Roleplaying by Petrel If you are new to MUME, this will not be an easy book. At this writing, Roleplaying in MUME is in need of a revival. Perhaps you will be part of that revival! Much of this work is aimed at people who have played here a long time, who are interested in roleplaying, but who have not had the experience of doing it here. Therefore, some of the specifics in the examples may be unfamiliar to you if you are new here. Also, if you are new here, you may find the world confusing enough without finding out that there are people with different ideas about how to play! Still, that is the reality. If you are one of those who have a real aptitude for roleplaying and a real appreciation for Tolkienicity, you will (I hope) find the energy to plow through this volume and provide necessary feedback to the author as to how it is or is not successful. Whatever your favored style of play, I hope you enjoy the game, whether or not you enjoy this book! :) Petrel Feb. 11 1997 Chapter 1 - What Is Roleplaying? Chapter 2 - Fundamentals of Character Chapter 3 - Roleplaying Behaviour Chapter 4 - Game Features and Roleplay Chapter 5 - The RP and GP Communities Chapter 6 - Creating Your RP Character Chapter 1 - What Is Roleplaying? ================================ Roleplaying [often abbreviated to RP] is, simply, playing a role - that is, trying to develop a character, a fleshed-out individual within a given world [the Tolkien world, in our case], and to speak and act as that person would act. Roleplaying exists in contrast to mere 'gameplaying'. A gameplayer tries to score as many points as possible (exp, levels, war points) as quickly as possible. A gameplayer tries to learn all the game data so as to score as quickly as possible. He may 'stat-hunt' for a character with exceptional strength or intelligence. He tries to get the best equipment possible as quickly as possible. He interacts with other players enough to get partners to get experience, equipment, money and war points. He determines his behavior (good or evil) on the basis of what will help him score the most points the fastest. He tries to find out the numbers underlying the game: what is the damage roll of this weapon? how much is the damage of that spell? what wisdom does a warrior need to learn that spell? He uses the 'emote' command to speak with people who don't speak his language, or to give signals to his groupmates. Since xp and wp are gained only in combat, the combat commands are most important to him. He races about at top speed, in brief mode, so that the room descriptions do not slow him down. He kills as much as he can, as quickly as he can. He might avoid killing elves, but only because he has heard about 'punishments' for elf-killing. Roleplaying has different goals. It is not about scoring points, and in some senses it is not like playing a 'game' at all. It is more like amateur theatre or even like literature. Roleplayers have the same kind of joy that Tolkien must have had in creating an interesting character or plot development. They are playing for 'pride in authorship' and for the fun of creating an interesting theatre piece, not for numbers and points. A roleplayer recognizes that in a good Tolkien play not everyone will be Aragorn; there have to be some lesser warriors and even ordinary farmers and merchants without combat skills. Therefore he/she is more likely to accept the default stats he or she is dealt, or even to generate more unusual and "challenging" distributions so as to play a more interesting character. He/she will enjoy the time spent with other roleplayers weaving an interesting or beautiful scene, even if this involves sitting in the tavern talking all night, more than time spent in raw "xping" with gameplayers. The roleplayer determines his/her behavior by what would be natural, appropriate, or interesting for his/her character in the situation. He/she uses the 'emote' command freely to create a sense of scene. Most roleplayers may look forward to competition and conflict, but they will want to do it in a way that arises naturally from the world they have created. Here are some things which roleplaying is NOT: - Speaking in a contrived "Old English" style with "thee" and "ye" all the time. (In Tolkien, hobbits and men were generally quite plain-spoken. High-elves were considerably more formal. The point is that one matches one's speech to the demands of one's characters. There is no "RP style of speech".) - Killing every good mob in sight with the excuse that one is "playing an evil character". - Picking fights with people for the same flimsy excuse, and because one has heard a rumor that "rp-based whitie pkilling won't get you listed". Furthermore, GOOD roleplaying requires interaction with other roleplayers and with the Tolkien environment. One may be able to play "Macbeth" very well, but if the play being staged is "Cats", one is not doing good roleplaying by storming onstage and acting like a king. Often it happens that everyone wants to roleplay a king, or, at any rate, some heroic knight or mighty wizard who has been "sent from Gondor" representing the Order of the Silver Spoon or some such thing. Fewer people want to roleplay the ordinary hobbits of