RPing pet hates

[Lace Neil Singer]

What was really ridiculous about what this person did was that the RP had reached a particularly tragic point, and then bam! there comes her post about her character being a beautiful witch with rainbow eyes walking into the house, which in her mind had suddenly changed into a magic school. XD

[Amanita]

^Oh lordy, that IS bad. Even my former friend and RP partner didn't pull that!

[Hyena Dandy]

What was really ridiculous about what this person did was that the RP had reached a particularly tragic point, and then bam! there comes her post about her character being a beautiful witch with rainbow eyes walking into the house, which in her mind had suddenly changed into a magic school. XD

I would absolutely love to read a story about a horror setting where one of the characters has had a psychotic break and is convinced she's at a magic school.

[Skunkle]

That'd be awesome. It'd also be a great plot for a Malkavian (I play Vampire).

We've seen a few really, really awful vampire characters. We have a few long-term players (this is a LARP that averages around 40-50 people) who always and only play characters intended solely to 'stir the pot' and create the sort of craziness their players enjoy. Thankfully, they develop their plots slowly, and they always play something different. The two LARPS I'm in - one old system (Masquerade - the big one) and one new (Requiem, currently around 16 players) kick two of the biggest LARP problems with written house rules. The first is that you can't play the same clan twice in a row. The second is known as the "Inigo Montoya" clause, and anyone who's seen The Princess Bride will get this one: you can't bring in a character whose entire purpose is to avenge your last character's death. This is extended to bringing in someone related to your last character and, in most cases, to playing someone with the flaw "Mistaken Identity: <some former character in the same game>".

I also do chat RP, these days on Instant Messages but formerly in a series of very detailed Medieval fantasy-themed roleplay Chats AOL ran for years under what was called the FFGF (Freeform Gaming Forum). The entire AOL RP setting was collectively called RhyDin. I saw a lot of really bad stereotypes there that I still encounter today, all of which dive me nuts. They include:

Thesaurus addicts, AKA the "tenebrous orbs" players: These guys will take five paragraphs to explain that their dark, mysterious character, for whom a short personal description is in order, has entered the tavern, inn or glade and is surveying the room from under his hat or hood. They use the longest descriptions possible, what's often called "purple prose", and many of them demand that anyone they play with should do the same. The nickname I gave them came from a web site started by some friends of mine in the late 90s to catalogue funny character descriptions found on AOL's member profiles and on character descriptions on roleplaying MUCKs; "tenebrous orbs" was apparently an extremely-overused description of eyes.

On the flipside, one-liners. Habitual one-liners. In the kind of short-form, first-person roleplay I'm into, things are usually more back-and-forth; neither person posts huge chunks of story alone unless some big scene or environment is being described. Thus, sometimes one line works. But not all or even most of the time.

People who are looking for sex only. Put it bluntly: the RP I do involves sex, usually - though naturally not always. But my stories are usually - if I had to guess at a number - only 10% sex scenes. And they're related to the plot. I've met I can't even say how many players are only looking for sex. One of my regular characters in the AOL rooms, a very Medieval-era type who carried a sword and hung out in taverns, ran into a human girl named Vanessa. Her player (who I think was probably a guy) sent me photos of some real model who represented Vanessa, and Vanessa only ever wore lingerie - think the generic lace teddy, garters, lace stockings, in pastel colors - and tiny, what I hate to but really must call prostitute-like outfits - and wanted to do nothing but try to instigate sex. It was very, very boring, and the character was as thin and flat as paper.

Then there are the guys who despise anthropomorphic characters with a passion, and who are quite certain that furry always = kinky and sex-obsessed. Does my 60-year-old fox, an ex-soldier with a heavy limp, with a torn ear, an eyepatch, and one arm completely missing, look or sound sex-crazed to you? 95% of my characters are anthropomorphic animals, and none of them are horny freaks; a few don't have sex at all, ever.

Oh, and then there are the many, many RPers I meet who are only interested in epic-level, grimdark settings, in which the main character(s) stuggles against impossible odds, with the standing knowledge out-of-character that, in the end, the fight will either be for nothing, or will be won but at great personal cost and with heavy losses, making it bittersweet. Is that stuff really a hoot'n a holler to play? Really? Glad you like it, but please don't try to insist I'm missing out by not getting in on it. I do tend to like stuff that is either cheerful, or is building toward a good end that won't take a thousand years' time and the loss of life and/or sanity.

