Roleplay (Insanity) - Who is Your Character

ErrantErrant Member Posts: 34 ✭✭
There seems to be an overly large amount of OOC communication happening on IC channels. This very jarring for people who like to create characters and immerse them in the world that's been (is being created). I understand that this is launch but can we not have people fighting to the death over 'rats'? What kind of person is your character that everything your character decides to kill you will instantly fight to the death for it? That can work as a character trait, without a doubt... but is that your character? Is your character the type of person who -would- fight to the death? Or are they more careful and cunning, or maybe more laid back? Who is your character - or are we playing Call of Duty Text Warfare?
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  • TextWenchTextWench Member Posts: 52 ✭✭✭
    edited December 2018
    Tye said:
    On the topic of RP:

    (Scatterhome): <personA> says, "As a great Earth historical figure once said, "I'm a dude. He's a dude. She's a dude. Cuz we're all dudes.""
    (Scatterhome): <personB> says, "As another one of Earth's great historical figures once said... I'm not your buddy, guy."

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Earth's history lost? Blatant OOC on public channels especially is really fucking with any sense of immersion.
    After the loss of Earth and its colonies, and the subsequent absorption of the few remaining humans into the Free Fleet, the survivors started this project in order to record what they could of our past. This would mainly be the thoughts and experiences of the last humans to have known our home planet, holocorded, though there was information captured by the Fleet from the computer systems on Callisto that gives us some extra insight today into the tragic history of our species beyond the purely anecdotal.
    From the human section on the website. 

    I think we would DEFINITELY still have garbled tidbits of Earth history. 1000 years isn't very long, really. It's likely to end up convoluted, and that's fun to play with. Music, cultural references are likely to linger, but be...almost unrecognizable. 

    And humans being the curious, backwards looking sorts we are, there's definitely going to be efforts to preserve and spread that history they DO have far and wide. So everyone's going to have had SOME chance to rub up against weirdo human history at one point or another. 


  • MundaneNameMundaneName Member Posts: 14
    A thousand years is a very long time. With digital archiving the language drift might not be such a huge issue but yeah things are going to be very garbled even still.

    Personally I like the idea that some random advertising jingle got saved by accident without context and as it is so catchy a bunch of humans now think of it as some kind of highly treasured cultural artifact. "And everywhere you go you hear the people say, Gimme a break! Gimme a break!" ;)

    With respect to the general topic though this game is currently bringing in people from many different backgrounds. Many other MUDs have a very, err, relaxed attitude to OOC things. It is far too early to say what the culture here will be like. Developing an RP rich culture is not going to happen quickly or without a significant amount of work.


    This statement is false.
  • SeladorSelador Member Posts: 31
    edited December 2018
    I'm not RPing a human, but things that may have survived Earth culturally would be rare and likely the bases of cargo cults. Johnny B. Goode was on the Voyager 1 golden record that left the solar system before Earth was destroyed. Clearly that was important to humans. Johnny must have been one of Earth's greatest heroes, right?
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  • TextWenchTextWench Member Posts: 52 ✭✭✭
    1000 years ago is...really not that long ago. I have art replicas in my house that are from vastly older pieces. We have world religions built around stories far, far older. Popular fiction, like Beowulf, is retranslated and offered up in accessible formats, new languages, new mediums. It lingers. 

    They -literally have- digital recordings from the survivors of Earth cataloging everything that they could remember about the homeworld. Holocorded. 

    It would survive better than you think. 
  • AmondraskAmondrask Member Posts: 37 ✭✭✭
    TextWench said:
    1000 years ago is...really not that long ago. I have art replicas in my house that are from vastly older pieces. We have world religions built around stories far, far older. Popular fiction, like Beowulf, is retranslated and offered up in accessible formats, new languages, new mediums. It lingers. 

    They -literally have- digital recordings from the survivors of Earth cataloging everything that they could remember about the homeworld. Holocorded. 

    It would survive better than you think. 
    Except we haven't suffered a massive cataclysm and almost complete loss of said physical artifacts. No books, no paintings, no statues, no architectural remnants - nothing. 

