of playby usage.
B) The second person saw what the first was using and said, "I want to do that too!"
it just really, really throws me off. The reason is that it implies a lack of effort. It implies to me that you just decided to replicate the relationship between those playbys and the characters of those playbys as an easy way to drop characters.
I don't investigate deeply into the cases I see, so I can't say just how many people are simply using related playbys and how many are actually doing carbon copy work. If you do the former, that's whatever. You're fine. If you're doing the latter, I really hope you'll learn that this gives you a bad impression on more experienced people.
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And yes, I know someone is going to say,
"This seems preachy, Nano."
The problem is, this is a public game. We have plenty of fresh roleplayers who haven't actually learned this yet, as common sense as it might sound to plenty of us.
And worse, some of them have not been taught this lesson and have become very good at the trade without realizing the problems they've not addressed.
Again, this is nothing against any specific person. I've seen people who show varying levels of promise do this, some who looked so promising I was actually disturbed to see them doing it.
As someone else in this community told me while I was having my initial, private rant about it, "We all have that phase."
So let me say in closing,
I'm not trying to berate anyone for doing so, even the more experienced roleplayers who continue to do it.
I just wanted to point it out, say it's a problem, and hope that you will learn from this and continue to grow and improve as a roleplayer. After thirteen or more years at this, I've come to hold the idea that fun comes first after seeing how much years of minding quality control ruined the experience for me. I've found no perfect answer to how to balance fun and quality in a way that satisfies even a closed circle, let alone an open community.
I wouldn't ask you to do the same, but find the balance that works best for you and makes you the most presentable roleplayer you can be without sacrificing your own enjoyment.
...
Shit, I didn't keep this post short.