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[Matariki Rain]

Having read the forum descriptions it seems we're oddly short of places for talk about roleplay approaches, so this seems to be the best place to continue this. "Character development" in a general sense, not about specific characters.

In contrast to what many people here seem to be advising, I'd like to state that bleed through is not acceptable. Keeping the IC/OOC division up is not easy, but it does matter. When out of character issues take over, a fun RP discussion turns into a therapy session. It completely spoils the idea. It's not just about your character and your experience, you're affecting the immersion of the people you are playing with. No one is perfect, there is always room for improvement and sometimes bleed through is just too difficult to avoid but heavens forbid it should not be presented as the new standard of role-playing.

Also, taking the setting into account is helpful. It's not just about the costume but how the character is from the inside. New Eden is a dark, harsh universe where nothing comes easily. The unambitious and gullible are exploited and stomped to the ground. Capsuleers are members of its elite, with access to unfathomable resources, capable and guilty of killing thousands without punishment. Can you see them whining about nice tones of voice and friendship, just for the sake of it? All EVE's character types are antagonists, they have attributes which most players would consider repulsive. These attributes help you to keep reality and fiction separated, they give your character depth and realism and it's generally not good for role-playing to leave these aspects out. They are there for a purpose.

Again, what I'm suggesting here is not really directed to Katrina. I'm a big fan of the grey shades she was casting in the latest I-RED thread and I hope we'll see more of that sort in the future.

I disagree on some aspects and would be interested in covering the discussion in another thread.

I was thinking of this myself, and may well join in. Please go to it!

[Esna Pitoojee]

I'd like to start off by saying that it appears to me that people often seem to suggest that there are two positions someone can be in regarding the IC/OOC divide: "My character is a completely seperate entity" and "my character is completely connected to me."

To me, this rings false; like everything else in RP, there are shades of grey between the two extremes, and in those shades is the realm in which the vast majority of us seem to exist.


One rule of thumb I try to hold to in the midst of this murky gray area is that while "negative modifiers" - i.e., "my character is NOT this" - are far more acceptable for the simple fact that there are some things that people may not want in their RP for personal reasons. Positive modifiers - "my character is this" need to be watched more carefully, as if they pile up you can rapidly end up with a Sue-ish character.

[Ghost Hunter]

In contrast to what many people here seem to be advising, I'd like to state that bleed through is not acceptable. Keeping the IC/OOC division up is not easy, but it does matter. When out of character issues take over, a fun RP discussion turns into a therapy session. It completely spoils the idea. It's not just about your character and your experience, you're affecting the immersion of the people you are playing with. No one is perfect, there is always room for improvement and sometimes bleed through is just too difficult to avoid but heavens forbid it should not be presented as the new standard of role-playing.

Also, taking the setting into account is helpful. It's not just about the costume but how the character is from the inside. New Eden is a dark, harsh universe where nothing comes easily. The unambitious and gullible are exploited and stomped to the ground. Capsuleers are members of its elite, with access to unfathomable resources, capable and guilty of killing thousands without punishment. Can you see them whining about nice tones of voice and friendship, just for the sake of it? All EVE's character types are antagonists, they have attributes which most players would consider repulsive. These attributes help you to keep reality and fiction separated, they give your character depth and realism and it's generally not good for role-playing to leave these aspects out. They are there for a purpose.

Again, what I'm suggesting here is not really directed to Katrina. I'm a big fan of the grey shades she was casting in the latest I-RED thread and I hope we'll see more of that sort in the future.

I disagree on some aspects and would be interested in covering the discussion in another thread.

I was thinking of this myself, and may well join in. Please go to it!

Thank you for the thread. I'll detail my points, but I'll leave it open in case Bastian does not want to engage in particular. I also wish to note that Bastian is most likely referring to one type of IC/OOC divide, but I will be using a wide brush over the entire subject.


The IC/OOC division is a very interesting problem in roleplaying as its very nature dictates a mandate that is impossible for humans to reach. Complete separation of our personal feelings and thoughts from that of our character is a nice academic process, but it is practically infeasible. Who we are as people will always bleed into and affect our characters because our characters are ultimately an extension of ourselves.