AOL had some godmoders invade en masse once: they were DragonballZ themed players (that should help put a date on this). There were a few accepted styles of sparring or fighting there; you could roll dice (AOL had a built-in dice roller) based on hit points, or you could agree out-of-character to politely describe taking damage from each other's hits. This was turn- or order-based fighting, based on an initiative roll to see what order the turns took, and everyone was responsible for keeping their own score offline somewhere. The DbZ fighters introduced a new style, called speed-fighting: the winner was the person who could make the most strikes in a given time period. Whoever could type "--strikes with sword--" and hit enter, repeatedly, faster was the winner. Problem was, these guys would attack absolutely anyone, for no reason, and while you could ignore them, their high-speed, one-line posts cluttered up the chatrooms, and they wouldn't go away until they got bored. A few months later they all just sort of vanished; no one knew where they took off to.

Oh, yes, and... can't forget the lifers. The guys who spend every waking hour RPing, and who get extremely angry when you have to: <pick one> sleep, take out the trash, cook dinner, go to work, etc. They don't do any of these things. Ever. Especially if there's a guild meeting. AOL has guilds, some of which are so hardcore that you can actually be kicked out for not being there at any and all hours. Having had friends who were in some of these, I've seen second-hand that there are scores of players who will tell you point blank that you'd better not be asleep or at work when there's a meeting or an event - and usually, if asked, they'll tell you they schedule their entire lives around the guild.

Most of these cliches still appear every time I visit the few remaining RP chats, or get contacted by people wanting to play.

P.S. There's also the guy who vanished suddenly... and a few months later, while Googling names of my characters to see if anything came up, I found that he'd taken a year's worth of his and my RP, made a few changes to move it away from the post-by-post format, posted it on a furry story archive as part of the life of his character (I have a feeling the parts I wasn't in were done with other players, and there was more after the point when he vanished), and claimed the characters as his own work. I contacted the site admin, got no response, and about a month after that the entire archive went bust. I never did see those stories appear elsewhere.

P.P.S. The "he put his thing in my you-know-what and we did it" comes from "My Immortal", an infamous bit of trolling posted to appear as though it was a real (but awful) piece of Harry Potter fan fiction. But one of my closest roleplay friends has encountered something just as bad, but real: one erotic scene she encountered consisted entirely of the other player posting: --strips, strips her, ***** her, gets dressed-- and if that wasn't comedic gold already, then says "Was it good for you?" I'm told she almost literally fell off her chair laughing.

[Andara Bledin]

That'd be awesome. It'd also be a great plot for a Malkavian (I play Vampire).

I naturally drifted to playing Malks way back. Fun times.

95% of my characters are anthropomorphic animals, and none of them are horny freaks; a few don't have sex at all, ever.

I still can't quite understand why people don't get that "furry" as often as not just adds race options.

And those same anti-furry-stereotype jerks would likely jump at the chance to play a half-dragon in D&D.

^-.-^

[Gravekeeper]

That'd be awesome. It'd also be a great plot for a Malkavian (I play Vampire).

Guns are an anathema to the ninja code. ( Ducks too, ducks are an anathema too. ).

Yeah, not much of a surprise which clan I played on the rare occasions I played the Masquerade. >.>

We've seen a few really, really awful vampire characters.

The best vampire characters are the ones who didn't want to be a vampire. The worst are those that do. You can typically chart the quality of play based on exactly how much the player wanted to be a vampire to begin with.

The second is known as the "Inigo Montoya" clause, and anyone who's seen The Princess Bride will get this one: you can't bring in a character whose entire purpose is to avenge your last character's death.

Ugh, God yes. I've had a couple people do back in my rp days even if the original character wasn't killed just whooped. What's that? You magically have a telepathic relative that came immediately because of some sort of brain Bat Signal and just happens to have the exact powers and skillset required to specifically defeat the person that beat your original character? -.-

These guys will take five paragraphs to explain that their dark, mysterious character, for whom a short personal description is in order, has entered the tavern, inn or glade and is surveying the room from under his hat or hood.