the Shire or farmers of the Bree-land, and yet if there aren't any ordinary people the kings and princes will not have as good a time. Good roleplayers will want to co-ordinate their efforts somehow. Good roleplaying and good gameplaying do not mix very well. Roleplaying will never make you the top warlord or give you the most xp. The things that roleplayers spend their time on are a waste of time to gameplayers. Furthermore, the diku system of character development (xp, levels, etc.) is not very good for roleplaying. It rewards body count, not style of play. A -pure- roleplayer, who spent his/her time on roleplaying interaction, only hunting when it was in character to do so, making his excursions long, rich dramas spiced with emotes, savoring the drama of each blow of the sword - well, that takes a lot of time, and he/she would find it hard to advance much beyond level 6. A certain amount of "xping" is necessary if one wants to see the farther parts of Middle-Earth. Therefore, most roleplayers in a diku system will find themselves playing in a sort of partial RP style. They may do their xp-hunting in a fast-paced scramble, and then spend part of their time engaging in a more pure form of role-playing. Or they may spend most or all of their time xp-hunting, accepting the distortions of time that involved (like dashing around at hundreds of miles per hour), but maintaining a consistent character type, being someone more than just an experience-maximizer. Or they may RP minimally with a legend character, but also have a couple of low-levels who RP more purely. In fact we do not at the moment have a good RP tradition in MUME, though some people try it from time to time. The answer to the question of "what it means to roleplay in MUME" has to be answered by a developing community of players who actually do it. Chapter 2 - Fundamentals of Character ===================================== To role-play a character, you have to know who that character is. Excellence in Roleplay is a matter of delivering a seamless performance, of acting in a way that is natural for your character. But how do you know what you would naturally do until you know where you came from, how you have grown up, and what your place in society is? Instead of sending your character out in the world as a "generic dwarf", a serious roleplayer will want to address questions like: CULTURE. What sort of society shaped your character? What are its values, what is its history, what are its songs and proverbs? And how does this affect your character? People do not pay NEARLY enough attention to this in MUME, I think. Tolkien says that hobbits have no magic, yet people turn out hobbit mages left and right. Hobbits are sedentary and home-loving, yet the aforesaid hobbit mages are always found sneaking about the darkest troll-caves. Elves are basically good people, often stern, but reluctant to use violence or restraint; and in fact they are described as little concerned with the fate of other peoples, and spending their time in song. Not much like the spell-blasting powerhouses we see hanging around the orc caves! Of course gameplayers can't be judged by RP standards, but there are a lot of people who think they ARE good RPers and yet have chosen to play very strange elves and hobbits. FAMILY. Who were your parents? Your grandparents? Are any of them alive? What other siblings or other relatives do you have? What was their place in the community? (ALL the following questions about your own character can - in a second pass - be asked about these relatives!) BIOGRAPHY. Where was your character born? What was his/her childhood like? What happened to make him/her become who he/she is today? (By the way, the story that 'my parents were killed by orcs, so I seek revenge' is QUITE overused by roleplayers.) What are you ashamed of having people find out about? Which of your accomplishments do you boast about all the time? PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION. This seems like the easiest thing to do, but just look at people's descriptions and you see how many people neglect it. ABILITIES/CAPACITIES [Stats]. "Stats" should not just be numbers to be plugged into damage equations, they should guide your character's behavior! This is difficult to do, but more people SHOULD do it, and will get into the habit of it as roleplaying becomes more common. If your character has a Wisdom of 10, shouldn't he or she be rash, hasty, emotional, and 'unwise'? If you have an intelligence of 8, why are you making complex battle plans? If you have a Dex of 9, aren't you rather clumsy? Shouldn't you bump into things every once in a while? Of course there is no Recipe for this, and I am not saying that your low-int low-wis character has to mobdie all the time or blunder into deathtraps, but he/she really should act a bit different from that Elven Mage over there with Str 18 Wis 18. Think about this. TEMPERAMENT. Temperament should flow from one's biography, native abilities, and also from the influences that are natural to one's species and culture. Read the help files about your species. Think about shortcomings, sins, and weaknesses that your character might have - don't make him/her like a "Generic Perfect