In my view, it is not acceptable to overtly and significantly allow your personal thoughts and feelings to contaminate your characters. This creates problems many roleplayers are familiar with, as it is no longer artfully created personas that are engaging each other, but the ugly side of our real selves. It is very useful, however, to use your personal thoughts and feelings to inject connections to your characters. It gives you very easy mental paths that you understand and know to use for your character without sacrificing the persona.

I use this method very extensively myself - all my characters are based off aspects of my own thoughts and feelings, created from a singular point. Ghost Hunter is the idealist, heroic self / Zegerth Kelja is the private, emotional thoughts / Integrator Yeliana is the calculating, alienated mind. Using one aspect of myself, I have a very good connection to my characters even if I do not adequately convey their archetypes to others.

With this method in mind, let us look at the IC/OOC divide. In an ideal world, there is no contamination from outside knowledge affecting the presentation and flow of the personas' environment. This is, technically speaking, impossible to achieve - so do we disregard the attempted divide entirely? I think its better to use the divide as a resource, a means of guiding your persona. Use the divide as a filter - remove as much as you can that you do not want in your persona, and use what remains for the persona's purposes.

What you can filter and how easily is often the problem area for a lot of people I notice. It is very easy to filter out real, present world items and things because we can discern they simply do not belong. It becomes increasingly harder from there, sliding upwards until you enter EVE's hyper competitive area. How do you filter knowledge you know will hurt your persona in their world? Jade Constantine provided an example on this subject quite some time ago - one that gave me a lot of thought on the subject. Is it a wrongful disregard of the IC/OOC divide if one uses OOC knowledge ICly to defend their character from an attack they wouldn't have known is coming otherwise? There are two thought strains that differ greatly - bear with me as this may seem like a wall banger.

The first thought : The knee-jerk response is 'yes', but my contemplation on the subject reached an impasse : how do you rightfully deny a person's instinctual response to survive? If the person respects the divide and simply observes as their character suffers the consequences, what will happen when someone disrespects their respect for the divide? What do you do when your respect is being exploited? In competitive environments, you use whatever means are available to you that are not explicitly and implicitly forbidden. EVE is very much a game where little can be considered 'forbidden'. Do you categorize these disrespectful people and no longer apply the divide to them? What happens when you do that for people who consider themselves proper 'roleplayers'? You can discern the failure cascade that might ensue.

The second thought : The knowledge you now possess is impossible to filter - you will, at the least, subconsciously respond to something that will greatly affect your character. The contamination cannot be stopped, so do you take it into your arsenal and use it? If you have your character react appropriately as if the knowledge was IC, you prevent yourself from being exploited. Your persona can use what has happened to further develop itself, even if its origins was not genuinely inside its universe. What happens when those responsible never fully translate IC, and continue on OOC? How do you translate what they are doing as players into your personas universe? Do you distill their inviolate actions (in EVE, direct game play) only or do you include what the player is saying? This can lead to a very unstable, failure cascade prone position.

Both thoughts rely on how much the 'sanctity of roleplaying' is a factor for you as a person. Roleplaying is not the controlled acting of a stage drama or movie, it is the volatile interaction of individuals who do not all follow the same script. There is no director who governs what is and what is not, every one is the leader with no followers. You will have people who are incompatible, you will have methods that cannot translate into each other. Some people use themselves as their character, directly implanting who they are into their persona's world. Some people create entirely artificial personas, unconnected and unrelated to their worldly self. Very much like a school play's audition, you will simply have to cut those not up to the par you are using - and thus, insular RP cliques are created.


To summarize myself, before I break off into tangent : The IC/OOC divide should be used as a filter, allowing us to put thoughts and ideas into our persona's world largely separate from our self. A person should not be held to a fault for allowing parts of themself bleed into their character, but they should be held to a fault with how they use that bleeding. Using myself as an example, Ghost Hunter has displayed extreme shows of emotion he would not have in a perfect world because of the emotion I myself was feeling. I used that bleed through to develop Ghost in unexpected ways, giving me new grounds to explore in his development.

