Hints, Tips and Tricks for New Roleplayers!

There's the daily GG calendar of what conversation you expect, but you'll have to get that off Soaring Horizon's player.

(This was a joke brought to you by those who had a surreal evening last night)

Oh, and there should be an external link to this because it should be mandatory reading. (Thanks to Shadowe for finding it.)

I always figured names and Super Groups, security level, and so on always appeared over a player's head or were easily accessible, for a few reasons.

1. Everyone who fights crime in the city is registered and has to follow the same laws as police officers. In the milieu, if you are not registered, you cannot use the hospital teleporters! Same with the Rogue Isles, but there it's Arachnos that has a file on you, since all those teleporters are owned and controlled by Arachnos. In addition, we know for a fact that they can detect power use almost anywhere in the city and suppress powers in specially prepared rooms. Since everyone is registered (everyone who is under the citizen crime fighting act, anyway), it means they have a unique name in the database. They may have registered under a secondary identity or whatever, but if you're not registered with the act, you can't get into half the places heroes go, and Arachnos appears to be the same way.

2. The Police Radio appears to use a holographic/augmented reality display. New heroes can quickly find their way around the city with a map, and information on enemies is quickly and easily available to you when you encounter them. Paragon is the City of Tomorrow, and it's full of supergeniuses. I've assumed that the HUD interface and the tagged names on everyone were the wireless network in the city calling to the database of registered heroes, so the name over their head is whatever it is they filled in on the Citizen Crime Fighting Act sheet.

3. Following this, I figure most people have RFID tags in their clothes (Citizen Crime Fighters have their ID card that grants them clearance, which probably also has an RFID on it (making it easy to find if you lose it!)), that's how you can see the names of citizens, rapidly find contacts, and assess the limits of how much power you're allowed to use inside city limits and how much lenience they're willing to grant you (i.e., your security level). This means that in character, you can greet someone by their heroin' name, check your mission details, your map waypoints, and just about anything else (in fact, this looks like the way computing technology is going in real life, so it's not too far a stretch to have it in the wacky techno-topia future land that is Paragon). Which means that when you sign up under the act, you get a set of contacts or goggles or glasses slips that let you see the AR objects.

It may be a bit complicated, but that's why I assume everything I do is in character, even "knowing" someone's registered name before I talk to them.

That's fair enough, but the tips written up in the first post apply to the general consensu of EU roleplay. It is interesting what you say about your interpretation of IC. We tend to ignore the NPC civilian names, a lot of us don't take everything our character (as in, the game character) does as IC. (So Zortel, a scientific genius who doesn't really know that much about magic, won't be going out to stop magical rituals and decipher things, because there's other heroes who can do that.)

There's also a play safe mentality. Some of us stick tags in our profiles saying to contact us via PM for if you have x enhanced type of sense, or can detect y. Or even to say if we're famous, have a secret identity or so forth.

Secret identities are less common in the Unionverse, due to the difficulties with keeping them secret, but they do exist.

The hospital teleporters also sometimes tend to be played with, because frankly, what's the point of characters heroing without risk of injury? "You defeated me, but I'll be back, just as soon as I've teleported to hospital and been rejuvenated!"

Cindersnap got a thrashing and was off heroing for weeks as he recovered in his Super Group's medical bay. Crimson Archer lost an eye to an acid attack and never got it back. Redsight didn't even make it to hospital and died, along with various other heroes in the Unionverse.

As a rule, EU RP'ers tend to disregard some of the rules and game mechanics in the name of realism, believabilty, fun and concept.

While I (and a lot of other players) sympathise with you and your encounters with all the "I are the bomb" characters that can do all, be all and have too many concepts to make sense.

But, in stating that you know all about them that you can find out about them is... well, almost as bad
Disrespecting their choice to be dark and mysterious and unknown. You're basically saying "My ability at knowing things is greater than your ability at keeping them unknown".
Which is godmoding.

Much better is the IC reaction that some characters in the EU have had:
"An other god? Welcome, what are you god of? ... riiight, how many gods are there for that? I swear you're the fifth one I've met this year. And what's with all the gods on earth, is rent that high in heaven?"

Basically, if a character IC acts like an oddball, you're well justified to have your character think and act like that oddball is ripe for the loonybin.

As Ghostie says - when someone attempts to RP an insanely stupid character concept, the best defense is ridicule.

When it comes to "what people can find out about my characters", my personal recourse is to point them at the Handbook of the Union Universe to look me up - the character data on the right hand side is all in-game publicly available information, and should be more than enough for anyone to go by, in addition to the stuff in the bio.

But the general rule is simple: Ask. If it's not in the bio, don't make assumptions. Asking usually gets decent results. If someone new comes up to my main and sends me a /tell asking if they are likely to recognise him, my response is typically something along the lines of "in these (civilian) clothes, he's pretty famous in the scientific and engineering communities, but not so much outside that and the hero community - given that, I'll let you decide". RP is collaborative storytelling, and I try to be accommodating - on the other hand, I do have one character who would be very distressed if anyone knew more about him than he's told anyone. Admitedly, given that he lied on his registration about, well, pretty much everything, that's not really a surprise.