Hero/Heroine". The "seven deadly sins" are anger, pride, gluttony, lust, greed, laziness, and envy. Others might include procrastination, fear, suspiciousness, prejudice, self-doubt, ignorance, impulsivity, depression, gullibility, and insensitivity. Which of these do you have? How about substance abuse? After a couple nasty mobdeaths I RP'd one of my characters as an alcoholic for a while. Notice that I haven't even mentioned 'alignment' here! Nothing is WORSE RP than someone who says "I'm playing an evil character" and then runs around Bree killing off all the guards for no earthly reason. People do evil actions for reasons, after all, and according to patterns! If you're evil, how and why did this happen? What will you do and what won't you do? Aside from 'sins', there are minor failings, features, and quirks, like good or bad taste in clothes, pedantry, being a bore, giggliness, standoffishness... If all else fails, write down ten names of people you know, then write down ten things about the temperament or character of each one; what can you take from that list and apply to your character? OCCUPATION / ROLE IN THE COMMUNITY. Ressaven said to me once, "One of the problems with RP on MUME is that everyone is an 'Adventurer'." This is too true. It is a rather boring world when EVERYONE is "a mighty smiter" or "a mighty mage" and nothing more. Who are the farmers, the wheelwrights, the herders, the craftspeople, the peddlers, the hunters, the drovers, the miners? Let's not act as if everyone was born on a warhorse or lived his whole life in a 'magic school'! Even if one is "an adventurer" now, one surely hasn't been adventuring one's whole life? Furthermore, if you are going to be "a smith", wouldn't it be cool to go find a library book and actually learn something about smithing? What are the parts of an anvil, for example? How would you go about shoeing a horse if you had to? Think how much more interesting you will be! And you dwarven miners, how many of you know anything about geology and minerology? Don't you want to be able to talk intelligently about hematite and malachite? POSSESSIONS. What are your personal possessions? What are your keepsakes and gifts? What is your residence like, when you aren't staying at the Inn? SPEECH. I am not referring to 'Old English Speech' and saying 'thee' and 'hast' all the time. Nor am I suggesting that everyone should speak in dialect all the time; badly done dialect is terrible. In LOTR, the hobbits are represented as speaking very ordinary English most of the time. So don't feel obliged to speak in an 'odd' way; but consider the possibilities at least. Is your character's speech formal or informal, blunt or polite (or overpolite)? Are there little expressions that he/she uses over and over again? Does he/she show off his/her knowledge of other tongues? Think of all the ways in which speech distinguishes characters in fine literature from Tolkien to Dickens, and see if there are any tricks you can pick up. SKILLS AND HOBBIES. What does your character do in his/her spare time? Cook? Sew? What games is he/she good at? Does he or she play a musical instrument? Sing? Paint? Carve? He/she might be one of those amateur historians / archaeologists / naturalists that England used to be full of - VERY nice RP for hobbits IMHO. Chapter 3 - Roleplaying Behaviour ================================= All right, what does one DO with one's carefully developed character? Much of this chapter will seem COMPLETELY STRANGE to a lot of people in MUME, because all our experience is in going around and killing things as quickly as possible. I am going to start at the other end of the spectrum entirely, and start out talking about -pure- roleplay, with NO killing and NO experience attached to it. I know some people will want to walk out of the lecture when I get to the part about the farmer hoeing weeds, grumbling something like "this is like ballet class" or something insulting :) Please bear with me, though. Once you learn to recognize what 'pure roleplay' is like, you can incorporate chunks, or admixtures, or it in your own play, even the xp-hunting smob-killing part. Many people associate roleplaying with 'quests'. But quests will not be running most of the time, so I want to look at the question of how one roleplays 'ordinary life', so to speak, and then get on to quests. In a sentence, your character should act naturally, in interaction with other roleplayers, so as to develop an interesting story. I intend this sentence to incorporate a lot of wisdom in a few words, viz.: Acting naturally: This means acting as your character would normally act in the situation. But of course to determine what is natural, one has to have some idea of your character's occupation, habits, desires and plans. If you are a farmer, it's 'natural' to be tilling your Field; if you are a miner, it's 'natural' to be mining. Furthermore, what is 'natural' depends on what else is going on from moment to moment. If an old friend comes by, it's 'natural' to stop what you're doing and invite him/her to lunch (particularly true for hobbits). If a strange character comes into the inn, it's 'natural' to find out what he's up to. If you overhear a conversation which suggests an opportunity for socializing, or combat, or trade, or scheming, or theft, or combat, depending on your character's propensities, it's 'natural' to try to take advantage of it somehow. 