Similarly, I have used complete OOC information and conversation IC simply because it would have put me in a position of being exploited. A critical impasse was reached in my persona's universe - events were occurring that should have not been affecting them at all. Do I sacrifice my enjoyment of the game and roleplaying to follow the sanctity of an unobtainable ideal, or do I adjust myself to deal with this improper invasion of the universe? Correct usage of the filter can make it a fantastic development, or a completely botched play.


[spoiler]fucking hell me and long posts lol[/spoiler]

[Ulphus]

IC/OOC divide is also particularly challenged in Eve, since it supports so well the corp-theft/betrayal aspect, and a lot of that happens at an OOC as well as an IC level. When you're scamming someone into giving your Alt access to their corp hangar, you are, to a largely unavoidable degree, doing so at least partially OOC.

That's Ok. It's part of the game, and Eve would be a very different game without it. But it also means that when I'm deciding whether to trust a character with access to my corp and corp-hangar, there's two evaluations going on.
1) can my character trust your character not to rip the corp off/ give the enemy intel/ awox a fleet.
2) can I as a player trust you as a player not to rip the corp off/ give the enemy intel/ awox a fleet.

In game assets have value, in that they represent hours of effort by people, but the biggest danger to a corp is morale. I've seen a corp implode because someone was stealing stuff without it being easily traced (ships deployed to a forward operating POS). The recriminations and paranoia made the various players stop trusting each other enough to work together, and the corp died.

Some people have said in my hearing that if people do a good job of RPing the betrayal, then they accept the possibility. The problem seems to me to be threefold:
1) the game does not give you the ability to do the things that the world should allow that would protect you somewhat. You can't pay some guy to sit there on the POS and watch who takes a ship. Players are dependent on a very low bandwidth system for getting a feel for the personality of the other character, and it is very difficult to strike a balance between providing enough hints that a betrayal is coming without instantly raising warning flags.
2) the problem of bad acting/limited bandwidth. If a player is acting in a way you think counts as hugely suspicious, you have to decide whether the player is a good actor playing someone acting suspicious, or a bad actor trying to play someone trustworthy. If they're trying to play a character who is untrustworthy but the character is trying to pretend to be trustworthy, then the problems become compounded.
3) There are people out there who are happy to lie OOC in order to make infiltrations more likely to succeed, and once successful, happy to walk away with as much loot as they can get their hands on, and/or do as much damage as they can. They're not there to tell a story that the other players enjoy, so you can't rely on their respecting of IC/OOC divide, or any other convention of RP to sort out misunderstandings so that both parties go away thinking the RP was fun, even if their character had a bad time.

I think the IC/OOC divide is hard enough to handle around a table where everyone is basically there to play together, and cares about whether the rest of the players are still going to talk to them next week. In Eve, where some people's game is all about ripping other people off, sticking strictly to that divide can leave you horribly exposed. When a two week old character shows up in your public channel interested in joining the corp, there's no easy way to tell if the player is a Roleplayer wanting to start an alt in your faction because they think it would be fun, or a corp thief wanting to slide an alt into your corp to rip them off.

This does, and should, limit the extent to which people respect the IC/OOC divide, and also the extent that you should give an unknown character the benefit of the doubt.

(There's another post out there somewhere about how the corps which base their membership off an out-of-game community have many fewer problems with in game betrayal, because reputation is associated with your OOG identity, and recycling your character doesn't wipe your transgressions against the community, but I'm not sure it's interesting enough to bother writing)

[Bastian Valoron]

The academic question about the possibility of a true IC/OOC divide is largely a strawman. Everyone can come up with examples of characters they just cannot play. We have to choose something we are familiar with, at least on some level. Everyone has to accept the limitations they have as players. There's nothing wrong with using aspects of your own personality in this fashion and it's hard to do it in any other way. Personally I don't even consider it as a breach of IC/OOC divide even though technically it might be considered as such.