It's always the Dark Mysterious characters too with a subset into what I can only refer to as Mysterious Prostitutes. Who require five paragraphs to describe their barely restrained bosoms and dark, mysteriously enchanting eyes. They both have tenebrous orbs, one just has a larger set.

We did all our games over IRC, which lends itself quite well to RP as well as D&D sessions or a mixture there of. I controlled the game setting by coding a series of chat bots that acted as NPC characters and could parse chat and respond accordingly. You could speak with them directly ( and indeed they would respond, which fooled many people...who would then hit on the female one in PM. Constantly. ). But I had one who would privately advise you of scene information by parsing your actions. If you looked out the window for example, the bot would send you a notice telling you weather and time of day ( I coded a random weather generator that would maintain weather patterns ;p ).

The best feature I ever came up with for shutting people the hell up though was an automated character database that allowed people to register their character *and* the character's description and introduction. So when they entered, the NPC bot would provide a private notice to everyone describing the person's character that just entered. It would do the same thing if you looked at another character ( and it would parse various ways of taking this action ) the first time you looked at them. You could turn these notices on and off if they bothered you, thereby shutting people the hell up *and* giving everyone else peace if they wanted it. You could also request someone's visual description with a query command. All of this worked behind the scenes, so none of it appeared in the actual RP.

Really should have marketed that bot. Hell, maybe I still should.

I also had another one that handled combat that had both a basic and a complex advanced combat system. Depending on how much or how little people wanted rules in their RP. Worked quite well as it kept people from godmoding other people.

As for lifers, yeah, had a lot of problems with those. Both in game and in real life. The worst was the shitstorms that would occur when a lifer had a significant other who also played from time to time. Specifically when said lifer would go cyber up other people's characters under the guise of "Oh it's just rp, so its ok!" then wonder why their SO flipped their shit on them when they walked in and found them bending an elf girl over a table.

I still can't quite understand why people don't get that "furry" as often as not just adds race options.

I find this to be a chicken / egg situation. Anthromorphic characters were perfectly fine before the weird creepy fursuit porn types came along and co-opted them. Now they've essentially taken over that archtype of character in popular culture.

For me the key to it is whether or not the character has been sexualized for us hairless apes. You'll notice people don't typically have a problem with playing "beast" races in games or MMOs. Unless said race has been sexualised for human consumption. IE its specifically been made attractive to humans even if that makes no sense for the species its based on. IE putting breasts on a lizard girl and sticking her in a low cut top or a cat girl whose just a supermodel with a tail and body paint. People tend to look at that and see it as catering to the creepy furries.

[Skunkle]

Thing about the creepy furries is, most furries aren't very creepy. The creepy ones, a small percentage of the fandom, are the ones who get the press - partly because they make the loudest stink, and partly because the net trolls nab anything they do and spread it around like it's an epidemic. For example, the common notion that furries at cons hump random people in the hallways: that happened once, at a small California furcon in the early 90s, as about twenty people thought it'd be a funny way to up the ante on a game of "freak the mundanes". Yes, the furry fandom is heavily sexualized. So is the anime fandom, which is as much if not more into bizarre fetishes, and yet they don't garner the same bad press. Why not? Well, loads of people watch anime. But loads of people aren't "into that weird freaky furry shit".

Oh, and by the way... People don't really have sex in fursuits.

In AOL RP chats, 70% of guys are dark and mysterious. Usually these are vampires or immortal in some way. And all the girls wear skimpy outfits. None of my characters are immortal, have bizarre powers, or wear slutty clothes-- err, maybe Lilith Rose, a vampire bat girl, she likes short skirts, but-- otherwise...

Even as a furry, though... Lizards don't get bewbs. A human girl with a tail and ears is called a nekomimi, and is NOT an anthropomorphic critter. She's just a girl wearing ears and a tail (but please, please don't ask how that tail is probably temporarily "attached").

The vampire character stereotype-- do you mewan the player, or the character? In the games I'm in, there are no PC mortals running around being embraced, just ghouls and kindred. As for characters, I know very few if any who sought out a vampire once they figured things out, but I know a whole lot who were embraced willingly. Both of mine were, and they quite enjoy their unlives, though neither is at all in it for the seductive side. Both of them are businessmen, and they just want to do their jobs for longer than a mortal life allows. One of them (Ventrue, Masquerade - playing now for almost nine years OOC time, longest-running character in the game) is based loosely on real historic people; the other (Daeva, unaligned, Requiem) is literally a real historic - though by no means famous outside his field - person, adapted over.

