Harrow

I'm Chuck here's a few things you might need to know about me....

I'm generally lazy and I don't post nearly as much as i used to or perhaps as much as I do now so don't take this the completely wrong way because it could be a situation of Pot Kettle.

Basically... what I want to know is, when did this whole fad of (*insert OOC commet here*) become an acceptable part of posting in a thread. I can't remember the last time I saw a thread without something like this happening. Surely if you can't make a point in character and in RP without having to explain what's going on via an OOC brackets comment then you've fucked up and should reword the point. People aren't idiots, so why does it happen?

Without intending to pick on anyone, example of it is this:

"At least for once he admitted he hasn't a clue whats going on. Though funnily, that makes me feel one of his alter ego's (Dupe accounts) placed the hits and he wants to try and create unrest where none exists."

Worse than that, it also meant an Admin/Developer guy also posted OOS making the nonsensical thread even worse. Now this was a Kuku thread and as such can be disregarded as 90% bollocks anyway but there's still no need for the OOC coments...

Why does it happen, and more importantly, why do cleaners/Admin/Street gurus allow it to happen? I know we've all gotten lazy in our old age and so the RP force isn't as strong as it once was, but is that an excuse for this?

Have my babies?

Men have no wombs!

(Men can't have babies) c what i did thar

I think an example would be the Comms menu.

If you hover on Streets and Business District you'll see the difference on both, even if both are meant to be In Character and role-played, only one of them says that RP is "required" and it's not the Streets. But with the vision/info coming into play, I guess maybe ruining someone's vision stats for a line of OOC by deleting their post isn't something the staff wants? I don't know, all I know is a lot has changed in the past 4 years, especially when it comes to the role-playing aspect of the game.

I think in the street's people need to figure out a way in saying what they need to in character if they want to say it.

Those (OOC) remarks simply lead to others doing the same or worst in their replies and future posters they may make and leads down the road to vanishing what little bit of role play is left. We have like 6 other forums they can use if they want to not role play properly but still express their opinions and differences.

Role play is not flowery descriptions. Role play is embodying your character.

Is it really so terrible that for some difficult things to describe that people use brackets to make sure their actual meaning isn't lost within their attempt at making an explanation that might come out of their character's mouth? I don't think it is.

Seems more like you're complaining just for the sake of complaining with this.

Is it really terrible for people not to RP on a RP game? Yes. Yes it is.

People are RPing all around it. They add brackets in to clarify their meaning to make sure that it is not lost amongst their attempt at explaining a concept that is completely impossible for our characters to logically explain. Oh, the horror.

I was guilty of posting an entire OOC paragraph within quotes in the Streets recently, so I suppose I should weigh in on this one.

I'm quite an avid (in comparison to some of the userbase) poster in the business district, and to be honest I really can't abide by 'bad RP' there. There's literally zero reason for any posts to contain even a couple of words within the dreaded OOC brackets. The BD can essentially operate entirely independent of the game's politics, in essence it's a purely descriptive forum. I even get quite frustrated when people post in the business district mentioning things that are anachronistic to the time frame we're meant to be playing in.

In the streets though, things are always much more difficult and the line is somewhat blurred. The vast majority of posts and threads in the Streets are going to be directly related to in game events. Sometimes, it's just impossible to shoehorn something fundamentally OOC into an IC phrasing with it making any sense. An example is describing money from credit purchases etc as something like 'money from the old country' - it's just quite cumbersome considering that for absolutely years, the IC way of referring to the real life mafia we try to emulate is by calling it 'the old country'. You might have 10  different posters using 10 different phrases to describe the same thing - it can get very confusing to follow.

I'm not saying that means we shouldn't make the effort to try, but sometimes a quick segue into bracketed OOC text to actually outline something is pretty helpful, and I don't see it as all that big of a problem. Cracking quote from Donbot in fairness:

Role play is not flowery descriptions. Role play is embodying your character.

 

This is where it's at. If you don't act like a Mobster with your actual actions in the game, no amount of clever euphemisms and italicised text is going to make a blind bit of difference.