'Natural' incorporates 'spontaneous'. Your plans can change from moment to moment. Now, here is an important point: what is natural is often NOT what is most advantageous! Your character knows less than you, the player, do. Your character does not know about the spirit in that cave, unless he's been there before or someone has told him about it. Your character does not know that the guy at the next table is a notorious thief. Of course, you can always claim that somebody told you, and that MIGHT make sense... but it's not good roleplay if it always works out that someone has warned you of the dangers beforehand, etc. Therefore, it's important to keep a separation between the things that you know OOC (out of character, that is, as a player) and the things that you know IC (in character, on the basis of your character's own experience). The question of 'narrates' and tells, and if it's ever permissible to treat information from them as IC knowledge, is a tough one and will be taken up later. Interaction with other roleplayers: Of course you CAN roleplay by yourself, if you are a genuine fanatic, or just really in the mood. I have spent a pleasant summer afternoon sitting on the Patio in Rivendell, drinking tea, smiling at the waitress, and looking out pensively on the waters of the Bruinen... But I'm pretty strange ;-) For most people, there is not much fun in roleplaying a farmer tilling his field, all by oneself.. l A Field This is a field of crops... A cow is standing here. emote takes his hoe in hand... emote begins chopping steadily at the weeds. emote has found a particularly tough one. l A Field This is a field of crops... A cow is standing here. Whether or not you think this is boring, it's sort of a waste of your fine talents if nobody can see you! Therefore you really want to find someone else, even if you are just going to be tilling your field. It is a legitimate use of narrate to set up RP encounters: narr Help, I'm tilling my field.. Someone come up with some more interesting RP :) Bob tells you 'On my way' Bob arrives from the north. emote , who has been diligently hoeing weeds, takes a deep breath, leans on his hoe, and smiles at you. Bob looks harried and upset. Bob says 'It's the strangest damned thing. My well has gone completely dry!' emote looks startled, and says, 'Your well?? really?' Bob says 'YES. There's not a drop in it. How is yours?' Well, perhaps Bob has somewhere he wants to go with this, perhaps not, but it's arguably more interesting than standing around typing 'emote hoes weeds'! Maybe the two of you should go into town and look for a mason or even a dowser. Maybe it's the fault of all these mages you've seen about lately. Maybe Bob will have to have a well-digging party. If you go into town, it gives you an excuse to drop by the tavern and see if any traveling dwarves have brought any interesting stories. Properly speaking, then, Quests and Events are just occasions to bring roleplayers together. Killing the boar or winning the prize is secondary. If you are participating in some sort of RP interaction, but want or need to say something OOC, it's good form to make that explicit: say The ale is really good here.... say [OOC] Argh have to log out in 1 min. :( You may in fact want to make aliases: alias os say [OOC] alias oe emote [OOC] Interesting story: This is the trickiest part. Of course most ordinary people in Middle-Earth spent most of their time doing routine things which nobody would have wasted a fantasy novel on. Therefore, it is legitimate to guide the action of the story that you are a part of toward interesting topics. The art in this is to know how much to bend the probabilities without smashing them into bits. Somewhere between 'unnecessarily dull' RP and 'impossibly exciting' RP there is an optimum. If you are always 'discovering an old treasure map in your grandfather's possessions' it will get a bit boring. But you can always claim whatever you like about your offline time. Here's an example from Elendor MUSH. Llewyn, who plays a Constable of Bree, and I have just found out OOC that something interesting is happening in the Shire the following day. Unfortunately nobody has told us about it IC, and it seems we are going to be left out of it. say OOC: SAY - wouldn't it be natural for you to go over to the Brandywine and tell the Shirriffs about the troll who was in the Chetwood? [There really had been one.] As a courtesy, to let them know to keep alert. say OOC: And then they would tell YOU about the other thing. Llewyn says OOC: 'You're right, I could! But is there time for that?' say OOC: Who's to say you haven't already done it? ;-) Llewyn says OOC: 'Very sneaky!' (both go back IC) Llewyn dashes in, all out of breath. Llewyn says 'I was just over talking with the Bridge guards, and do you know what I heard?? -- [etc.]' The thing that made this work is that he WAS a constable and had a duty to 'law enforcement' which made it natural for him to go over there. Also, he had just logged on, so he COULD