[SkullKing]

We did all our games over IRC, which lends itself quite well to RP as well as D&D sessions or a mixture there of. I controlled the game setting by coding a series of chat bots that acted as NPC characters and could parse chat and respond accordingly. You could speak with them directly ( and indeed they would respond, which fooled many people...who would then hit on the female one in PM. Constantly. ). But I had one who would privately advise you of scene information by parsing your actions. If you looked out the window for example, the bot would send you a notice telling you weather and time of day ( I coded a random weather generator that would maintain weather patterns ;p ).

The best feature I ever came up with for shutting people the hell up though was an automated character database that allowed people to register their character *and* the character's description and introduction. So when they entered, the NPC bot would provide a private notice to everyone describing the person's character that just entered. It would do the same thing if you looked at another character ( and it would parse various ways of taking this action ) the first time you looked at them. You could turn these notices on and off if they bothered you, thereby shutting people the hell up *and* giving everyone else peace if they wanted it. You could also request someone's visual description with a query command. All of this worked behind the scenes, so none of it appeared in the actual RP.

Really should have marketed that bot. Hell, maybe I still should.

You definitively should do it. what language was it, Python?


Ever thought of trying to turn it into an standalone or an iOS app?

[Andara Bledin]

Really should have marketed that bot. Hell, maybe I still should.

I also had another one that handled combat that had both a basic and a complex advanced combat system.

You should totally market both of these. With people doing more online gaming, they'd both be really awesome as part of a gaming framework.

Oh, and by the way... People don't really have sex in fursuits.

People haven't even done 90% of what's been reported. There's a report of a huge something that went on at one of the earlier Confurences, and I have it on good authority from one of the major people in the story that it never happened. Or anything even remotely like it that could have been sensationalized. From what I can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth by a bunch of bitter burned furs with axes to grind.

As for the whole sexy character thing... I don't think I've ever sexualized any of my pen and paper rp characters. Actually, I don't think any of the crew I gamed with ever did, either.

The closest I've ever gotten was when the boyfriend and I had a brother sister team who happened to also be lovers. And the reactions from others when they figured out both types of relationship was awesome.

^-.-^

[Skunkle]

Pen and paper RP characters, I can't really see a reason to want to sexualize. The characters I mention are mostly used in chat-based play that's usually of the slice-of-life variety in a modern-day setting; even the few that exist in a Medieval sort of setting are used in life situations, not in "go out on an adventure" or "crawl a dungeon" type stuff. Sex tends to be a part of interpersonal stuff, eventually.

I've only ever seen a few disturbing things, after attending over 30 cons, half of those being furcons.

[Android Kaeli]

I oversee a forum-based RP, have been for a couple of years now -- it's based on a long running console game series.

One of my biggest peeves is when I have to send a profile back to the player, stating that the character profile in question does not fit the storyline. Because of the nature of the game series and the time frame in which I set the storyline in, there may or may not be limits to the type of character that can be played. However, I have been flexible about characters -- I really don't care what kind of job the character has, what their background is [for the most part anyways], who their parents were, or what kind of skills/weaknesses they have. While there are some limitations, it's not so much so that characters can not be created from what time frame the storyline is.

I recently had a character profile submitted to me that was so damn awful, I had to tell the potiental player to either get his shit together with the profile or just stop while he was ahead. It roughly took about five times before I eventually told him this; there was no reason for him to be so stupid when it came to creating a profile for a freaking character. Especally when some of the same crap I had told him at the beginning, he didn't bother to correct or re-worded it so that it sounded better but even a person who wasn't overly familiar with the things he was trying to put into the profile could tell him themselves to fix.

What was so horrible and awful about this profile that I was glad he stopped after the fifth or sixth time? Lets just say that this person was trying to submit a character that sounded like it was taken from a currently popular ninja anime/manga series and was trying to pass it off into a video game world where the most ninja-like thing in it is the all female band of thieves that only has one male born into it every generation or so, of which is the main villian of most of the series regardless of when the game was set in.

[Gravekeeper]

Thing about the creepy furries is, most furries aren't very creepy. The creepy ones, a small percentage of the fandom, are the ones who get the press - partly because they make the loudest stink, and partly because the net trolls nab anything they do and spread it around like it's an epidemic.