In the following examples, it's not clear that the breach of IC/OOC divide cannot be avoided:
-Icon of Evil is a nice person out-of-character - he is not perceived as suspicious in-character, despite his attributes.
-Icon of Evil is an evil person in-character - the player becomes a persona non grata out-of-character, for no other reason.
-During an in-character discussion, it becomes apparent that the player is now defending his own real-life stance.
-Character is clearly minmaxing game-play options, claiming otherwise.

In a thread where it was asked what to do to avoid bleed through, there seemed to be a correlation between the people who admitted suffering from bleed though themselves and who said it's a good idea to start building the character around yourself.

By building the character around oneself I understand things like
-Identical religious/political views
-Basically the same moral philosophy
-Same occupation
-Belonging to the same minorities
-Same personal hot topics

If you have even a slightest idea bleed through is going to be an issue, it doesn't seem to be a great idea to go there.

The discussion concerning OOC knowledge is irrelevant to the point I have tried to make above. When that kind of circumstance has presented itself to me, I have usually chosen to stay in character. For role-playing purposes, it shouldn't really matter whether you win or lose.

[Valdezi]

This is an interesting dilemma and Bastian knows that I have been in the middle of a interesting IC/OOC situation of late. Mammal has been a member of the FCO which recently came into some verbal conflict with I-RED, the alliance to which my other character, Valdezi, belongs.

Now, I generally reconcile these two characters' connection and knowledge of each others' doing by having them be good friends OOC. They grew up together while Mammal's father was diplomatically posted in the Khanid Kingdom. Since they both became Capsuleers, they have spent a great deal of time in the same corporations. I don't see this as a problem, and I don't have to worry too much about separating OOC knowledge between the two characters.

However there are diplomatic machinations on each side that both characters are intimately involved in, particularly Val being I-RED diplomat. It becomes difficult to avoid the perception of meta gaming and using OOC knowledge.

It is quite a quandary.

On the other side of the argument, I am inclined to think that playing characters who are reflections of elements of ourselves is a psychological inevitability. I'm sure others will feel otherwise, however.

[Ulphus]

However there are diplomatic machinations on each side that both characters are intimately involved in, particularly Val being I-RED diplomat. It becomes difficult to avoid the perception of meta gaming and using OOC knowledge.

I will admit this was a consideration in my mind when I-RED was trying to get blue with EM just after you had another alt join EM. Even though you declared it and all that, so it wasn't underhanded in any way, it sat there in the back of my mind.

[Valdezi]

However there are diplomatic machinations on each side that both characters are intimately involved in, particularly Val being I-RED diplomat. It becomes difficult to avoid the perception of meta gaming and using OOC knowledge.

I will admit this was a consideration in my mind when I-RED was trying to get blue with EM just after you had another alt join EM. Even though you declared it and all that, so it wasn't underhanded in any way, it sat there in the back of my mind.

And rightly so. It's an obvious downside of playing multiple characters. At various times, I've considered putting all my eggs in one RP basket, and condensing all characters into one alliance, but there seems to be so many cool things out there to try and I really wanted to see what EM was like.

[Ghost Hunter]

The academic question about the possibility of a true IC/OOC divide is largely a strawman. Everyone can come up with examples of characters they just cannot play. We have to choose something we are familiar with, at least on some level. Everyone has to accept the limitations they have as players. There's nothing wrong with using aspects of your own personality in this fashion and it's hard to do it in any other way. Personally I don't even consider it as a breach of IC/OOC divide even though technically it might be considered as such...

My postulation originates from the need to go to the lowest common denominator - working off comparing the absolute ideal is more practical than the individual variants that change across the RP landscape. My apologies if that is a strawman position in reality. If I were to distill my post down to more specifically address your point, as I understand it better, it would be an argument on the approach of handling bleed through. 'Avoiding bleed through' strikes me as the incorrect way to think about the subject, where as 'How do I use the bleed through' seems better. We both appear to agree some sort of bleed through is inevitable, perhaps it is just semantics in how we deal with it?

