HARSH AUGMENTED REALITY
Level 21
THE SCHOOL ROLEPLAY, ROLEPLAYING GUIDELINES
Index:1. Introduction
2. You Versus Who You Play
3. Actions, Emotes & Roleplay Limitations
3.1. Actions & Emotes
3.2. SRP Theatrics
3.3. Roleplay Limitations
4. Character Development5. Sharing a Community
6. Gang & Crime Roleplay
1. INTRODUCTION
Hello! Welcome to the School Roleplay (roleplay) guidelines - a handbook that explains, to new players and those who wish to develop their roleplaying insight, certain concepts regarding playing a character, coexisting within an interpretative setting and sharing a space with other players in a way that's healthy, fun and organic.
Upon joining SRP, you will be entering a universe based on a specific setting: an island city beyond coastal Japan - the city of Karakura. This means that you will be playing someone who lives in this city and is part of a broader community which is shared by other individuals. With this in mind, character creation and development are two different aspects that are extremely important in order to maintain good roleplay culture.
The concept of playing characters within a setting is as old as time, but the possibility of doing so within an enabling, virtual community, amongst other like-minded individuals, is actually really new, and has spread throughout the internet, covering each and every corner of this virtual space, spreading to other online communities. Some of them express their creativity in video-games, such as Minecraft, GTA, GMod and such, while others limit their activities within purely text spaces, such as Discord. It's fair to say, though, that with or without the existence of these mediums, the concept of roleplaying would still exist in one form or another.
The many characters of SRP, played by the many community members that share this space with one another, are unique and interesting - some more than others, but interesting nonetheless. The care that each player puts into their character is inspiring, which in turn encourages other players to do the same. Some characters are more popular than others, some are more impactful, and others are well thought-out from the very beginning to the very end of their development. This is the art of roleplaying, and hopefully, this thread motivates players to pursue a meaningful stay on SRP.
So let's jump into the concepts that revolve around this complex concept that is roleplay, and explore the many different items that are essential for a good and consistent roleplaying experience.
2. YOU VERSUS WHO YOU PLAY
As mentioned previously, when joining SRP, you will be assuming the form of someone else (your character) and inhabit a world (in the literal sense, a Minecraft world) with other players, as well as with the characters they play. This means that, as soon as you log onto the server, you will submit yourself to potential interactions and scenarios: once you are on SRP, you are roleplaying, even when you're not doing anything.
Since you'll be taking the form of a different person, it's important to learn and absorb some key aspects, standards and rules that are an important part of the whole concept behind RP, and being able to separate IC (in character) from OOC (out of character) is essential. You and your fellow players are here to enjoy the game and the roleplay, as well as the experiences they provide. Because roleplaying is playing a role, or assuming the personality of another individual, conflicts within the setting (e.g. IC conflicts) are bound to happen, just like in real life.
How you and your character deal with them is mostly what defines how much you'll be able to enjoy not only SRP, but any other roleplaying space or community: the way you and your character react to an in-character inconvenience MUST be, by default, different. If you are absorbing your character's IC pain, this means you're taking the game too seriously, and this leads to many other issues, such as mixing IC and OOC together, developing out-of-game rivalry with other players, amongst other issues that inevitably will impact your experience, as well as other players'.
While roleplay can get really interesting and engaging, it can also become stressful and frustrating. It's important to always remember that you're playing a game, and although we can, sometimes, indeed, get attached, maintaining the reminder that we're sharing a space with other people trying to roleplay just like ourselves can help us come back to our senses. In-character defeat and/or losses, such as items or weapons, grant us the opportunity of improving and working on our character's development - the possession of remodeled horse armor items should not be anyone's top priority.
Learning how to be a good sport and taking things lightly is the key for fun in any roleplaying space. Conflicts that happen or arise from in-character events must be dealt with and responded to in character. Making use of /looc when things start getting dirty on your character's end isn't the way to go, and displays a lack of good and healthy sportsmanship. Akin to any other game, arguments are bound to happen, but knowing how to deal with them is extremely important in order to avoid developing a bad reputation and receiving potential sanctions from SRP staff.
3. ACTIONS, EMOTES & ROLEPLAY LIMITATIONS
In order to properly roleplay, SRP provides commands that are used to portray physical actions. Emphasis: physical! This section won't get into details regarding the commands themselves, since this thread would only lure people who have at least a bit of mechanical knowledge on the server, but instead, we will be talking about the details and concepts of portraying an action.
