Dear Twitch.

What is this?

This is a place where you can ask me roleplay related questions. Be it fishing for ideas, wanting critique, or anything else having to do with server side roleplay and development. This is not a place for you to ask moderator issues, report users, or post passive aggressive content against other users.

I've been roleplaying for a very very long time, and in a variety of ways. Take anything I say with a grain of salt, as they are based on my opinions. There is no right or wrong way to roleplay, and like most anything else, people learned differently.

TL DR - Roleplay advice thread.

Ask away.

 

I did the thing. I should note I am currently on my phone, and auto correct is the devil.

 

A lot of folks are happy just sitting and waiting for roleplay to come to them, and a great deal of the time it is actually in character that they wouldn't just chat up strangers. It sometimes feels a lot like shopping, seeing characters all in their pockets of the room. You get to pick who you want to interact with, which isn't terrible.

The easiest way to deal with this problem is with a fish out of water character. Someone who is unfamiliar with a race, history, or Antares who is curious. They have reason to approach strangers and listen to personal tales. It helps develop a bit of confidence oocly as you learn the ins and outs of leading conversation as well as gives you some nice practice for not metagaming things you already know.

Other easy ways around this is getting a job that requires you to interact with people, or making excuses to have people provide a service for you. My ships FTL is overheating, can anyone out there familiar with early earth coolant tech on a class II shuttle? Don't be afraid to make things up so long as they don't go against starbound lore. Talk about a crazy hylotl gameshow you saw last night, or question what's actually in that meatwine they are serving.

 

Being a mod did have an effect on my time in general. I have full time employment, real life stuff, and my moderator duties to space out between my roleplaying. I do a lot of log browseing and server related troubleshooting as well as stay pretty active on the forum. Thankfully we have reviewere /PAs(we are looking for more) because applications were also a huge chunk of time.

I certainly have less time to play then a normal player, but I still do freqeuntly. The biggest effect it had was not playing my "main" character as much. I like the genuine reactions you get when people don't know who you are oocly. It takes away the preassure from the players if they want to treat me different because I am a mod, or because they may like or dislike me.

I have roleplayed with almost everyone on the server whether they know it or not. So while you may not see Twitch in game, I am on quite often, unless Jay is giving me dirty looks.

 

I will answer Clockia when I get home. All the highlighting and c&p required for that wouldn't turn out great with me on the phone.

I have played a few tabletop RPGs. I am not certain what all of them were. Most all were d20 variants such as standard DND v 3, and Pathfinder. Played a few other games with custom d20 systems when I was younger but I have no idea if the games they were from are even well known. Only played one type of d100 based game. I use to work in a hobby shop when I was younger so I hot a lot of second hand exposure to games of this nature. I still prefer my freeform roleplay over dice based roleplay. Both have a unique method of weaving a story that works in their favor.

I don't think I played them nearly enough to have a favorite, but I don't mind Pathfinder's system.

As for the second question. A character stops being unique and becomes a "special snowflake" at the point where the setting and the people around them are force to bend roleplay to accommodate there existance or accomplishments.

The term special snowflake is one of those catch all things people like to throw around, a lot. Its something a lot of newer roleplays fall into the habit of becoming. The sort of main character syndrome. This is where you inevitably get the pissing contests and people pulling rediculous things off to win fights or showboat. A lot of people roleplay for attention. Be it the loudmouth racist looking to tick everyone off, the cartoonishly silly guy who pulls random objects from his jacket, or the weeping girl who requires constant company because their despair spans oceans.

In a massive roleplay enviorment like this, nobody is the main character. They all have their own stories to tell, so its works best to bounce them off one another and share the spotlight. It is okay to be support, it helps drive plots and makes people feel good when you talk other people up for things they did instead of yourself.

You can be an orphan.
You can be a grizzled war veteran turned merc.
You can be a scarred survivor of a brutal attack.
You can be a samurai fish person.
You can be a mad scientist.
You can be a crazed religious fenatic.
You can be a sad old lady with a million cats.

There are tons of tropes out there that are overused and instantly labeled poorly by the community, but that doesn't mean a player can't make it their own and be a great asset to a story. You just have to be willing to work with people. Roleplaying is a group activity, we all have to play our part to keep things moving and developing.

Its okay for a character to fail. Some of the best roleplay I have had often comes from a character facing their shortcomings or losing when they were being counted on.

 

It depends on the type of racism, and how it is portrayed. I like to think the cross species racism that exists in roleplay is far enough removed from actual society that it is alright. That said, everything in moderation. We see a lot of things go over the top in roleplay, especially here on the forums. There is a line of decency that should be maintained if it actually does start to impact people negatively. That is the reason why like to keep real world religion and present day political parallels to a minimum.

In closing. Tasteful IC racism, is okay. Yes, I know this will be quoted out of context.

 

Example?

 

Things like this are best left out of a roleplay setting, only because they fall under things that blur the line between ooc and IC in most cases. I recall the transgender thing coming up here, which I wasn't overly happy about. I have no issue with people living their lives however they want, but I find it upsetting when people take things like race, gender, or sexual preference and make that a primary character trait. It makes the character a very flat
caricature and it comes off as offensive. People can play these sorts of things, they just need to be careful of how they present it and keep it respectful.

Overall this falls under the other question I responded to, like political and religious ties, stuff like this should be avoided. We have walking plant people, talking birds, and knight robots. Ain't nobody got time for giving Ted a hard time cause he wants you to call him Tina.