have been on the road the last day, for all anyone knew. By contrast, if a man of Bree comes up and says 'A mysterious dwarf came to my house last night bringing news of orcs near Rivendell etc.' this is just silly. Especially if he does it every day. Now, we can edge back toward what experience-hunting in a semi-RP style might be. It does not work very well, frankly, if you and everyone else in the group are killing the same brigands for the 18th time. Maybe *sigh* you had just better whack the brigands, take the money and the xp, and go on to more interesting things. But if you have never explored this area before, or someone else in your group hasn't, there's your opportunity. Announce that you are organizing an expedition and see if any young hobbits want to come along. Pick the members for their interest in RP. Talk about it a bit. Buy the supplies and set out. Go a little slow, so you and the other members can imagine themselves standing on that hill, or peering into that dark cave, wondering what is in there. Take some time to express apprehension, pride, fatigue, etc. Make a campfire and cook that meat, don't just gulp it down raw like a wild beast! :) Make an adventure out of it, is the point. And for the Gods' sake, don't just do it by remote control, i.e., narr "Where is the Giant Spider from Bree" "What do I open at 'In the Cave'" "Is the secretdoor nobash" "How tough is the spider" and all that!! Not unless you are utterly stuck, and maybe not even then. Chapter 4 - Game Features and Roleplay ====================================== If one is going to Roleplay in earnest, one has to ignore, or circumvent, some features of the game. Some of them are pretty non-controversial among roleplayers, while, with regard to others, there is no consensus, and reasonable roleplayers disagree. Let's do the easy stuff first: Stats I think it's reasonable to say that if someone is always talking about his ob, pb, hp, moves, the Damroll of his weapon, level, etc., he is not roleplaying by anyone's definition. These numbers are strictly gameplay stuff. The same goes for the names of hidden doors, the % to which you can learn a spell, and so forth. I don't mean that you should never type 'stat', but you should try to convert the numbers into thoughts before discussing them. Socials Canned socials should be viewed with suspicion or avoided altogether. For one thing, they don't always produce the output to other people that you would expect. Use emotes, or can your own aliases. Travel and Time The journey from Bree to Rivendell takes about 3 weeks for someone like Aragorn, but in MUME it can be done in an hour, at a land speed that you only find on the Bonneville Salt Flats. This poses problems, particularly since the option of 'camping' does not exist at this writing. If one is travelling eastward from Bree one has to get to the Last Inn to rent at all, which is a two-week trip. Suppose you don't have 7 hours to play, though? In fact one pretty much has to travel a lot faster than one really should, but when RPing one should try not to spam at top speed at least, and should somehow take into account that it is a long, long journey. The specifics of this have to be worked out in practice. Well, that was the easy part. Now we come to the problematic stuff: features of the game that are nothing like the books, such as teleportation, narrating, resurrection, and looting your own corpse. In general RPers are found along a continuum here between two poles which I will call Book Supremacy and Game Supremacy. Book Supremacists say: if it's not in Tolkien you should not use it, not matter whether it exists in MUME or not. Game Supremacists Say: MUME is a consistent world, not exactly the same as Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and we should RP using the features of that world. Book Supremacists think Game Supremacists are cheats, while Game Supremacists think Book Supremacists are unrealistic fanatics. Some of their areas of dispute are: Instant Information and Communications This includes a host of commands, such as 'narrate', 'tell', 'who', and 'where', all of which obtain or convey information by telepathy, radio, radar, or something of the sort. Here I also include the board system, whereby information written on a board in the Havens is instantly known in Rivendell. This is probably the area where the Book Supremacists have the strongest argument. The point is not that one should never narrate anything, but that one should not use the information IC, not in a simplistic way anyhow. This, by the way, is the answer to a question which was asked on the boards recently: "How can you roleplay when people can transfer their thoughts to the other end of the earth?" One answer is that one can treat those narrates as just social conversation among the players of the game, while not using them IC. This is sort of a new idea for MUME, I know, since everyone sort of accepts that 'narrate' is a sort of 'battle radio channel'. Yes, that WOULD mean that if someone narrates that orcs are at Nen-i-Sul, and YOU are 1 west of Nen-i-Sul, you are NOT supposed to turn and run in the other direction (or, if you are a well-armoured smiter group, spam kill and run