There is no reason why Seriphyn isn't a big Federal hero loved by everyone, but the RP capsuleers will refuse to believe this IC because the concept offends them! ... while disliked by a wide plefora of capsuleers, I do feel he is grudingly respected.
To move from the specific to the general, I feel that there's a certain amount of collaboration and co-operation required by all RP that isn't strictly supported by game mechanics. For example, while if you blow up my ship, you
blew up my ship, my assertion that Cia is about 5'5" tall is exactly that: an assertion.
When it comes to how we present our characters in RP situations that presume face-to-face contact - like bars -we all seem to largely agree to accept how another player indicates their character appears. There's no
reason why I have to have Cia respond to Verone as if he's exceptionally tall, but the player tells me he is, and going against that would be, in my opinion, just plain rude.
There's another aspect to non-game-mechanic RP, though, where things get more complicated and harder to negotiate, and that's our character's non-game backgrounds and the way they're perceived by others. In my own case, I have RPed that Cia comes from an important family in the smallish city on the insignificant world where she grew up. As far as I know, no-one else RPs that their character comes from Debreth on Annelle XI, so the world I've created there doesn't impact on anyone else. Nonetheless, I can't force anyone to accept that this
is Cia's background.
The wider you spread your character's background influence, the more you're impacting and to a degree
imposing on other players to adapt their RP to accommodate yours. If I create a character who, pre-pod career, was a 'famous holo-actress of Cluster-wide renown' then I am, in effect, making an OOC request or even demand to every other RPer in the game: if their character has even the slightest exposure to the entertainment industry anywhere in the Cluster, I am
telling them that they have heard of my character.
That's quite different to, say, (to use Verone as an example again, sorry Verone!) Verone IC acting like a big pirate lord who people ought to know about: Verone is, IG, through game mechanics, a big pirate lord who people ought to know about. It's also different from the one-day-old Velator pilot carrying on like the Dread Pirate Roberts - those claims can be proved or disproved in the game, through game actions.
It's when we get to things that can't be proved or disproved by other players that we have to be especially careful that our own RP doesn't impinge on others' freedoms to RP their own characters. No one could prove or disprove that Cia's mother was the mistress of Jaques Roden and on the cover of every holo-magazine like the Brangelina of Eve, but if I make such an assertion I am offering other players a very stark choice: validate my RP by adapting yours, or contradict my RP.
The problem with that is, it brings my RP into both IC and OOC conflict with people who just don't want to play that particular story. If I'm standing there in my alt-skin saying "I am cluster-wide famous actress" and they're saying "I never heard of you" I have in effect godmodded their character to be ignorant.
Much better, in my opinion, to give people an easy in and an easy out: make your backstory local, and contained. Then if they want to be part of your character building, their character can say 'Oh, right, I heard of you, that holomovie you starred in never got the wide release it deserved, in my opinion' (to go back to the holostar example) or else 'Hmm, can't say the name rings a bell, of course, I never really got into Jin-Mei martial arts opera flicks'.
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Topic: Egomaniacs, A-holes and Mary Sues (Read 8981 times)