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Roleplay Talks
February 24th, 2007 4pm FST
Rumors, Intrigues, and Secrets -- Talzhemir
Talzhemir: Thank you, Emerald Flame, and Gar. And thank you everybody else, for tuning in to this talk about roleplay.
Emerald|Flame: Hello all and welcome to our Groups and Guilds Day broadcast! Talzhemir will be giving her talk now called "Rumors, Intrigues, and Secrets" 'how character records greatly change the nature of play when the Continuity is likely to involve these three things.' Enjoy!
Talzhemir: The name of this speech is... Rumors, Intrigues, and Secrets
Talzhemir: "Is everbody in...?" -- Jim Morrison, of The Doors "The ceremony is about to begin." 
Talzhemir: Quick! When someone says "character sheet", what's the first thing you think it means? Mad dice-rolling so the outcome is wildly random?
Talzhemir: Geekish spouting of numbers for statistics ("My character has a 19 CHARISMA and a 17 DEXTERITY!")...?
Talzhemir: Does it make you worry that the game is about to turn into a mindless hack-and-slash fest...?
Talzhemir: I hope you'll be pleasantly surprised to find out that long before we need to worry about any of these things, what character sheets actually do, is to bring depth to roleplay by facilitating...
Talzhemir: ...Rumors, Intrigues & Secrets!
Talzhemir: Part One (of two): Rumors!
Talzhemir: In "Lord of the Rings", how the characters were perceived affected how they were treated by others, and what happened to them. For example, in his home village, everybody knew Bilbo Baggins was 'wealthy'...
Talzhemir: Pesky relatives come out of the woodwork, hoping to get written into his will. Bilbo gets no peace. It forms a part of his decision to leave Bag End to Frodo, and go live with the Elves.
Talzhemir: In roleplay on Furcadia, when a new player arrives, it's fun for them to learn various characters' reputations by hearing it from other characters.
Talzhemir: For this to actually happen, everybody in the Dream needs to know this.
Talzhemir: RP Dream-owners, please take note: What you know about others is part of what holds the Dream together as one "Continuity". It's like a bar-- One thing that keeps regulars coming back is that this is "the place where everybody knows your name."
Talzhemir: Whose job is it to uphold a Continuity?
Talzhemir: EVERYBODY's. Not just "key players", not just the Dream's owners, but everyone is responsible for trying to make the Dream's overall events make sense.
Talzhemir: Sometimes it takes a wee bit of thinking but it really pays off if the players go out of their way to gossip. 
Talzhemir: Of course, another way to learn about somebody is through OOC notes in their description.
Talzhemir: Generally, OOC info is marked by putting it in brackets. For example, somebody might put [Married to Jamie] or [Eldest son of mob boss Don Mario] or [looking for a mate].
Talzhemir: Sometimes OOC info can help jump-start the RP. In Persona RP (not-Strict), what you put in your description is alot more flexible.
Talzhemir: OOC info in descs can also lead to confusion, though. It's OOC information-- but normally, in good RP, we try hard not to roleplay based on what we only knew OOC, right? So should you RP knowing that information or not...?
Talzhemir: In Strict RP, to help prevent confusion, only "common knowledge" should be in brackets. If somebody's looking for a mate or has serious "mob" connections, it's expected that this will come out through actual roleplaying.
Talzhemir: That way, whatever you read in somebody else's description is fair game for use in RP because it's either something anyone can perceive with normal senses, or it's something that the "regulars" of this neighborhood are likely to know about you, and your character could have found out earlier.
Talzhemir: Imagine the RP that might take place with tags like these visible on characters about town: [Lord Edom's wife] [Lord Edom's torturer] [Lord Edom's Manicurist] [Lord Edom's mistress] [Lord Edom's Necromancer].
Talzhemir: Now from that, I think you've probably got a vague sense of what this Lord Edom guy is like... And you haven't even met him yet!
Talzhemir: Common knowledge tags that happen to connect two characters can really reinforce who characters are, within the community.
Talzhemir: The more characters are interconnected, the more sense of Continuity you'll get. And common knowledge passed on as rumors, not merely [OOC notes] can help to make it all come alive.
Talzhemir: Now sometimes somebody is so famous that their reputation won't fit in just a few words in their description. Think for a moment how much we know, in real life, about 'Prince Charles'...
Talzhemir: Let's see... Even if you're an American, you probably know some of the following: He was married to Princess Diana. He has two sons, William and Harry. He's married Duchess Camilla. He's rich, of course. He's the heir-apparent to the a dozen "Commonwealth" kingship titles. He's done extensive charity work.
Talzhemir: This kind of information is best saved for a web page. Currently, the most convenient place to post this kind of information is with Furocity.
Talzhemir: Furocity (http://www.furocity.com) is a site for any info you want, about a character. (There's also space for OOC information, and for information about the player as opposed to the alt).