Which is precisely my point. The most visible/extreme segment has co-opted everything else and a Furcon is a visual spectacle the media could never resist. Sure, anime has its weird fetishes, but its been around quite a lot longer and honestly it isn't as visible. Plus, it is looked upon with similar disdain by the media in its country of origin.

Thing is, cosplaying is fairly accepted these days and to those that don't accept it they just see some sad nerds dressing up like nerd characters. Its just seen as a progression from Trekkies who were also viewed as sad nerds dressing up as nerd characters. But a Furcon on the other hand draws quite a bit more attention then a pudgy nerd dressed like Spock. The costumes are far more elaborate, draw quite a bit more attention and are not of established recognizable characters. They also co-opt something that already existed in western culture. Specifically, mascots.

Thus the exact same action is precieved differently from the outside between the two groups. Sad pudgy nerd dressed as Sailor Moon striking sexy poses is just viewed as a sad lonely nerd. Someone in a fursuit doing it though is "Oh god, is that Tony the Tiger? What the hell is he doing?" -.-

Hence the media loves it.

Oh, and by the way... People don't really have sex in fursuits.

I didn't say that they did, however if I were you I would not be willing to place that bet on Google.

Even as a furry, though... Lizards don't get bewbs. A human girl with a tail and ears is called a nekomimi, and is NOT an anthropomorphic critter. She's just a girl wearing ears and a tail (but please, please don't ask how that tail is probably temporarily "attached").

I'm aware of the terms. I was discussing the outside perception. Reptiles do get bosom'd up quite a bit though.

The vampire character stereotype-- do you mewan the player, or the character?

The player. Its one thing to be playing V:TM, it's another when you have one player that will try to cram a vampire character into anything you're playing. -.-

You should totally market both of these. With people doing more online gaming, they'd both be really awesome as part of a gaming framework.

They were all written in good ol' C+, then a friend of mine ported them to PERL. However, we are both actually licensed Apple developers too. iPod/iPhone apps are not problem at all for us. In fact I did design a number of gaming app tools, but we really didn't think we'd find much of a market for them so we never put them together. Thing is, while the Apple install base is massive, the Apple store is complete, total and utter shit. Shit layered upon shit layered upon shit. To the point of being near impossible for any worthwhile app to tread water in said shit unless it gets picked up in the main stream media ala Angry Birds. Which itself is a complete rip off of someone else's game. Much like 90% of the App Store. -.-

Gaming utility apps would largely get lost in it and it'd be up to us to struggle to advertise them by ourselves.

[Andara Bledin]

There's likely a huge opportunity for someone to develop tools for structured RP via internet/chat/forum for those of us who want to play but aren't near the people we want to play with.

^-.-^

[SkullKing]

They were all written in good ol' C+, then a friend of mine ported them to PERL. However, we are both actually licensed Apple developers too. iPod/iPhone apps are not problem at all for us. In fact I did design a number of gaming app tools, but we really didn't think we'd find much of a market for them so we never put them together. Thing is, while the Apple install base is massive, the Apple store is complete, total and utter shit. Shit layered upon shit layered upon shit. To the point of being near impossible for any worthwhile app to tread water in said shit unless it gets picked up in the main stream media ala Angry Birds. Which itself is a complete rip off of someone else's game. Much like 90% of the App Store. -.-

Gaming utility apps would largely get lost in it and it'd be up to us to struggle to advertise them by ourselves.

There is some truth in that, however, a few forum posts in RP Forums would probably give you a lot of attention without much work. Plus ex- P&P Roleplayers are always on the lookout for new tools.

Plus it won´t be a single-player application so once someone is interested they would show to more people.

Not saying it would be an instant success, but I think it would probably be worth the time, especially since you already made it.

[Gravekeeper]

One of the biggest issues with it though, is the inability to conform it to any game system ( and thus, lawsuits! ). The bots were RP management tools which is fine and dandy. The apps were game management tools which required a fark ton of user set up because we can't use an existing commercial game system. We can only give the tools for people to enter said game system on their own.

The alternative is to use our own game system, but then people would complain they can't use <insert game rules here>. So the options for game management are actually kind of limited unless we allow for a crap ton of set up. -.-