Before anything, we first have to come to an agreement regarding SRP's roleplaying standards: we can agree that SRP has some sort of roleplaying standards - not in the quality side, but instead, on the mechanical side of things. SRP's roleplaying standards are in place in order to avoid abuse or rule infringement. SRP staff isn't out to catch players who use internet slang when writing their actions or emotes on a /me. Instead, they're looking for players who use emotes to break SRP rules, such as power or metagaming. SRP's roleplaying standards do not (or otherwise don't aim to) assure and maintain RP quality - and that's O-K!
The server aims to grant its community a wide range of freedom, instead of restraining it with quality-control guidelines. Because of this, we can find all sorts of roleplayer profiles on the server: from those who write a sentence or two, those who write a whole paragraph, and those who don't know what they're doing at all - people who use internet acronyms in-character and those who go out of their way to write numbers in word form (?). Each member of the community has established their own standards, and this is why SRP is one of the few roleplaying spaces where the community isn't as heavily restrained. There are RP-sommeliers who F-W this, just like there are some who do not. It's a matter of community principles and tradition, and while this thread isn't meant to point out what the right and wrong ways of roleplay are, it will still attempt to introduce players to concepts they otherwise didn't know about.
3.1. ACTIONS & EMOTES
Actions (or emotes, whatever you prefer to call them) are physical demonstrations of what your character is doing, using the commands /me, for a third person action, and /it, for describing an object, scenario or factor present in the scene. One fatal mistake people often commit is projection.
As mentioned previously, an action/emote is the description of a physical act - something your character physically performed. "Physical" is being so heavily enforced because oftentimes, players, during the writing of their character's actions, end up including details that wouldn't be noticed, seen or heard by the opposite party. One frequent mistake is including thoughts in one's action. Thoughts aren't perceivable by other people except yourself - projection is providing the opposite party (the person(s) you're roleplaying with) with an emote that simply can't be acted upon.
For example, "/me couldn't stand any more of that conversation. She thought Adam was really dumb and boring." Not only is this a pointless emote, it can also serve as an OOCly provocative device that can be absorbed by the other party, thus promoting a negative experience for everyone involved.
Ideally, an action should transmit the physical act, detailed enough so the other party can understand and expand upon. Can it be written in a paragraph or two? Yes, it can. Can it be as short as 2 or 3 lines? Yes, it can. Roleplaying is what you make of it, and quantity doesn't necessarily equal quality. Emotes should also contain understandable grammar.
But if you disagree with everything in this section, ignore it completely and go to the next one:
3.2. SRP THEATRICS
On SRP, it's common practice to exaggerate actions or certain scenes - to go beyond what's necessarily required for a particular action and, instead of sparing words, writing lengthy, exaggerated descriptions to act out, for example, a fight, especially in P2K. This is SRP theatrics, or detail roleplay (except SRP theatrics involves a broader meaning and goes beyond the simple act of writing paragraphs) - engaging in the elaboration of a lenghty development for a given scene, to add a dramatic dynamic that would otherwise be seen on TV shows or movies. Is this wrong, frowned upon or bad?
The portrayal of theatrics has long been part of SRP culture, and it's not exactly bad practice - it promotes planning and character development, whilst providing the involved players with an entertaining experience that they can be a part of. No matter the age, feeling like part of a combat, murder or drama scene feels cool, and some people live for it. Is this not the point of RP?
SRP theatrics goes against the idea of simple text-based roleplay - the concept of a bland game piece, lacking any depth or creative value: it aims for the creation of an elaborate scene, with live assets such as characters, a scenario and surrounding objects. It strives for true depth, while granting the participants development for their characters.
This is a practice in which participants may, due to the lenghty size of their characters' actions, include thoughts, intentions and other non-material items in their emotes. In this case, this is usually okay, since these are sessions usually held between friends, scheduled ahead of time between players who probably already know each other. Is the risk of "I am offended by this person's action, and/or don't know how to act on it" still there? Probably not, since these people know each other.
So we go back to what was said in the beginning of this chapter: SRP grants its players the ability to express their creativity in the most different ways possible. There is no actual limitation when it comes to roleplaying standards, as long as it doesn't break the rules. This has always been, is and likely will continue on being the norm.
