Suggestions for Good RPing

Hello, everyone. I wanted to elaborate on a couple things I've noticed in the ICs that I think we can change. Much of this is common RP knowledge but a lot of the time we don't even realize that we're doing these. I'm going to be using examples for each topic but I do not intend to target anybody in specific. Just wanted to make that clear.

Powerplaying/Autohitting and Preparedness

Now, there are a couple forms of powerplay, and sometimes it's forgivable to help the plot move. However, what I'm going to be focusing on here is known as Damage Powerplaying, and also autohitting. We're all guilty of this in combat scenes. None of us want our characters to lose a fight, be injured, killed, etc. and to bypass this often we will attempt to take control of a combat situation. This can involve hitting an enemy with complete certainty and not allowing the person controlling said character react, as well as taking control of someone's character in your post during a fight. Obviously this can be planned out between two players but most often it's not. Here's an example I found in The Paradox Machine.

ViperaUnion wrote:Charging over, Ravage seemed to materialize out of nowhere, and, with an extra boost from her wings, punched with as much force as she could with unsheathed claws of superior metal, metal that was unlike any other, formed into the sharpest blades that were physically possible. One fist punched the one that had seized Vey, forcing the miraculously-revived Jiiran to drop him, and the other attacked the area in the breastplate where she knew the power source was surely hiding. Just as she remembered from before, her claws didn't completely pierce through, but they left notable scratches in their wake, and the force of the blows was enough to send Jiiran flying a distance away, as Ravage landed back on her talons, seemingly unfazed, although fury was evident in her every move, and the look in her eyes.

Like I said, this could have been planned out between VU and tonysaur, but it was the best example I could find. Here, Ravage hits Jiiran as hard as she could, and Jiiran couldn't do much about it, especially since it's stated that Vey was forced out of his hands. Even then, it's stated that the force, "was enough to send Jiiran flying back," which tonysaur may or may not have wanted. Now, in the next post it's dealt with pretty well but I this kind of thing is an issue in the RPs and I could see it becoming more of a problem with everyone in the future.

Now, you may or may not know what I mean when I say preparedness. Again, everyone is guilty of this, I've seen it and done this myself so many times I wouldn't bother to count it. This most commonly occurs within ship battles, but it happens everywhere. This is when a character just seems to be magically prepared for any type of situation in battle or otherwise.

For example: "Our lasers aren't working against that Dreadnought? Fire the ______ (Insert any number of things here: disruptor, phazer, heat, entropy, thermonuclear, whatever)missiles!"

Another one: "Oh, my sword and plasma cannon isn't working against this huge predatory snake thing? No problem, I have a railgun!" (This was me, by the way).

Though people can be more prepared than others, they usually don't have something to just pull out their pocket for every single situation. It;s a form of metagaming, really. It makes sense sometimes, such as when we're just being introduced to a character or don't know the capabilities of a ship, but usually it's just annoying. Sometimes it can also lead to a chain of this occurring, which is difficult to explain, but it's usually when someone doesn't known how to react to an improvised solution in combat and does the same thing. This is a big rant, so I'll stop now.

Mary Sues/Gary Stus and Overpowering

Ok, here we go. This is my biggest pet peeve in roleplaying and, I'll admit it, I'm guilty of it as well. For the love of a God that I don't believe in, please do not create perfect, idealized characters! I know everyone tries to give their characters flaws, and some characters we've seen haven't been developed enough to show these. Too often, I see these same characters have flawless opinions on everything, always know what to say, and the faults take too much of a backseat, or simply don't exist.

Let's take (With Whoster's permission) Emperor Xonoc as an example. Xonoc is a brilliant and experienced leader. He's kind, knows what he's doing, skilled in much of what he does, and more. However, I can't really name any faults actively present in Xonoc - And it's not that he's been around for only a couple posts, because he's been here for a while.

I have personally seen everyone do this, and if you deny it to me I will post a video of myself laughing for ten minutes straight. Point is, please don't make your characters too good to be true. I am currently trying to fix this for my own characters, because I'm very guilty of it as well, and everybody should reevaluate their characters to make them more imperfect. Make these faults realistic, however. If you don't know much about bipolar disorder and you want a character of yours to have it, either do your research or find something else.

This also applies to combat abilities and overpowering. Like I said before, none of us want our characters to die and we can and will create bad***es in the RPs. I personally do not want to be fighting Ruthless Galaxy's version of Chuck Norris. It's boring. Try to create a weakness for your character so their (relative) super strength/augmentations/extensive combat knowledge/whatever is counterbalanced.

These were only the two things I really want to discuss at the moment. If you want to make a suggestion like these to everyone else, post in this thread. Otherwise, please read Vipera's guide, as well as others, if you want to improve your writing. I know I do.

A word on autohitting, the reason it happens is super simple, and I openly confess to doing it on multiple occasions. The main reason people start to autohit in stories is because if they allow the other character an opportunity to dodge, meaning the attack doesn't connect in their post, the other RPer whose character is being attacked has a huge tendency (And a rather annoying and irritating one, at that) to make their character either dodge or block the attack, and take no damage at all. This is a big no-no in RPing that people have trouble dealing with. Typically, what should happen is the character attempts to block or dodge, but gets hit anyway, the end result being the wound wasn't as severe as it could have been.