    People seem to forget that the Earth vanished, like a popped bubble. Everything we have left is the diluted remnants of what some hardcore prisoners remembered or felt like sharing to each other and their children - odds on them being history or culture buffs being fairly slim, considering the sort of people that would end up in a penal colony. Yes, there was some info gleaned from the computer systems on said penal colony. but again do you really think a prison would have a vast storage of historical and cultural information? Certainly there wouldn't be much of anything in the way of memes or references to pop culture left in the present day - we don't have the same sayings that people had thirty years ago, let alone a thousand. 

    I realise people get amusement from the gag of people botching current day references and the like, which is fine, but I personally don't feel it's terribly accurate to the lore. Still, this is more of a moot point on the topic. The blatant OOC chatter is very jarring, and it's a large factor in what's keeping me away from the game for the time being. 
  • SlanderSlander Member Posts: 176 ✭✭✭
    Counterpoint - All humans are descended from a very small group of prisoners from a space colony IIRC. I doubt they had access to much even before Earth disappeared.
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  • SkaraSkara Member Posts: 16
    edited December 2018
    https://forums.starmourn.com/discussion/271/sneak-preview-dialogue-trees

    This is canon.

    edit: The NPC is specifically crafted with 'likes ancient Earth memes' as a design point.
  • AmondraskAmondrask Member Posts: 37 ✭✭✭
    edited December 2018
    I don't think that's really something to go off of, as it was a community built thing that was built by meme-loving jokers. It's an anomaly and OOC driven, not exactly a great candidate for proof.
  • TextWenchTextWench Member Posts: 52 ✭✭✭
    NPC's make a bunch of earth references. Again, it's cannon that there is -literally a holorecording- of the memories of the survivors of Earth. Of, and I quote, "the last humans to have known our home planet."

    We still have lingering information about completely eradicated cultures on earth that existed thousands of years ago, fragments, of course, but the idea that 1000 years into a timeline in which we have electronic records of folks' memories that -nothing- would remain is laughable. 
  • EsheEshe Member Posts: 76 ✭✭✭
    I don't think anyone is suggesting that absolutely nothing remains. They're suggesting that those memories would be tempered by the experience of the people who left them, and coded jokes aside, Memetopia would not be the product. It's possible to take too many liberties. 
  • AmondraskAmondrask Member Posts: 37 ✭✭✭
    A holocording is just a future analogue video recording, as far as I'm aware - it's not the same as a literal recording of their memory, just them talking about what they remember. See the holocord of one of the initial human survivors here https://www.starmourn.com/races/humans/  It's just him talking about it, and even then he's not entirely sure on the specifics of Jesse James, other than he was some famous outlaw. Information of relatively recent times was already vague and fading, and that was almost a thousand years before the in-game date. 

    Again, it's an entirely different scenario from anything we can compare it to in real life. Even when ancient cultures went extinct, there were still a large number of people that would have interacted with them and absorbed or passed on information or cultural quirks from them, when the main one broke down and diffused. The diaspora of such a large number would naturally lead to some fragments surviving to some extent.

    In Starmourn, there were 375 humans from which all current humans are descended from. These 375 were hardened criminals, as well, so again the information pool is already small from which to draw from. Add a thousand years and a huge amount of inter-cultural mixing, and it's unlikely you'd find much coherent or recognisable references from Earth culture. So, not nothing, but hardly sufficient to justify using present day memes and references to any great degree. 

    Then again, this is all conjecture on our behalf, so unless we got Eukelade or one of the other staff members weighing in, people can and will do as they please. I just want people to act and talk IC, even if that involves the use of outdated memes and pop culture references. 
  • entropyratentropyrat Member Posts: 10
    What we need staff to address is "though there was information captured by the Fleet from the computer systems on Callisto that gives us some extra insight today into the tragic history of our species beyond the purely anecdotal." what information? How much of it? Was this just fragments of data or are we talking about entire libraries?
  • zacczacc Member Posts: 100 ✭✭✭
    edited December 2018
    I think the big question(s) is:
    Did Starmourn's Earth follow the same timeline as RL Earth?
    If not, is it appropriate to use RL references IG?