Your Charlie Manson example confuses me towards the end there, as I'm not certain why you provide, "your character is clearly minmaxing..." unless its Charlie Manson accusing your character? Will need some clarification before I can address this sufficiently.

I cannot categorize OOC knowledge as irrelevant due to the fact bleed through will impact your persona's universe. At the very least, you are looking at a subconscious reaction that changes your presentation from what it might have been - but that might be a strawman argument. To phrase it another way; you treat such occurrences as in-character but you most likely do so because it keeps your fun consistent, yes? Winning and losing are merely conditions to achieve fun that a person can have, not the metric itself.

IC/OOC divide is also particularly challenged in Eve, since it supports so well the corp-theft/betrayal aspect, and a lot of that happens at an OOC as well as an IC level. When you're scamming someone into giving your Alt access to their corp hangar, you are, to a largely unavoidable degree, doing so at least partially OOC...

I agree, and your examples are why I spent a long time thinking on the IC/OOC divide, roleplaying, and EVE's hyper competitive environment. They are all situations I have covered once in my mind that really stretches the continuity between roleplay as an art form and EVE as a game. More practically, as the leader of an RP organization, it is necessary to have an understanding on how to deal with the problems this area can generate in my opinion.

I can understand the view point that corporations/alliances based on OOG entities suffer less of EVE's manner of betrayal. While it is a nice exception to the rule, I question if its worth developing discussion on because of just that - its an exception.

This is an interesting dilemma and Bastian knows that I have been in the middle of a interesting IC/OOC situation of late. Mammal has been a member of the FCO which recently came into some verbal conflict with I-RED, the alliance to which my other character, Valdezi, belongs...

I have encountered a situation similar to yours before a few times. Its one of those volatile, "I must rely on how others feel" situations that usually have a subjective answer.

A saying comes to mind, one that I don't agree with, but useful for analysis - "One cannot serve two masters". People will natively distrust you if they perceive you are not sufficiently loyal to their organization/ideal when you are involved with others. If there is the reasonable chance that you will not further their goals because you are more inclined to another, it can quickly degenerate into an expulsion/removal.

If your goal is to avoid being perceived as metagaming / abusing OOC knowledge, I think such an endeavor would be impossible. Would you agree it would ultimately come down to how much leeway people are willing to entrust to you, knowing you have an equal investment in two sides?

[Valdezi]

If your goal is to avoid being perceived as metagaming / abusing OOC knowledge, I think such an endeavor would be impossible. Would you agree it would ultimately come down to how much leeway people are willing to entrust to you, knowing you have an equal investment in two sides?

Absolutely. Whenever these flash points of conflict come up - it happened once when I had Mammal in the ILF as well, but the disagreement was less intense and I wasn't the only one with a foot in both camps - I generally end up having to make uncomfortable decisions. Oh well, downside of trying to play two mains.

[Bastian Valoron]

My postulation originates from the need to go to the lowest common denominator - working off comparing the absolute ideal is more practical than the individual variants that change across the RP landscape. My apologies if that is a strawman position in reality. If I were to distill my post down to more specifically address your point, as I understand it better, it would be an argument on the approach of handling bleed through. 'Avoiding bleed through' strikes me as the incorrect way to think about the subject, where as 'How do I use the bleed through' seems better. We both appear to agree some sort of bleed through is inevitable, perhaps it is just semantics in how we deal with it?

Your Charlie Manson example confuses me towards the end there, as I'm not certain why you provide, "your character is clearly minmaxing..." unless its Charlie Manson accusing your character? Will need some clarification before I can address this sufficiently.

I cannot categorize OOC knowledge as irrelevant due to the fact bleed through will impact your persona's universe. At the very least, you are looking at a subconscious reaction that changes your presentation from what it might have been - but that might be a strawman argument. To phrase it another way; you treat such occurrences as in-character but you most likely do so because it keeps your fun consistent, yes? Winning and losing are merely conditions to achieve fun that a person can have, not the metric itself.

