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Roleplay (Insanity) - Who is Your Character
Errant
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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(Celestine): Name redacted says, "I ended up going Fury, and it's certainly complicated."
(Celestine): Someone else says, "Yeah. I'll need to get more lessons."
Please ... contextually this makes absolutely no sense to say IC. You need to get more lessons for what? More piano lessons? More singing lessons? Are you scheduling these in? And what do you mean you 'went' Fury ... You are a Fury. Stahp.
"They are elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty."
— Oscar Wilde
"I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before."
— Margaret Atwood
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.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.
Edit: For context, Beowulf is at least 200 years more recent to me than a book written this year would be to our characters and I sure as shit can't read old English.
Race: Elgan
Class: Engineer
I do appreciate the need to talk about stuff like this sometimes, and I think ooc clans are a great solution. Because when you want total immersion, you can just tune them out. But when you need to discuss mechanics, you have a forum to do that.
I think there are far more important things to focus our energy on than the example given though. Blatant OOC stuff is very jarring, I agree. But a novice Fury saying they need more lessons seems like a trivial thing to be upset about. They don't need piano lessons, they obviously want lessons on Fury things. Similar examples: I'm studying Biochemistry but need to go to more lectures before post-translational modification makes sense. I'm studying piano but I need more lessons and practice before I can play Bach. I'm a Fury but need more lessons in swordfighting before I can execute some of those complex maneuvers. That's hardly as immersion breaking as "who has a nexus autobasher for beast I can use lol"
We'll make more meaningful progress if we don't sweat the small stuff, I think.
Also "I went biochem because I didn't want to take inorganic chem." Some people do speak this way, especially if IC you aren't terribly grammatically savvy.
Instead of ridiculing people (even with their names omitted) on the forums, how about just leading by example and staying obviously IC ourselves? Maybe interacting with these people and showing them how we can express certain ideas in more IC language. For many people, this is their first experience with this and it is way healthier for the game to provide a nurturing environment than a ridiculing one.
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.
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.
This is canon.
edit: The NPC is specifically crafted with 'likes ancient Earth memes' as a design point.
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.
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.
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.
Jin
VOTE FOR STARMOURN
if there's no kittens in space
I'm going on a rampage
TectonToday at 2:17 PM
They're called w'hoorn, Groot
sets out a saucer of milk
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.
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.
Worse, it's not like those prisoners were scholars or folks generally interested in documenting life on Earth, although there was the Terran History Project at one point, which started doing so. It just didn't get very far because they were hardened criminals who, if they survived, became hardened soldiers trying desperately to survive in a hostile universe. Not a lot of time for worrying about documentation.
Anything anyone knows about Earth 900+ years later is so distorted as to be unrecognizable to us as 2018 humans, and is almost certainly wrong. Modern human history essentially begins the day the Free Fleet attacked the Callisto prison colony, and everything before that is just kind of a blur at very best, and mostly completely opaque. Maddox Khan and Akari Lane are effective Adam and Eve of the new human race. (With a guest appearance by Selma Castillo.)
So yeah, anyone referencing Gordon Ramsey or MacBeth is being pretty OOC.
Edit: During Open Beta, we changed this slightly: http://wiki.starmourn.com/Slang
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.
Stealing this for my signature line to reference ad nauseum in the future.