3.3. ROLEPLAY LIMITATIONS
This is Minecraft. GTA will be GTA, and whatever other game will continue to be itself. Unless someone makes a 100% responsive game, where everything is interactable, roleplay will have its limitations, because it is an imitation of life, and in this context, done in a video game. Minecraft was a game made without RP in mind, so SRP, with the use of code, plugins and scripts, tries to fill in the gaps, but even then, there is still a long way to go. SRP is a universe created the way its creators intended - but luckily, there are well-known concepts to make up for what's lacking.
Actions and emotes are a powerful tool that allows us, players, to properly play our characters by properly portraying their actions. Our characters can pick a mug off the counter, despite this being mechanically impossible, or rip a bandaid off their ankle, even if there is no actual bandaid in a mechanical, gameplay-wise sense. Roleplay is play pretend 80% of the time, where players make up for what's not possible in the game in the form of actions and emotes. But being consistent as to what we can (or should) not do is important to maintain a fair environment for everyone.
Roleplaying items that shouldn't be there from a consistent IC perspective is usually unfair and can be considered powergaming, depending on the severity and how impactful it is towards the other party. This touches the topic of item RP and (surprisingly) fairplay, but in short, always aim to be consistent with your actions, in a way that upholds fairplay, mutual respect and doesn't infringe the rules.
4. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Character development means playing a character in a way that is consistent and realistic, instead of playing a cliché self-insert with no depth or story. Proper character development is asking "what would my character do?", instead of asking yourself what you'd do - this is the fastest and easiest way of maintaining a reputable image within the community.
While maintaining a cohesive character development is a rule in most roleplaying communities, seeing a former gang member joining a faction is somewhat common on SRP. This isn't enforced (nothing on this guide is), but going out of your way to maintain a proper character development, in a way that's believable and reputable, sets a golden standard to the general playerbase, which can then be followed in the future.
Character development isn't just maintaining a gradual line of progression, but also making the effort of portraying, playing and maintaining a human being who commits all sorts of mistakes, has a story to tell, a personality to display and thoughts, opinions and matters of their own, all while attempting to go about their daily lives.
5. SHARING A COMMUNITY
SRP is the pioneer of text-based roleplay in Minecraft - although its audience differs from what many experienced text-based RPers are accostumed to, it is still a roleplaying server with features that many bigger communities lack, and a broad range of freedom that can't be taken for granted in many online roleplaying spaces.
"Community" was mentioned many times in this thread - you are part of SRP's community, as a player, and should learn how to coexist amongst other people who are looking for the same experience as you are: roleplay. Respect should be upheld at all times, as well as courtesy and empathy. Remember that most people just want to gather with their friends and play. Aside from sharing a Minecraft server, you also share (probably more than one) Discord servers, forums and probably other spaces. Decisions you make on these mediums can be used as grounds for punishment from SRP staff.
Always be respectful and patient, amongst each other and with new, aspiring players. Encourage a quality and respectful roleplay stance community-wide, teach and be receptive to new players, and engage in meaningful projects with the intention of improving and maintaining roleplay culture.
Lastly, your aim must not be to try and become the main character. Karakura has hundreds of characters, and attempting to be "another cog", instead of the greatest piece of them all is egotistical, encourages powergaming and isn't interesting to anyone besides yourself. When roleplaying with another person, your aim should be to provide and promote a fun and entertaining experience to everyone involved.
6. GANG & CRIME ROLEPLAY
Gang-RP (and therefore, crime RP) is a niche field of roleplay that exists on SRP: the act of partaking in crime-derived scenarios and leading unlawful roleplay are one of the most difficult areas in all of SRP. Not only it's surrounded by rules and guidelines, you will also be dealing with players who are, just like you, competing for the best spot in the scene of gang-RP.
Participation in this kind of roleplay is limited by whether you're in a gang or not, but this is not always the case. "Gangs" are player-ran groups with internal organization, structure and charts, with the intention of providing its members and the community with interesting development and player-driven events.
Because it's such a competitive environment, things can get toxic really fast, although recent regulations have toned down the OOC discourtesy. Whether players can get toxic or not isn't the point, because what truly matters is how you'll deal with in and out of character obstacles. Some scenes can get heated, and so can OOC interpersonal interactions. Refer to chapter 2 and don't let the roleplay get to your head!
If you want to learn more about this niche, join the School Roleplay Crime Discord and connect with the crime community! There are many gangs willing to take new faces in.
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