Every time my main comes across yet another god, or demon, or universal architect, or any other ultimately powered being; she treats them as just another fruit, ripe for the picking.

Zortel... That is some really good stuff, and I think very helpful for those who have never played any type of a role-playing game.

Pen & Paper RPGs are slightly different of course, and as a long time RPGer since 1978, I think that your basics here will show others how to adapt to the new environment of online RPGs.

Thank you for your solid examples, and helpful hints.

I for one appreciate you taking the time.

Well Done Zortel !! I would only add that it is delightful to RP while running missions and TFs as well. You need to have a strong character picture and background in your mind ( and in your bio) and stay consistent and true to that character. It helps if you have picked a character which many people may have some knowledge of and then simply (it isn't simple to do tho) react to everyone as that character during missions between missions etc. For Example; you pick Lucky Skyrunner as your character and you are from a galaxy far far away. Most people have an idea about that character and you can become that character in the game. Will it be different than another famous character with a similar name, sure but that is ok just don't cross the line into copyright infringement =) But you now have a character everyone can relate to whether you are in a PUG or a SG team or an AE team or a RP team. Be aware that there will be people who want to know your real ID and what gender and age you are but usually reply in character and they give up in short order (Why yes I am Yogurt and900 of your years I be) It does not detract from playing the game at all and if you manage to team up with some one who gets what you are doing and plays along it can add great fun and intrigue to the game. I have several characters I have done this with. A word of caution tho, try to be something that is fairly well known or is similar to a well known figure it gives people a good starting point. If you truly want to create a new character that isn't similar to some other well known character it is best done in with other RPers.

Too much getting obsessed with details in this thread.. roleplay should be like dancing, not American Football. It's about the inspiration, the imagery, the poetry of matching steps with someone for a few passages, then moving on. It's not about rules, attempting to bully or over-ride each other, or half hour time-outs while people argue over Lore in local chat with flurries of (( ))

Setting out hard and fast rules like 'you can't possibly know about that' is a way of breaking the spell. Wherever possible, if you *can* justify something another player has done, you should try and do so. If it's a challenge - isn't overcoming challenges a sort of fun as well? Some of the best stories start when someone does something unexpected and you have to incorporate it, taking the plot into strange territory.

I'm kinda hoping some psychic will try to read one of my character's minds. She's completely insane, and looking too closely in there might well drive the viewer a little crazy as well

Oh god, a zombie thread, aim for the head!

Anyway, yeah, this thread is old. Like really old. We should probably update it but… to be honest, I don’t disagree with much of what was said, although I have to admit, I probably use English colloquialisms rather than American ones, but, as long as they aren’t egregious, I don’t really care.

When it comes to consistent lore, well, that’s just world building really, and sharing the same sandbox with everyone else more than anything. Union has its nice fancy (mostly) consistent universe, and it doesn’t work if people don’t stick to what has already been established. You have one character claiming something or doing that cannot be reconciled with another character. To take an extreme example, I can’t have as part of my background that I blew up Pluto, or am The Destined One, who went to the future and punched LR in the face.

As for working out how to get around when people say “I’m totally invulnerable” or “I’m immune to psychics”, I personally consider it a challenge, and make a sport out of coming up of ways around it. If you have been on URP you may have even witnessed me brainstorming ways of killing allegedly invulnerable characters. Throwing them into the sun usually works.

Unfortunately, and I am generalising here, bad roleplayers tend to blanket no sell attacks more often than good ones.

People can be invulnerable to psychics, or just straight up basically impossible to kill, but really, there should be some kind of explanation for this, something that people can either try and run with to work out a way or countering it, or just something that makes sense as part of the characters. It’s understandable that a dumb robot wouldn’t really be susceptible to mindreading.

For example, one of my characters, Fateweaver Venom, is really rather difficult to kill. Mostly because she has foresight, and then therefore manage to avoid most attacks. Something she can’t dodge or avoid? Or somehow negating her precognitive abilities (tachyons apparently do this). Yeah, she has some armour, but beyond that she’s a squishy human.

Not a zombie thread, a sticky. As such it *should* be up to date, and relevant to the way things are done now, or you should petition to have it un-stickied.

I agree with Nitro's comments with regard to the emote-fight-based player versus player aspect of roleplay, but don't particularly enjoy that sort of RP myself. It's too prone to the sort of problems he describes.

There are a lot of other ways of RPing - emotional/relationship based stuff, shared storytelling, in-character missions or AE arcs, plotlines with an agreed 'gamesmaster', even simple stuff like just showing up in a bar and talking, with no competitiveness involved. New roleplayers (the people addressed by the title of this thread) should be able to explore all these options.