    Don't forget the computer systems on Callisto. There could have been a futuristic version of wikipedia stored on them. Just saying.
  • QitorienQitorien Member Posts: 361 ✭✭✭
    Not completely on topic, but just two points:
    1) I treat everything anyone says about Earth as if they are making it up because who would know? That's not completely satisfactory because I, the player, know and it does hurt immersion a little anyway.
    2) Remember that it's not simply a long time ago that anyone experienced Earth, it was also just a small handful of jailed convicts from prison...There are plenty of well-educated prisoners, but the knowledge was probably more limited from the get-go given the limited source.
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  • entropyratentropyrat Member Posts: 10
    In general I think we probably need to focus less on what convicts knew, since I think we can all agree this was likely way too limited in scope to be of great use IC for referencing Earth history/culture. No convict had a brain full of 1980's movie trivia, or a comprehensive memory of the War of the Roses.

    The real focus on "What is appropriate to know" should really be based on what was grabbed in that computer swipe at Callisto. Was this primary just prisoner data with limited background information? Or was it Zacc said a futuristic version of Wikipedia? 

    Also, regarding "Did Starmourn's Earth follow the same timeline as RL Earth?" I don't see any reason to assume that it didn't follow Earth's time line up until the present day. But this really doesn't matter at all unless the computer information on Callisto was encyclopedic.
  • CrorrCrorr Member Posts: 64 ✭✭✭
    My two marks: The colony, if it was run more like US prisons tend to be today than say, Australia-as-a-penal-colony or the Tower of London, would probably have had a few novels that would have been considered 'classics' in their data banks, maybe one or two magazines' catalogues, a lot of training manuals for somewhat boring jobs like accountancy, and a bunch of law books (most of which would obviously be as hilariously out of date as it would be for us to have a copy of the Code of Hammurabi, if only because of the different cultures and societies human culture ended up getting filtered through in the new sector), and a bunch of biographies of people important to the society from which the criminals came. The biggest chunk of what would be available though would be prison records, time-sinks, and approved entertainment. A couple genres' top 40s playlists, a few movies (most likely action flicks and thrillers, with one or two holiday films per.), a few religious texts and prerecorded sermons, maybe a season or two of a popular television show. Note that access these would be 'good behavior' perks. I imagine that after a generation or two there was probably a push to grab as much information as could be found, especially once contact was made, but computers left alone for that long tend to degrade or become so obsolete that no one has the tech needed to bridge the gap. (Remember the betamax episode of Bebop?).

    So, essentially, we'd probably have a few snippets of some ancient biographies, trade techniques, and one or two reliable complete quotes from human authors, and a bit more of pop culture circa 1000ish years ago, and a pretty decent idea of what the 'ideal' human body looked like at the time, plus some antique training equipment from the gyms that would be a bit like someone in modern times finding a training post from William the Conquerer's time, or a set of caber tossing equipment. But for a little bit of context, the oldest known English song as of earlier this year was written in the 1200s. The oldest complete song we know is about 2200 years old, ish, and the oldest song we can piece together is about 3400 years old. Out of 55000 years or more of music. Greensleeves, which is one of the oldest earworms commonly known today, is only about 500 years old, if that. Meanwhile, we have no real idea of what slang sounded like before Shakespeare and Chaucer's time, and even what we do know was probably a bit cleaner than what you'd hear in the rough parts of town. Memes and jokes are probably missed when made, by and large. When was the last Tide Pod reference you saw in the wild? Because that nonsense started THIS year.

