How does your character explain the weird stuff...

That happens in game. As your character, not as player. By weird stuff I mean lag, rubber banding, game bugs, DCing, extra.
To prime the pump sort of, I'll give you all examples of what I mean.

Dcing during a task force. We all had this happen to us. We come back and in chat say "sorry I DCed", but what if you came back, and said in character, "Stupid Ouroboros meddlers, yanked me right out of time to do a dumb mission that any one else could do. And then they miss the target time when sending me back...arggg. Oh...wait you all are cleared to know about Ouroboros, right??"

Ok, folks have at it. I hope that you can come up with some good stuff.

Wizards did it.

Azathoth was stirring in his sleep.

In character phone call tends to cover most things.

What, you think that a contact's telephone only works one way?

I have one character who habitually pulls out a book while waiting for the rest of the team to arrive at the mission. She loses track of time while reading sometimes.

Full out disconnects I tend not to try and explain IC. If I had to, I'd probably go with the unexplained blackout. "Woah...what happened?"

Virtuites often refer to Rikti L.A.G. Technology.

I don't tend to bother any more so than I try to explain why I have to log into the game to play, or why I'm the same person controlling all these different characters. Or why my characters don't have fingers. Or why my characters are just 2D images on a 2D plane mimicking 3D perspective.

Certain things are subject to concept and roleplay, things agreed to be an accepted part of the world. Certain things simply aren't, as they're artefacts of the underlying technology used to run the world. Just like movie characters won't try to explain the film grain quality or why they gained weight between shots, so my characters aren't even aware of the fact that disconnects happen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

..i explain them by saying...there wierd...laugh it off

I have never tried to explain it away...but I also do not role play a whole lot...most of my role play is done through the background bio.....weird I know...

if my character had to explain lag, rubberbanding he'd blame it all on the hootch he drinks.
rubberbanding? what, ya never seen a flier stagger in mid air before?
DCing? he passed out drunk, and if he should reconnect then he popped right back up (i've seen the odd drunk do that) and ready to party. and if he doesnt reconnect, well then he's passed out cold.

wow. thanks for the replies so far. though i am surprised that no one came back with the standard reply. you all know the one. all together now... "It's a..."

in Anarchy Online RP its known as losing dimension (or LDing)

As someone who rubberbands and disconnects quite frequently IRL, I don't really need to explain it as anything out of the

"I"M DEAD! Do you think it's easy moving a rotting corps of a body. So sometimes I black out and stand there like a... well a corps!" (AFK)

"I didn't eat anyone did I? I kind of lost touch with what I was doing" (Map server)

Okay I can't think of anything else for Rotten

My current domi is a robot called RuntimeException.

So handwaving such weirdness is pretty easy

I ususally blame Portal Corp. for opening too many cross dimensional rifts without caring about any side effects this may be causing.. invisible temporal storms swirling about that cause a variety of random effects.

I have a character planned that MAKES things like that happen. He's a six-dimensional horror that eats time.

I don't bother to explain that sort of thing, but I'm not really a roleplayer.

However, I can tell you that my characters use server downtime to use the restrooms. Less frequent downtimes have been a problem for some of them...

Let's see...

On my old machine, whenever I got near a large group of other players and my system starting to lag to a crawl, I would call it "a gravity well due to an exceptional power influx" or some similar rubbish.

For times of environmentally-induced lag (because I can't blame my machine anymore), I would call it simple things like tripping, muscle twitches, gun jams or some kind of mystical interference.

For things like the server events yesterday and the day before, I would say "The Gamester did it."

Magical unicorns on an adventure to Candy Mountain ...

Shun the unbeliever! Shhhhuuuunnn!!!!!

There's actually a great deal to this game that I gloss over in character. Bugs and lag would go right in that same file.