The only time that autohitting really makes sense is if it was planned, although sometimes, it will occur under certain occasions. One might be that an aspect of one of the fighters in combat is that they have incredible speed, in which case it would be very difficult to dodge an attack. The other is to make the scene as a whole, although that part is a bit debatable. Overall, if you're going to autohit, make sure you're not breaking any rules, first, and secondly, autohits should never be lethal wounds.

Zaroas, one other issue has come to my attention, though it is less important than the those two that you have stated.

So, I was reading through Rise of Thart, I believe it was the first post in the IC. I noticed how pleasantly surprised I was to see some variety in the form of a Samien. Instead of the natural pink color that most Samiens have, this one was blue. And, instead of a regular species variation, the coloring was tattoos.

Now, I know that we have a lot of diverse races and characters in the RP, but eventually, after they've been introduced, they'll become more and more regular, and less surprising or interesting. I think it would be a great benefit if we tried to introduce a more varied set of characters, such as Darkel's Samien character. Maybe they're lacking a limb and don't have the proper tools to replace it, perhaps it's just tattoos. It doesn't even have to be a flaw, just something to better grab your attention.

I shall address something which I told someone earlier.

Defining Insanity and Sociopathism

In actuality, insanity does not define violent tendencies, or vice versa. Insanity simply means a severely abnormal pattern of behaviors. Some violent, some not. Most writers fail to correctly illustrate insanity because of this. A realistic insane man would likely wear his pants over his head on some days and not be bothered by using the restroom while he's not in the restroom (if you get what I'm saying). This insane man will likely be dangerous, yes. But his sole purpose is not just to kill. He has a lifestyle too, however strange or taboo.

Now I will address sociopathism, which is what is portrayed in today's fiction as the "evil insanity". Being a sociopath is more than just killing people. Sociopaths are liars, cheats, and manipulators. They do far more than kill. They get their way in which ever way they need to. That being said, sociopaths are not people you point at and say, "oh, look at that sociopath!"

Sociopaths are hidden. You don't know they're messed up until they do something really bad to you, because they're so good at hiding it. An example of this is the Governor from the Walking Dead. Nobody really knew he was such a terrible dude until he killed all of his men because they wouldn't go back to kill the surviving people at the Prison.

Kradus is the prime RG example of sociopathism. Although Kradus is very outwardly a bad dude, and makes that known to everyone. But if we look back to the early days of the Dominion, Kradus outwardly seemed like a pretty cool dude, and that often led to empires foolishly allying themselves with him. When times cracked down on him, we got to see his true colors emerge. Now that it's out there, he has no need to hide it anymore.

The only characters that we can apply the concept of "kill everything just because" are essentially lifeless droids and robots. A good example I think are the Loccalians. They're not robots, but they may as well be. Overall, their mission from the beginning was to exterminate everything that can't be used to benefit them. Overall, the Loccalians wish to kill, but they have a mission in the process. They want to expand and gain knowledge, to the point that they have "god-brains" as I call it, and they basically want to know everything about everything. They kill not only to kill, but also to take a race's resources and harvest them as their own. They might also be interested in specific stars or planets. Loccalians are all about obtaining wisdom and being known as "alpha" of all things in existence.

Killing everything can be a goal, but it should never be the mission. It should simply be one of the things that the race/character wishes to do or happens to accomplish along the way.

"To Build a Villain" Backstories

I'd like to point out that it would take a very crushing backstory to destroy a person so much and completely derail their perception of humanity and civilization. It can't be the cliche, "oh, his family was killed," either. Sure, his family could still have been killed, but that's just something that should happen along the way. Take Kradus for example. His entire homeworld was raided in a single day, and in an instant he witnessed his family die, his home destroyed, his friends slaughtered, and was taken aboard a Loccalian ship and taken back to Locce. That's enough to traumatize a kid, as young as he was, thoroughly. However, the most it would do would send them into an increasing depression. There needs to be more. The pain has to travel with them throughout their entire lives. One day of pain isn't enough to drive someone over the deep end, typically. There are a few exceptions but none that really apply here. So, Kradus was made into a slave, because Jadel were too strong and useful for the Loccalians to completely dispose of. They could be taken advantage of. Kradus was treated with harsh living conditions, an insanity environment, horrid labor as a child, dangerous work, and cruel enforcement. Every time Kradus made a really, really close friend (often another slave), his Slavemaster would kill them as soon as he suspected their friendship, simply to send a message to Kradus that he had no other purpose, but to work and serve the Loccalians. After a couple of decades of abuse and mistreatment and constant, constant loss, Kradus snapped. When the Loccalians began to decline and Locce had fallen, Kradus took the first opportunity he got to kill as many of them as he could and eventually escape. However, escaping was the least of his objectives. He wanted to kill them before anything else, for what they did. Because that would feel like the weight of the world being lifted off of his shoulders, knowing that they are dead.

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Those are some contributions of my own.