 

Never heard this terminology before, but I'll roll with it. I agree players should play how they want, but there is of course benefits to both styles of play. Playing "tall" in an environment like we have here means you see alot more screentime and you can get far more involved. Starbound roleplay, as well as many types of third party medium roleplays (mmos and such, for an example) move fast, because people are always around to drive roleplay. You can easily miss alot by having taken a day off of playing. So focusing your time on one or two characters to remain active gets you alot more action. Something that I have learned alot through roleplay though, is this sometimes can be a detriment too.

Yes, people can become attached to their characters, maybe even self insert a bit. It comes with the territory of investing alot into something. I know from experience, playing a character for a long time can lead to a rather robust and honestly, quite ridiculous history that can often times seem to outsiders or new players as if you have a "snowflake" type character. This is again, because LOTS of stuff happens in roleplay, and if you catch it all, it seems like your character has done so much over such a short timeframe. A player that we use to play with often only really used one character primarily. He was always showing up and getting into the middle of things, and as a result he was ALWAYS getting hurt or needing to be saved. Is that wrong? No, not really. But if he sat down and ran over his life happenings to a stranger, it would seem very outlandish despite it being things that happened naturally in roleplay.

I personally, in most settings, fall under the "wide" variant of roleplayer. I enjoy playing a vast array characters that are different to my others, or rework an idea people don't tend to play. In regards to people leaning to make their characters disposable, let me share with you a quick rundown of my process.

I make a new character, develop a look and base idea of how the character will be. I assign a personality, then hop in roleplay. I interact with people, and get a good feel on how I want to refine the character's personality. After that, I reverse build the character. I come up with a goal, something the character ultimately wants to achieve. From there I break it down into pieces, which will ultimately become pieces of the characters history and personality traits. This also serves to figure for yourself a character's fight or flight responses. I do this with EVERY character I play, regardless if it is someone I intend to play long term, or a character I am playing as a one off for an event. It helps breath life into them, and really helps you put yourself into their mindset. It's important to question yourself about character motivation and the length they are willing to go.

It's always been a pet peeve of mine, especially in events, when PCs take the part of disposable characters, and just throw them into the meatgrinder like their existence doesn't matter. It would to them. It would to their friends and family. Just because they were made for this one moment, maybe even to die, doesn't mean they didn't have a life up to this point. We did alot back during the fungus plague event to make all the infected NPCs feel like people. We gave them names, ages, jobs, and history with the colony. When rolls came up bad and they died, I know some of the people who had been rping with the npcs, and treating them got upset pretty upset. This sort of stuff makes for good roleplay. It adds flavor to the world. Take advantage of that.

 

What is the accepted level of assumption?

Pretty sure all a glitch would need to do to become a freethinker is be removed from the hivemind network. Any attempts to effect the mental state of one that was connected would likely interfere with all the others. That said the workings of the hivemind are rather vague.

No reason this can't be true, as it is a case by case thing. Everybody is different in their own ways.

By their "mother" and "father" who construct them. If they are hiveminded, it is likely to serve a specific need for their collective. If they are not hivemind, then I have no idea why, as there are no children glitch so the whole overarching goal of raising someone is almost lost. It is certainly their too a degree, the learning aspect, but as to why someone would do that is beyond me. I suppose it could be more about creating something together than it is about the actual glitch offspring.

Not sure why something like that would exist.

A hiveminded glitch would have all the knowledge of the collective upon being merged into the hivemind network. Other than that, none hiveminded glitch would know what they were programed with. That all depends on the person creating them. I can't imagine a "mother" and "father" glitch would build a new son or daughter with programming faults intentionally.

Glitch do not have organic brains. Unless they are programmed without the ability to learn (not sure why anyone would do that), they all have the capacity to gain knowledge.

Possibly. Though I don't think most would stray from what they are more familiar with. This is something hard programmed into them when speaking with outsiders. If they are hiveminded, it makes quite alot of sense that they don't need to convey emotion prefixes, as they already know what one another feel.

Given we have glitch who roleplay without prefixes, or use of proper prefixing, I would say it is possible to have it removed or deadened to a degree. That said, it would be a mental programing thing if anything.

Not all florans everywhere have done everything some florans have. Not all florans were there to run the Avian blockades. Not all florans invaded the hylotl homeworld. I would imagine a lot of it is personal experience, as MOST floran don't have the ability to read or write, despite that not being the case here. Most knowledge is passed on first and second hand or by drawings I'd imagine. I want to point out that floran reverse engineering is more like tech assimilation. They don't break it down and know how to build it. They break it down and slap it together with what they already know.

Case by case basis. It depends on the character involved. They may be aware of steps to protect themselves.

It is mentioned they have underwater cities, however, it is unclear if that means atlantis leavel of livinIN the water, or cities under the sea in giant domed air bubbles. Both of these really make you wonder how florans managed to steamroll them. Regardless of this, there is alot of things Hylotl make and use in their building that really require them to not be submerged in water 24/7. I tend to avoid taking solid stances on things that are not proven, but from my own personal experience I have handled Hylotl's affinity to water as being able to stay under for a very very long time.

I treat my own hylotl as if he is cold blooded.

Yes. See above.

Like anyone else. See above.

Chucklefish.

See above in relation to living under water. I treat my own hyltol as having a poor sense of smell though.

I don't play it that way.

When you assume you make an ass out of u and me. Hurr hurr.

Spoiler: This