Talzhemir: Here, for example, is a Furocity page for 'Digan Darkpaw'. http://www.furocity.com/profiles.cgi?login=digan
Talzhemir: We find out he's a retired army officer, and that he's moderately wealthy. Those are both the sorts of "common knowledge" things you might ask a bartender and the 'tender might know.
Talzhemir: Good job, Digan!!!
Talzhemir: So far I've just mentioned a kind of information that's helpful to gaming, and doesn't require any outside interference. The next part of my talk goes into territory where some kind of referee, judge or facilitator is helpful...
Talzhemir: Let's take a quick 5-minute break, please. I'll have a sip of water, and then I'll go on to Part 2: Intrigues & Secrets.
Talzhemir: In Part 1, I talked about Rumors, and how Bilbo Baggins had a reputation, and how furres can independently make the RP more fun by helping fill each other in.
Talzhemir: "Intrigues" happen whenever a character is acting from some motive that we don't know about. It could be an old relationship gone sour, for instance.
Talzhemir: (anybody remember in the Three Musketeers, how we find out a main villain was originally married to one of the heroes?)
Talzhemir: In fiction, intrigues are interesting because characters do surprising things. In roleplaying, however, intrigues run the risk of being very annoying because, to another RPer's perspective, a character may abruptly do something that makes no sense.
Talzhemir: Most RPers take it very badly when one character attacks another for what appears to be no reason at all. It usually seems like they're picking a fight just because they were OOCly bored, and that can be an ugly imposition on someone else.
Talzhemir: So, to some extent, intrigues are good-- but it's also good to have some kind of "reins" on it. Usually, having the motives get revealed later works better when we know somebody at least gave it a looking-over and okayed it.
Talzhemir: There's no guarantee you won't have a deadly mortal enmity develop in-play (like between Aramis and his ex-wife Countess De Winter), of course... but in general, it's helpful when the secret motives are pre-approved.
Talzhemir: In the world of tabletop paper-and-pencil-and-dice gaming, there's usually a gamemaster (GM or DM) who takes care of this stuff. On Furcadia, that role generally falls to the heads of the furres who own/run a Strict RP Dream.
Talzhemir: Why do we need GM's when we generally don't have coded combat? Well, one player might decide they want to keep picking fights with another character for OOC personal reasons. A GM can question the player's IC motives and decide whether or not it's a case of OOC harassment. To do that, the GM may need to be privy to IC secret information about the character.
Talzhemir: In some roleplaying games, players may be required to take on motives from the start, to help the play move along in an interesting direction. Dungeons & Dragons does it in an odd abstract and general way, by giving characters "alignments" ("Lawful Good", "Neutral Evil", "Chaotic Good", etc.).
Talzhemir: Sometimes it's done as an overarching mega-plot assumption. The MMORPG "City of Heroes" does it by setting up the Heroes vs. the Villains. "World of Warcraft" does it by setting up the Horde vs. Alliance.
Talzhemir: For the past ten years, game systems have been going further than that, getting players to opt-in during character creation to characters with motives, disadvantages, flaws, and foibles.
Talzhemir: Characters can begin as wanted by the law, or having a paralyzing phobia of worms, or being sworn to slay all Undead. And so on.
Talzhemir: Let's relate this business of 'Intrigues & Secrets' to fiction. Once again, let's use "Lord of the Rings", since I know alot of you have either read it or seen the movies.
Talzhemir: There's a character named Aragorn. To RP him effectively, I'd probably make an alt named "Strider". His reputation at the Prancing Pony in Bree is that he's a shifty outsider, one of those 'Rangers', up to no good.
Talzhemir: I could put that part on a Furocity page.
Talzhemir: The intriguing/secret part about Aragorn is that he's also "Isildur's Heir", the rightful king of the people of Gondor.
Talzhemir: Now, I could put in my description [Secretly the Real King]...
Talzhemir: One problem with doing something like this is that it begs the question, "Says who?!?!" (Yeah, who died and made you Elendil's descendant, hm?)
Talzhemir: For this part of Aragorn's story to be acceptable to the typical player, a referee needs to okay it. (Secrets and intrigues tend to work better in Strict RP than in Persona RP, which tends to run without much "authority".)
Talzhemir: After all, it's a bit on the twinkish side to go around declaring yourself everybody else's lawful liege and monarch out of the blue, right?
Talzhemir: For this to work, ideally we should be in a Strict RP (based on Lord of the Rings) and anybody playing there has to opt in to this kind of plot development first.
Talzhemir: If you want to play 'Aragorn' on the Lord of the Rings MUSH, they would require you to write up an application saying what your RP experience isk, and describe how you view the character and what you'd like to do with the character in IC play, and so on.
Talzhemir: ("Named" characters from the source material are often played on MUSHes, and there's some wonderful opportunities to take up "canon" characters out there. You could apply for your favorite Marvel superhero character on one of the Marvel MUSHes, for instance. These are all-text RPG's and you can find out more by Googling for "MUSH".)