Yeah, we both agree some sort of bleed through is inevitable. The four unconnected examples were intended to demonstrate cases where I feel that bleed through is not inevitable: icon of evil is not seen as such due to out of character influence, line between fact and fiction gets blurred leading to conflicts between the players or breaking the character, and prioritization of game mechanics rewards.

When it comes to OOC knowledge, I'm still not any closer to understanding why it's such a big issue. If we use information our characters are not supposed to have, we're no longer role-playing. If we use OOC knowledge to save our ships, or make sure that no one steals from the corp hangars, we are not role-playing, we have other priorities. Keeping it IC will make the game play more complicated, no doubt about it but that's just what it costs.

[DeadRow]

When it comes to OOC knowledge, I'm still not any closer to understanding why it's such a big issue. If we use information our characters are not supposed to have, we're no longer role-playing. If we use OOC knowledge to save our ships, or make sure that no one steals from the corp hangars, we are not role-playing, we have other priorities. Keeping it IC will make the game play more complicated, no doubt about it but that's just what it costs.

The problem is it costs without any reward. I have no issue with losing ships and I love the idea in Eve that Corp Thief is possible. However a corporation has no way to detect when a Corp thief has occurred until they look in the hangers and then, as far as I know, you can't trace who took what. Like Ghost said, you can't hire a man to sit in a Hanger and watch everybody who enters. Where as IRL we have CCTV feeds and alarms to show who has broken into a store. We don't have that in Eve, so blinding yourself to OOC knowledge to prevent it doesn't benefit you as a player or character in anyway.

Also, I don't just join a Corporation as the Character I play. I join as a Player and make OOC friends along the way. If I was passed OOC knowledge that xxx player/character was stealing, do I betray the OOC trust that I was given when joining the Corporation simply because my character can't see what is going on when she is asleep/away from the Corp Hanger? It's not roleplaying, true. But there is no IC-way to gain said knowledge in the first place.

[Jev North]

The thing with EVE is that assets straddle the IC/OOC line. In PnP, fortunes and empires can be gained and lost by fiat and a stroke of the pen; in EVE, they also represent real value, and are closer to the actual physical tokens of the game itself. I'm simply not playing nice with people whom I know to have a habit of stealing the books, dice, and possibly the silverware. No matter how nice their characters are.

[Matariki Rain]

I'm seeing at least three different levels of IC/OOC divide-or-bleedthrough:

1. Knowledge.
2. Personality or "character".
3. Trust.

Knowledge is one that I used to compartmentalise. When I had characters who were valid targets to each other and active in slightly-overlapping areas I picked one to fly and read forums for, while the other had a stint of being pretty much purely a roleplay character. I was also careful about not using OOC knowledge IC. That included keeping some secrets for people who shouldn't have told me some stuff, which contributed to one of my early phases of brownout: "nothing we do matters, because these people are going to write the canon and they want this particular story".

Since then we've had the Big IC/OOC Debate, much has happened, and I've changed my approach. I'm less fully-firewalled/fully-immersionist these days. If you put information out there for players to read, even if you tag it as IC-only, I reserve the right to use that information as "rumour" to flesh out what I know of your character. I try not to abuse that, and honestly don't often have cause for it to be a big issue, but having had the opposite inflicted on me (including "I told you stuff, so now you can't find it out naturally") I've toughened up. If you don't want your character's personal angst to be the subject of rumour and gossip--let alone any information that has wider opsec implications--don't blog it publicly.

For me, things get really interesting when talking about the next two topics: personality and trust. Maybe later.

[Ghost Hunter]

I'm not sure if Jade Constantine still actively reads these forums, but I would value his input on this topic - his position on this matter formed most of my original studies, and I'm a tad afraid of referencing them purely from memory.

When it comes to OOC knowledge, I'm still not any closer to understanding why it's such a big issue. If we use information our characters are not supposed to have, we're no longer role-playing. If we use OOC knowledge to save our ships, or make sure that no one steals from the corp hangars, we are not role-playing, we have other priorities. Keeping it IC will make the game play more complicated, no doubt about it but that's just what it costs.

The problem is it costs without any reward. I have no issue with losing ships and I love the idea in Eve that Corp Thief is possible...