east). You are supposed to keep on playing your role. Another is that one can use that information but sort of filter it first, on the theory that 'narrates' represent 'things that people have heard about', 'stories that people are telling', 'news from afar.' So if some big news happens, and people are discussing on narrate, and you hear about it, AND it is something someone like you, in your area, WOULD have heard about, then you can use the information IC. This still doesn't help with the orcs at Nen-i-Sul, though. A third answer is that one should not use narrates and other OOC information to -help you get an advantage- IC, but that you can use it to -help others-. For example, if someone has gotten trapped in the Old Wight's lair and needs help, and narrates for aid, I don't necessarily say 'Sorry, Jack, I don't use narrates IC'. But should -I-, as a roleplayer, narrate for help if -I- get stuck in there, thus magically sending my words via telepathy and so on? I did this, I confess. Twice. Would I do it today? I think maybe not, particularly once a Roleplay tradition sprouts up in MUME. As for the Boards, I think it would be good if postings on the In-Character board were prefaced by the name of the place where the message was actually posted, so that looking at the board would show you: 1. Bree: auction tomorrow 2. Shire: big party!! 3. Rivendell: minions defeated This would allow purists to give a little thought to whether they think the news would really have gotten to their location. Long-distance Spells (teleport, transfer, word of recall, locate life, locate object, portal, scry) These don't exist anywhere in Tolkien, and I think there's a lot to be said for the idea that "Real Roleplayers" ought not to use them, but should walk or ride (If it's good enough for Gandalf...). On the other hand, they're less objectionable then narrate, since they at least cost mana, have to be practiced, require some intelligence to use them properly, and so on. Death and Resurrection The sad 'reality' (if that's the word) is that 'the gift of Eru', i.e., praying back to the mortal realms from the Halls of Mandos, is nothing like anything in LOTR. Yes, elves resurrect, but they are supposed to stay in the blessed lands, not run back and loot their own corpses! Yes, dwarves maybe come back in some strange way, but by being reborn hundreds of years later. As for humans, they are supposed to stay in the Halls, dot, end of line. Here, on the other hand, resurrection is a part of life (so to speak). The true Book Supremacists will argue that if you want to roleplay, you should be prepared to stay dead like a decent chap and let your friends mourn you properly. On the other hand, death in MUME is really easy... maybe easier than it should ideally be. It's hard to drag people out of battle, or escape. Incapacitating hits are rare. Tolkien orcs liked to capture people alive, but MUME orcs can't do that. So you can argue that resurrection is a patch, a fixup for the bug that death is too easy. MAYBE an RPer ought to sit in the halls and calculate the odds that he might have lived through the fight after all, and if he honestly concludes (no sarcasm) that his friends might have gotten him out, then he comes back. Otherwise he waves good-bye forever. Regenerating Named Mobs These are very troublesome to the RP-oriented person. Let's say you hear that there is an evil bandit in the Midgewater named Bill Ferny. You go out there with some constables and defeat him. All right, but then he is out there again the next day?? And the next?? How can one deal with this in an RP framework? Maybe it's just impossible. Maybe RPers should just avoid Ferny when In Character, sneaking out there when OOC to get some xp in semi-RP style. No easy answers here! Chapter 5 - The RP and GP Communities ===================================== In the previous chapter I hinted at the the strongest arguments against the Book Supremacist position. Argument #1 is very simple: "If one tries to roleplay anywhere east of Bree on Book Supremacist lines, you will get immediately killed by non-roleplaying enemies." That is a powerful argument, to be sure. There's no easy answer to the fact that in the current MUME environment if you try to poke along slowly from Bree to Rivendell, or NOC to Warrens for that matter, without listening to narrates, refusing to port, narrate for transes, or use word of recall, you are quite likely to get slaughtered by some gameplayer who has heard where you are on narrate and proceeds to chop you up for your equip, xp and wp. Although it is at least an argument that even Book Supremacists might want to consider praying back from Mandos if they have gotten killed by gameplayers. In fact, the truth is that it is very hard to merge good roleplaying with the War. Once the enemy shows up, even the best roleplayers are spamming around, trying to blast the enemy or get away; nobody is typing 'emote hacks the orc with a mighty blow of his dwarven axe' and so on. And it is hard to do anything about this with combat as fast as it is, and with the rules against interrace fraternization being what they are. So at first glance it seems that it is much easier for RP to be done in areas that