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[Havohej]

@Mizhara - You keep saying this phrase "OOC knowledge". OOC means out of character. So "OOC knowledge" is knowledge that exists out of character. "Humans definitely come from Earth, and Earth is definitely on the other side of the EVE Gate" is OOC knowledge. What my character had for breakfast that day, or how she's feeling, is IC. The thing you fail in here is that if my character knows it, then it is in fact not OOC knowledge. My character's background? Yeah that's IC too. Your character might not know it, but mine does. I get it - IGS is just an IC message board. Point taken. But all this other arguing over what is RP and what isn't RP doesn't accomplish anything, and you're in fact being elitist by saying that my roleplay style wasn't real, and coming up with these, frankly, strange definitions of IC and OOC.

There seems to be a set of mixed up definitions at work here.

Roleplaying is something that's done interactively.  Nobody else can interact with things their characters don't know.  What your character had for breakfast that day, or how she's feeling deep inside?  Yeah, that's not an in-character knowledge for our characters, which we would be able to interact with, unless your character communicates this knowledge to our characters - by speech or written word shared with our characters In-Character.  In order for anyone to remark on what your character had for breakfast that day without such a communication taking place, we would have to "god-mode" our characters' intimate knowledge of your character's minute-by-minute life and their thoughts/emotions.

Are you expecting other players to respond to that post with their own internal monologues full of thoughts, emotions and eating habits that your character by necessity of not having had any direct interaction with our characters must also be ignorant of (and thus unable to engage with)?  I am not one of the people who is familiar with the brand of Forum RP that you are suggesting is the only way to correctly RP on a forum without being "elitist" somehow, so please, explain to me how it works.  If I wrote a post like yours about things Havohej is thinking and/or doing, how do A: You respond to that as a player, and B: your character respond to it with no actual knowledge of anything I wrote about Havohej?

[Samira Kernher]

In that kind of style, Havo, posts are written in a narrative style for the sake of, well, good writing. It's like writing a normal story, except that you bounce back and forth between players instead of just writing by yourself. It's a way to engage in proper writing in a collaborative way. Yes, characters can't see each other's thoughts, but in that kind of style you're writing it for the sake of writing in a fleshed out, narrative manner. In other words, the writing style is for the benefit of the readers, rather than the characters.

That kind of style works just fine on forums and sites based around it. It's fun to do and is something a lot of us got started with. It's primarily about the writing of stories in a social manner, getting the benefits of fiction writing with the benefits of additional participants to add random variables and portrayal of other characters.

There's nothing wrong with that style. Just, the IGS isn't the place for it, because the IGS is an in-universe forum where everything posted is posted directly by the character, instead of by the player describing the character. In other words, if play-by-post storywriting is third person writing (the author as a timeless/faceless "third party" describing the actions of the characters), IGS posting is first person writing (the character is the author and doing the writing themselves). For the IGS, it is the character doing the writing, not just the player.

[Havohej]

I think I understand.  If I'm reading that right, everyone makes big, long posts and picks out the action or dialogue that their character could respond to - like old-school text gaming.   Telnet-style...?

If that's so, I can't help thinking of all of the "RP Elitists" on those games with notes in their Info write-ups about how "If you pose less than 12 lines, I'm not going to give you the time of day."

[Samira Kernher]

Yup, exactly.

[Havohej]

That could be fun.  I always enjoyed the telnet stuff I've played on.  Sadly I don't have time for that sort of thing right now... 10-hour days, many commissions, much shekels.

EDIT: More to the point, if someone starts a thread like that on the IGS with that in mind, good luck.  But with it not being what Eve RPers are used to (and I know so many people ingame for whom Eve is their first experience with intentional RP), I would not have high hopes.  Someone go enter it into the "IC Forum is going to be a thing" thread as a suggestion, I don't see why we can't have an area just for that format on the IC test forum when it opens.

[Mizhara]

Collaborative writing like that can be very fun. Needs the right medium though.

[Saede Riordan]

Collaborative writing like that can be very fun. Needs the right medium though.

Could this forum be the right medium? We could do some test threads in the fiction section.

[Havohej]

Collaborative writing like that can be very fun. Needs the right medium though.

Could this forum be the right medium? We could do some test threads in the fiction section.

I don't see why not.

If you (or anyone) starts a thread like that and it's well-received, when the IC test board opens, we'll make sure there's an area for the format and any existing threads on the Fiction board will get moved into that board.

[Lyn Farel]

I think I understand.  If I'm reading that right, everyone makes big, long posts and picks out the action or dialogue that their character could respond to - like old-school text gaming.   Telnet-style...?

If that's so, I can't help thinking of all of the "RP Elitists" on those games with notes in their Info write-ups about how "If you pose less than 12 lines, I'm not going to give you the time of day."

If I had to describe it with a tl;dr, it would be "it's like writing a fiction, but in multiplayer". 