Talzhemir: (getting back to Aragorn--) Now, the second problem with having [Secretly the Real King] in my desc is that it warps the RP pretty badly.
Talzhemir: No matter how good an RPer is, info like this has a way of swaying the play in a way that would never happen if this information had been concealed.
Talzhemir: An unwashed unshaved homeless man shouldn't get that many dates.
Talzhemir: And- Aha! We've found something that doesn't work well by just putting it on a web page.
Talzhemir: (not even if he looks like Vigo Mortensen.)
Talzhemir: In the all-text MUSH world, character sheets are typically approved by a gamemaster of some kind, who can say yes or no if somebody wants to be royalty, for instance.
Talzhemir: The MUSH mechanics let you type +prove and reveal new information that was previously established. It's also used for secret things like whether somebody is a vampire, whether or not someone has super strength, whether or not somebody has mage ability, and so forth.
Talzhemir: Most MUSHes don't run on number statistics, and combat is very much like it is in Furcadia's Persona RP Dreams: consentual, posed, a work of cooperative creative fiction writing. Character sheets were still needed for those intrigues & secrets, though. This incidentally opened up the door to characters having interesting super-powers.
Talzhemir: To regulate powers (and perks like being noble-born), most of them have point-construction systems. In general, what makes having powers more palatable was knowing that if someone is super-beautiful, or is actually the king's heir, you knowtheir player gave something ELSE up in order to have that.
Talzhemir: You know that your character could have something special, too, in that game. It's a bit like Lewis Carroll's unicorn says to Alice: "I'll believe in you if you'll believe in me."
Talzhemir: The payoff of character sheets isn't just in having unusual abilities, though. The biggest reward has been the joy of surprises.
Talzhemir: I mean... How'd you like to read Lord of the Rings and when Aragorn is introduced, it says "secretly the real king" a paragraph later?
Talzhemir: Or, how about, you're watching the movie, and a subtitle shows up that says 'Secretly the Real King!'? Doesn't pack much of a punch does it...?
Talzhemir: This is why I'm working on the "Furre!" RPG game, and, in the meantime, I encourage anybody who loves RP to go to a used bookstore and invest ten bucks or less in a second-paw copy of a game like "Vampire the Masquerade" or "Big Eyes Small Mouth". These are two idea-rich numbers-light game systems.
Talzhemir: (For specifically "furry" RP, there's "Worldtree" http://www.world-tree-rpg.com/ , and "Ironclaw" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironclaw !)
Talzhemir: All of these move out into "Strict" RP territory. Strict RP has need of some kind of system that allows the storyteller referees (usually Dream owners) to have some measure of control over characters' backgrounds, by granting approval.
Talzhemir: Unfortunately, the main way this is being done right now is by posting character sheets on a Forum where storytellers can see it- but so can the other players. A lot of the drama is killed this way. :/
Talzhemir: A better way to do this would be a project such as Screen Monkey Lite, which is a free program you run on a PC. Originally intended for adapting tabletop style gaming to online, it has ways to keep character records. The downside is that Screen Monkey isn't meant to be run 24/7. http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=3839&
Talzhemir: With character sheets, the characters can possess, act upon, and reveal, valid surprises. Now, this does require a GM, someone in charge of the Continuity. There does have to be somebody (or a friendly concil of somebodies) who'll back you up while in that Dream. Continuity needs enforcement; no way around it.
Emerald|Flame: Hopefully we will have PhoenixSpeak soon so you can run things through Furcadia!
Talzhemir: I just wanted to make it extra-clear that having rumors, intrigues, and secrets didn't necessarily mean having to have scores for your character's dexterity, or weapon skill, or magic ability.
Talzhemir: There's a need for players to be able to seed rumors, to reveal IC surprises such as their true loyalties, and their secret powers. I think the best way to do this are .PHP or Flash type thing (and Phoenix Speak will eventually cover alot of this too.)
Talzhemir: I can't say what the ultimate solution(s) is/are; right now we're just at the stage of hashing out the needs. If furres create their own character databases for Dreams, this helps me learn what we'll need when Phoenix Speak is designed!
Talzhemir: You're sort of prototyping, just the same way player-created Dreams often give us great ideas. So I hope I've inspired you, and maybe this talk puts a few bees in your bonnets. Thank you all for listening; I feel like I've let a few bees out of the hive in my head, now.
Emerald|Flame: Thank you so much for that very interesting and helpful talk, Talzie
Talzhemir: you're welcome! thank you for having me here today.
Emerald|Flame: I will be starting my talk shortly. Talz says if you have any questions to "run her down" sometime this week! 
Emerald|Flame: Thank you all for coming tonight. Talzie's wodnderful talk will be posted later on the webpages, as will mine!
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