    On the other hand, if Calliope was space-Aus we'd have next to nothing but vague memories of prisoners who were probably grandparents when they recorded things, plus the prison records to tell us which of those survivors committed what crime, and maybe where they came from originally. In the unlikely event that a prisoner was able to produce something both interesting in a historical sense and hadn't pissed off the space-wardens too badly, we might have a reference to something he did. Maybe even an incident report or a recording of the wardens chewing out someone and using pop culture references as analogies (a la: "Well if it isn't our own little Paris Hilton trying to skive kitchen duty to avoid getting his haaaands dirty." or "Someone thinks he's Gordon Fucking Ramsey tonight, wasting supplies to spice up your buddies' rations?") but we'd utterly lack any context for those references in the same way that people might not quite understand the procession of ghosts in MacBeth being intended to play to the ego of one of the patrons of the play, or...well, most of the Genie's references in Aladdin if you were target demographic when it was released.
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  • VictoriaVictoria Member Posts: 22 ✭✭
    All I want to know is if there is anime.
  • BadPenguinBadPenguin Member Posts: 42 ✭✭
    We have cultures older then 1000 years still kicking and surviving written texts from then. We also currently have data stored that can survive EMP and nuclear devestation. All of Earth's info would realistically be accessible 1000 years from now if we exist. We are sending space ships now with tons of info made to last eons in space while searching for intelligent life. Not only would we see pop culture references we probably should see Aliens knowing them because of Voyager and all the radio waves we send out.
  • MinionMinion Member Posts: 162 ✭✭✭
    That is assuming a human-centric development to Starmourn sector. Humans are the relative newcomers to the galaxy where some races have had spaceflight for tens of thousands of years. Chances are that the 375 prisoners were far more ljkely to assimilate into other established cultures rather than cling to their own to that extent. Very little of ancient history is truly understood even if it was well recorded, which it wasn't. 

    For instance, the histories of Julius Ceasar were likely not truly accurate but written from a roman-centric hero worship by a man  who more than likely twisted many facts for his own gain and reputation.
  • AureliusAurelius Administrator Posts: 467 Starmourn staff
    We have cultures older then 1000 years still kicking and surviving written texts from then. We also currently have data stored that can survive EMP and nuclear devestation. All of Earth's info would realistically be accessible 1000 years from now if we exist. We are sending space ships now with tons of info made to last eons in space while searching for intelligent life. Not only would we see pop culture references we probably should see Aliens knowing them because of Voyager and all the radio waves we send out.
    Yeah, but we have a very very tiny percentage of written texts from them.

    Virtually all info from past cultures is gone, and the best we can do is make educated guesses by trying to infer what they were like from the relatively few data points we actually have. It is likely somewhat more will survive 1000 years from now, but almost all the data we produce will have been lost.

    However, the difference in Starmourn is that -none- of that data was taken with the humans who were kidnapped by the Free Fleet. It's all just gone. 

    Voyager, btw, is very slow and so even 921 years later it will have barely left the vicinty of the solar system, cosmically-speaking. Radio waves are the speed of light, but the galaxy is huge, and Starmourn sector is not close to Earth. Radio waves can go 921 light years in 921 years, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. Radio waves wouldn't have even traveled 1% of the width of the galaxy in that time (not to mention that the further away they get the weaker they get) and Voyager is much much slower than that. 
  • TyeTye Member Posts: 127 ✭✭✭
    Aurelius said:

    So yeah, anyone referencing Gordon Ramsey or MacBeth is being pretty OOC. 

    Stealing this for my signature line to reference ad nauseum in the future.
  • MundaneNameMundaneName Member Posts: 14
    Aurelius said:
     Radio waves can go 921 light years in 921 years, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. Radio waves wouldn't have even traveled 1% of the width of the galaxy in that time (not to mention that the further away they get the weaker they get) and Voyager is much much slower than that. 
    Just because radio waves travel at the speed of light does not mean they are going to be detectable. Baring some very specific targeted broadcasts or some magic detection technology there is no way that someone on the other side of the Milky Way could detect signals from earth.


    This statement is false.
  • CrorrCrorr Member Posts: 64 ✭✭✭
    Pssst. You're agreeing with him. He's pointing out that there's no way it's happening.
    Come one, come all W'hoorn, to the Cultural Exchange where we can talk about being catbird klingons!
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