are relatively safe from the wars - west of Bree, by whities, or in the depths of the orc caves, by orcs. Or in Moria, because of its being no-narrate. Of course, as we get some more experience with it, we may get some new ideas. Furthermore, all of this discussion applies to conflict among same-side players, when some of them are roleplaying and others are not. You are playing a good hero. You see someone killing the Druid. You come to the Druid's defense. If the evil party is into Roleplay, this can be fun for all. But if he is just a gameplayer, or a malcontent trying to screw things up to prove some point, then you have to decide how to deal with him. If you end up trying to kill each other, will you use 'where' to find out where he is? Or narrates? If you do, he will probably call you a hypocrite. But if you don't, then he will probably escape you, or kill you. Both approaches have their drawbacks. Argument #2 against the Book Supremacist position is that "If you do it that way, you'll spoil it for all the other players." If you don't trans people out of fights, it's YOUR fault when they die. If you don't spam or port from Rivendell to OERMGW to join the willow party, it's YOUR fault if there are too few casters. And so on. Actually, both arguments 1 and 2 are (taken to their logical extents) arguments against ALL roleplay. And we have heard them used that way a hundred times: "The environment here makes roleplay impossible." But in fact there are plenty of players here who want to RP. The problem they have had so far is that they have gotten lost in the spam and culture of the GP community, and have so far been unable to develop an RP community of their own. Partly this is because MUME culture is shaped so much by narrates, and narrates have an inherent anti-RP tendency. And in fact most narrates now facilitate either stat-hunting, xp-hunting ('what do I open', 'who wants to do willow') or 'electronic battlefield'-style pkilling and trans-begging. MUME culture is also shaped by what is on the boards, and what do you find there? Whining about how there ought to be more damage from this sword or less damage from that spell or how some bug ought to be fixed, that is, OOC GP spam. Partly it is because the code does not support some of the things that RPers could really use, like, for example, typing "WHO IC" and getting a list of the people who are roleplaying and In Character. And partly it is because the GP-ers are, necessarily, better at killing than the RP-ers, and, as a result, are better able to explore all the dangerous parts of MUME. Short of massive interference with and censorship of GP players, which happens on MUSHes but which will not happen here, the only obvious way around this is that RP-oriented players have to come together and create their own community. Possibly a thing like a Role-Players' Guild will come into existence. An RPG could schedule its own Events, and make some determinations as to where on the Book/Game Supremacist line the standard should be set. RPG members will have 'some way' to recognize who the roleplayers are, if only by the fact that membership lists can be mailed to people. When you go into the tavern, you will be able to refer to the list and figure out who might be interested in some RP conversation or activity, and who will look at you blankly and say 'wanta smob?' An RPG might be able to develop a sort of story line, a history of the RP events that have taken place.. who likes who, who hates who, who has driven who out of business, and so on. The stronger and better organized the RP community is, the more interesting the RP will be; the more interesting it is, the more people it will recruit. Aside from the spontaneous roleplaying of ordinary life, which is likely to result in a lot of small talk in taverns, there is the possibility of Special Events. The RPG will be able to sponsor and implement such Events. I prefer the term 'Events' to 'Quests', since the term 'Quest' suggests (to some) that there is going to be money, xp, or a cool item at the end of it. In MUME, xp will be gotten only from coded quests of the Bree Weaponsmith variety. And those are difficult to code and debug. (On the other hand, nothing, so far as I know, prohibits mortals from putting up cash prizes or item rewards. Perhaps the RPG will have to get a 'Director of Development' to hustle up contributions!) 'Quest' also suggests hunting some beast and killing it, which, although we can certainly do that, is only a small subset of what we can do. We can do lawsuits, parties, contests, arguments, fights, rescues, and all sorts of things. Some of these things obviously need no divine participation at all. If we need specially designed mobiles and items, or gods switching into mobs, we CAN potentially get them, IF it is just for fun and nobody is expecting to get xp or money out of management. Let there be no mistake: Top Management is Distrustful of such goings-on, and will (in my view) be the MORE distrustful, the more 'ad hoc', private, and unscheduled such things are. If there is adequate public advance notice, the fears of Management may be quieted to some extent. Chapter 6 - Creating Your RP Character ====================================== If