And from experience, I think it is often best in that kind of collective effort not to actually write wall of texts, unless you do it with people you know well and that are not afraid of that, because it's enormously time consuming. So, the most lines people write and do it casually, the most the risk for players to drop out of it, and usually when you lose a character on a closed RP adventure like that, it's like losing a main character and it often dooms the whole fiction (you know, kind of like someone you are ICly speaking to in a venue drops out without notice and leaves you alone in the middle of a conversation). Most of those I had the pleasure to be part of (most of the time kinda like a GM since I was the main engine behind, adding stuff and fluff), they didn't last very long. So it's not a bad idea to set up small settings and stories that actually consist of a glimpse or an episode of anything. If you set up a big and longer adventure, it's best to know what you are engaging into. The only one that worked very well for me was waiting for SWTOR, where we had like more than 150 forum pages of that with 4-5 players (+ one on SWG that sadly didn't last more than 15 pages, but it was like half a page per player lol, since we knew each other perfectly), and when the synergy takes off, it's the most awesome thing I have experienced in RP to this day.

[Anskek]

Goto OOPE on the eve o forums. Look for a thread called the Greater Fool Bar. This is the kind of RP being refered to. I made a few posts even. It's kinda neat.

[Ché Biko]

Ergo, if you were to, for example, start an [Open Roleplay] thread, it would be viewed as Gwen, the character, ICly starting a roleplaying thread. Roleplayception.

Brb starting an in character fantasy roleplay thread/

I think Ché once participate in one of these, until it died...sadly. Roleplaying Ché roleplaying...soooo meta...I think?

Ok, so...EVE is my only online RP experience I've ever had, so the IGS is pretty much all I know about IC forums...but now I've learned it's somewhat unique because of that, I'm sort of even more fond of it.
I admit that I already do not read like 90% of IGS posts, but if this...I'll call it In Narrator RP, would be there, I would it read even less, as I prefer to keep OOC knowledge to a minimum. And I also would find the "OOC" bits immersion breaking, as well as an [Open RP] tag.

I did pen and paper RP, mostly WoD, when me and my friends still had the time to do so, but I don't recall any of us mentioning a lot of our chars thoughts and motivations during sessions, so this kind of RP is somewhat strange/new to me, as I imagine EVE RP was/is for Gwen and Xiaohui.

Anyway, I feel compelled to end this post with a quote from Charles V after he visited the newly build cathedral inside the Cordoba Mezquita:

They have taken something unique in all the world and destroyed it to build something you can find in any city.

[Silas Vitalia]

We've been a bit overdue for someone new to register and start throwing shit at people out of the gate, so good to see that tradition holding strong 

[Elmund Egivand]

I believe that the second sticky in the IGS forum state that everything there must be posted IC.

So I use it like a New Eden BBS where bunch of capsuleers bicker with and troll each other.

[Morwen Lagann]

I've been away and not had access to a posting-friendly computer for a few days, but something came to mind on my train ride home today.

First off - I've done that particular kind of forum RP before. I participated in an EV:Nova-themed one called "670 NC". (Assuming I remember the name right, anyway.) It was fun, but even though I knew two of the other participants personally from school and was often able to work with them directly on posts, and I had plenty of other stuff to do, waiting for other people to respond really could be painful.

Anyway - that specific style of RP? It might not be happening on the official forums, but people are already doing it every single day. Regularly. Can you guess where?

In channels. In real-time.

Every interaction is important and can have an impact on every other interaction that follows it, especially in an environment like the one that EVE provides. Look at it this way.

Let's say two characters meet up somewhere and talk. For whatever reason, some sort of meaningful ~thing~ happens or is said during that interaction that would color and influence those characters' interactions with themselves and others.

If that interaction happens in a chat channel, then the two players are immediately able to act upon what happened and use it elsewhere in other interactions, in real-time, as part of the universe.

On the other hand, if it played out in an RP-by-snail-mail forum thread? It could be days, weeks or even months before that impactful thing actually was written out and would become usable elsewhere, even though it technically happened quite a while before that in-universe.

Reconciling the two completely different timescales is difficult and incredibly unpleasant, especially when you KNOW something important and meaningful would have occurred during that scene, but don't know what it is yet because you haven't gotten there yet due to the nature of that RP style.

I'm not saying that the two methods are 100% incompatible, but when it comes down to it, one is a lot more compatible with EVE than the other: when there is an actual, living world that changes from day to day due to the interactions of the players, RP-by-snail-mail is approaching equivalency with shooting yourself in the foot RPwise. Perhaps in another game where the universe is largely stagnant and the players' actions have no effect on the world around them, it works better. But in EVE, you are generally going to be better off with the more real-time interaction you can get through channels and treating the IGS as an in-universe forum, than trying to old-skool it.

[Elmund Egivand]

Why post about shooting the other guy in the face and take away all his corp assets when you can do it in-game?