Nosferatu Coven

                                                                           Ediquette

 

 

There are a few very simple rules of etiquette when it comes to role playing. Many are things players will talk about in private, complaints, what have you. We decided to just go ahead and put this up in hopes of bettering the role-play experience for everyone. Below are the most commonly complained about things concerning role-play.

Among the top things players want to remember in role-play is don't power play (control other people's characters), don't god mode (entering role play with invincibility and may make outrageous claims about their characters ability) and don't be rude.

Text based role play is basically telling a story therefore chat speak and or chat abbreviations such as u, ur, 2, etc are highly frowned upon. You wouldn't pick a book off a shelf, open it and see such things. Try to be as descriptive as you can, much again as you from a scenario in a book and try and use adjectives to give other role-players a sense of what you are trying to get over.

Be patient! Yes, sometimes you might come into a chat and there are several players but no one or only one person is active. There are many reasons behind this. Sometimes a player had to run afk for a short or even a long period of time. The players all have real lives, things to attend to, and can't always log out or even say they have to run afk. They might be spending time with their sweetie, their kids, their pets, on the phone, getting food, whatever, and that is normal. Sometimes emergencies happen. Give others time to react to you.
One of the strangest things noticed in online RPG’s is impatience. People will walk up, say something, wait about 0.0001 seconds and run off. The person they talked to would barely have had enough time to read what they said, let alone respond to it. This also happens in conversations. People will say something, wait a very short amount of time, then keep going as if they think the person they were talking to didn’t hear them or isn’t going to respond. In most cases, the other person was going to respond but simply wasn’t as fast as expected, and loses the chance because the conversation has moved on without them. There’s no need to hurry so much, just relax and enjoy the interaction. Just please be patient. If we are at our computers we WILL greet you. Calm down. Real life doesn't move at the speed of light.

Now with that said, do your best not to just disappear without warning. It's aggravating for a player to poof on them without warning over and over, and eventually they will just stop playing with the person that does that. Of course real life intervenes and we can't always give a warning but at least say "good night", "brb" or "gtg" or something ooc if you possibly can.

If you are feeling burned out and feel the need for a short or even extended break from rp, at the very least communicate this want or need to your partner. Few things are more frustrating to a player than to have their partner just disappear, and have a ton of characters tied up with theirs and it seems like nothing can be done with them.
Be open and honest with your rp partners, otherwise when you come back from that long break you may just find they figured you to be gone for good and moved on, pairing their characters up with someone else's. Common courtesy is a beautiful, wonderful thing in role-play. Treat your partner and other players with the same decency and respect as you would want them to treat you.

Never use OOC information IC in any way. The best example I can give is...just because you can see someone’s name hanging over their head in the game, your character wouldn’t know that character’s name unless someone had told you in-game.

Never assume someone will react in a certain way just because you think they should. Always give others the chance to react in their own way, and don’t get upset if the reaction isn’t what you expected.
Any action you perform on someone else’s character, no matter what the action might be, should be phrased as an attempt. By making an attempt instead of just doing it outright, you give the character’s player the chance to consent to the action or avoid it if it’s something they’d rather not have happen to their character.

Be considerate of the role-playing mood of others. If you come into a situation where other characters are already engaged in some RP, don’t just leap in with a radically different mood unless you get permission (Either IC or OOC, depending on the situation and whether you have any way to contact them OOC). As an example...say there is a couple sitting at a table discussing a recently deceased character and you jump in acting like a court jester and spill their drinks in their laps while telling bad jokes. You aren’t going to make friends like this if your actions offend the players behind the characters.

Don’t try to be the center of attention all the time. Be polite and share attention with other characters. You aren’t the only one there to have fun, give everyone their turn in the spotlight.

Avoid god-like abilities for your characters. RPing isn’t about who can make up the best super powers for their characters, it’s about the personalities of the characters. Any character that is ridiculously powerful or has a perfect personality is going to be fairly boring to RP with and will end up being mostly ignored by others.

Use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. If players can't read what you are trying to convey to them chances are their character can't or won't respond. Sure we all typo, and none of us are perfect, but we are writing a story. If you have to write it all down in notepad first and then copy paste after spell check, do so. You can do this with some scenarios which you commonly encounter.

Don't harass people OOC or in PM because no one responded to your character the way you think they should have. Let everyone play their own characters the way they see fit, and they will allow you that same privilege. Harassment to get players to role-play with you, to do certain things, sexual or not, in anyway shape or form can get you kicked from the room. If a player sees your character and wants theirs to react to yours they will. You don't have to coerce them to. role-play is just like real life and one character will respond in a different way to another.

Do not Godmod. There are different types of godmodding but I will use the most general of terms for this bit. You will find all of the definitions in my RP glossary. In this case, it is where a player definitively describes the outcome of their own actions against another character or interactive object. For example, if player A states, "A strikes B and B takes damage", they could be considered to be godmoding. Another example of this might be where a character is facing multiple enemies, and they redirect one foe's attack onto another. For example, Player A states, "B misses A completely, and strikes C instead."

Remember to have fun. We are all here for a reason and all enjoy rping in one form or another; the more we enjoy it, the better it is for eveybody. The main thing is to have fun and if in doubt then ask a question by pm or skype rather than assume the answer and not ask it.