you are convinced by all this, then you will want to know what to do next to set up your new or existing character as an 'official' Roleplayer. Two processes go into creating a character: the menu part or 'character creation screen', and the mental part, in which you develop the individual character on the basis of the material in Chapter 2 of this book. If you are creating a new character, you can do either one first; you can develop a character sketch first and then select race, class, and stat priorities to make it come true, or you can determine the character's parameters some other way - even at random - and then develop a corresponding bio. The first few paragraphs will deal with new characters, and then the existing ones can pick up at the appropriate place. Some purists take the position that character generation ought to be mainly random, because "you don't have any choice as to who you are before you are born." I used to create all my characters mainly by throwing dice or flipping coins to determine race and class. I'm no longer sure that's a good idea, though, because I've thought a bit more about the following consideration: the choice of race OUGHT to have a lot to do with what you want your character to do. If you enjoy social roleplaying, even with a character who may never be very high level, hobbits are very well suited to this; they are supposed to spend a lot of their time eating and drinking, as we all know. On the other hand, if you want to fight in the east a lot, you might want to produce a dwarf. If you REALLY want a cleric, then (from the Book Supremacist perspective at least) there is no point being a hobbit, because hobbits can't do magic at all. My point is that from a roleplaying perspective you might as well create a race of character who will fit well into the way you want to spend your time. By 'fit well' I am talking about RP-wise, not GP-wise in the sense of who has what race mods. How about gender? It's "supposedly true" that most people on M*s are male, though I don't have any hard data on it. Should guys play female characters? On the one hand it's a bit disturbing having a MUD full of female characters played by guys, for some reason (although it was that way in Shakespeare's theatre, come to think of it). On the other hand a world that's 80% male doesn't make much sense either. No easy answers here; do what you feel like, I guess. But if you are going to be female, try to be somone other than the Eowyn-style shieldmaiden, for the sake of variety? (Not a slam at our Eowyn, I just think there are too many Eowyn clones.) Now we come to 'class'. This system may change at any time, but at the moment 'class' means (a) are you especially strong, intelligent, wise, or dextrous [for your race] and (b) (more important) which 'package' of spells/skills will you have the most aptitude for. I think it -immediately- follows from this that dwarves are natural warriors, hobbits are natural 'thieves' [not to say that they steal, but that they are dextrous, stealthy, etc.], elves are natural clerics [not mages - you never see an elf fireballing someone in LOTR, that's humans' work]. I used to flip coins here, as I said, and I came up with some interesting characters. I'm less likely to do so now - not because "Dwarven mages suck" or for some such GP thing, but just because from an RP perspective, unusually stealthy/magical dwarves ought to be very rare. When it comes to the order of secondary stats, however, throwing dice and flipping coins can indeed produce some interesting stat combinations. It's fun to come up with a stat combination randomly, then try to come up with a biography that produced it. Why are you an unusually strong hobbit? [It's that Tookish blood.] Why an unusually intelligent dwarf? On the other hand, you may have created your biography already, in which case you may be setting your secondary stat priorities on the basis of what it says. All right, now let's say that you have generated a character, gone through Chapter 2, and developed a sense of who your character is. Next you want to write your 'whois' and 'description'. Too many MUMErs use these as venues for their favorite poetry, metal lyrics, ASCII art [some of it quite good I admit], jokes with asterisks [*an orc* kills you etc.], and so on. Your descrip. should have your physical appearance. Your whois should have something about your role in the community or reputation. Now you may want to do whatever you have to do OOC to get your citizenship established properly, for example, by going to Bree, paying one gold, and making yourself a hobbit or human of the Bree-land. (As to where to get the 1 gold, see _Riches at Your Feet!_, also in this library.) The next thing to do is to join the RolePlayers' Guild, WHEN it comes into existence. At this writing it hasn't yet. But it may be soon! For the moment, send a MUMEmail to me (Petrel) to join the list of people who are discussing the creation of such a group. Well, this is not a complete guide - if there can be such a thing - but I hope it gives the movement toward RP a little impetus. Please write the author with any input, suggestions for additions or corrections, flames, etc. Good RP to all!