It is as DeadRow says for the most part. Those who wish to chiefly govern their game play by roleplaying will encounter a certain point where they simply cannot proceed without OOC contamination. Ulphus describes it very well,

Some people have said in my hearing that if people do a good job of RPing the betrayal, then they accept the possibility. The problem seems to me to be threefold:
1) the game does not give you the ability to do the things that the world should allow that would protect you somewhat. You can't pay some guy to sit there on the POS and watch who takes a ship. Players are dependent on a very low bandwidth system for getting a feel for the personality of the other character, and it is very difficult to strike a balance between providing enough hints that a betrayal is coming without instantly raising warning flags.
2) the problem of bad acting/limited bandwidth. If a player is acting in a way you think counts as hugely suspicious, you have to decide whether the player is a good actor playing someone acting suspicious, or a bad actor trying to play someone trustworthy. If they're trying to play a character who is untrustworthy but the character is trying to pretend to be trustworthy, then the problems become compounded.
3) There are people out there who are happy to lie OOC in order to make infiltrations more likely to succeed, and once successful, happy to walk away with as much loot as they can get their hands on, and/or do as much damage as they can. They're not there to tell a story that the other players enjoy, so you can't rely on their respecting of IC/OOC divide, or any other convention of RP to sort out misunderstandings so that both parties go away thinking the RP was fun, even if their character had a bad time.

The lines between IC and OOC become blurred and the lack of distinction can be very troubling for a lot of reasons - not just roleplay drama. It can be postulated that one never stops roleplaying - you are always being thrust into a role and acting it out. 'Proper' roleplaying is merely a greater indulgence of this enforced play. Using OOC knowledge devalues roleplaying because it usually strips the illusion down to its barest essentials.

I think this is where most draw issue with it, and why EVE in particular compounds it.

The thing with EVE is that assets straddle the IC/OOC line. In PnP, fortunes and empires can be gained and lost by fiat and a stroke of the pen; in EVE, they also represent real value, and are closer to the actual physical tokens of the game itself. I'm simply not playing nice with people whom I know to have a habit of stealing the books, dice, and possibly the silverware. No matter how nice their characters are.

Time is a universal commodity to those whose life is finite: a person who steals time or the equivalent from some body robs them of a real resource. Would you be willing to say a person whose had hours of mining labor stolen from them (via thievery not pewpew) is equally comparable to someone whose DnD books got jacked?

I'm seeing at least three different levels of IC/OOC divide-or-bleedthrough...

Ahh this is a position that I studied a lot. It really tickled a lot of people back in the day and still does, I believe. Using information labeled as private or inaccessible IC, even though its very easily found OOC, without being allowed to know it IC riled up the community. My contemplations on the IC/OOC bleed through ultimately agreed with leaving the knowledge to the fate of the readers - not so much the author.

As a personal example, the revelation of the chronicle Uplifted sent a wrecking ball through pro-Sansha roleplay. It was easy to accept the idea that the Upliftings were not always benign 'people hopping on transports' activities, and the Sansha were using something to acquire people. The mechanics of this were completely shrouded and the ambiguity helped both sides argue in their own favor. The Sansha pointedly blacked out and commenced massive electronic warfare during their planetary invasions, effectively blocking all IC knowledge of the event. The ISD stories during the pre-Incursion story arc alluded to the complete inability of authorities to identify what the Sansha were doing.

Then Uplifted came and suddenly everyone knew exactly what the Sansha were doing and how. There was no IC reveal, no ISD articles, just a chronicle that came out of no where that ripped the ambiguity to shreds. From my perspective, it was easy to denounce the legitimacy of the chronicle as a resource because of just that - it was never put into the game world. It existed purely as an OOC knowledge fact. The results of its usage are easy to see these days (SeyCon3 as a recent example), and it remains one of my personal sore points about the conclusion of the pre-Incursion live events.


It's not a polite or pretty thing to contend with, but once knowledge is put into the wild - so to speak - stopping people from using it is very difficult / impractical.