Conversation #9: Breaking Character

rayuu

3 years ago
updated 3 years ago

Let us know how you feel about this rule. Albeit a normal rule, we do get this a fair bit and would like to see how you guys think we can make it easier to follow or if it's just a trend no matter where ya go no matter how it's said! Keep it civil.

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Breaking Character

STAY IN-CHARACTER AT ALL TIMES!

Just because someone breaks a rule doesn't mean you end the roleplay and go out of character yelling that "you are going to report them", follow the line of RP that is presented to you, adapt to the situation and then report it to staff once the interaction has finished. We expect you to stay in character 100% of the time while in server.

If you feel a rule was broken, use the report ticket on Discord.
Everything added to the server has roleplay in mind and because of this we don't want the little things ruining the experience.
If your character has a legal whitelist job, when you go off duty you are still that person. If you get arrested it can be reported to your department leads and may result in you being dismissed from your legal job.
Do not use terms in-game like "going to the government", threatening to get someone "deported", citing rule number violations, or tell someone their RP is "Fail RP". Please use Discord to report abuse.

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Yung Sleezus

3 years ago

I 100% agree with Barnett that a type of roleplay guide would help. A Roleplay SOPs if you will.

Valerio is 100% right and it's been irking me for some time now. It can be difficult to gauge severity and decide when something is serious enough for a ticket, but the city is way too much like a chat room sometimes. I think a hard limit definitely needs to be drawn when it comes to saying "in head" things. It is a shortcoming to not be clipping and reporting these but atleast for me part of that is because no hard line is drawn in the rules. Bring it to Discord. If you really need to get something off your chest with your friend, bring them into a discord voice channel after you fly out or something. Yeah, playing FiveM may not be the most immersive thing all the time, but it is actually jarring when people get too OOC with their dialogue, to the point where if I'm doing one of my voice based characters it actually takes me a minute to get back into character and recollect my thoughts to get all my mannerisms and voice details back in check.

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Griff/Barnett

I really like Rob's comment and also Val's. From a staff perspective, we really don't see very many reports come in for breaking character. I can understand trying to stay IC and correcting it as well. "What button do I press?" "Button? You mean muscle?" type thing. I think people should be doing what they can to not break that immersion. The situation Val describes is pretty bad and should be coached through staff.

I don't like the phrases that are like: "Well I can't because the government said so", or "my in-head brain", I even hate hearing the term "Discordia".

I really think we need to create a rules/role-play guide. Brief explanation of the rule (point form if possible) and also a 10 to 30 second video showcasing the situation within role-play. The video shows what the rule break can look like in city and what the solution could be.

Him Who Robs

While I kinda agree with Valerio on some people take the piss going ooc far too often. I think this falls into what type of server is this going to be going forward. If its a hardcore rp server then fine ban all ooc talk and make it clear. I myself fall somewhere into the grey area. I think there is a time and place for hardcore rp. But IMO the server is a rp / economy server. We cant simply spawn jn cars and create scenarios we have to work for it ( which I love having to do!) But that means sometimes im always in city just chilling with friends and the RP does slide from serious everyone in character rp to me talking to my mates asking how his day has been while we drive around chopping. And if its a super laid back event and someone slips up or says something dumb I honestly don't mind aslong as they aren't going out of thier way every 5mins to "let the dog out" while we are all sat in a car or in a clothing store. The one thing I think needs cracking down on is breaking character in frustration. The whole "Enjoy your ban" and stuff like that is a hard no imo

TLDR: depends on the direction of the server going forward. I dont mind casual references in the correct crowd if everyone is in the same boat.

Zopfco

"We got that on bodycam and sending that to the government. right, yep, time to throw in a ticket"

Have to agree the amount of times I hear references to OOC punishment, "be careful you can get points for that" & so on can be frustrating. At the same time, the frequency of this kind of talk seems to indicate players might be overly concerned with other rule breaks.

Hopefully this review process clarifies some things so we see less of this "walking on eggshells" mentality about some rules & a total disregard for others.

valerio

I'm gonna go on another tangent on this one, as this is to date the most broken rule.

First and foremost, this is a roleplay server, where you play a character and not yourself. Why do I mention this? Well, the amount of people I've heard mentioning "in head" this and "in head" that is mindboggling, to the point where it feels like a chatroom at late night. I understand that things happen, the cat throws up or what have you, but talking about your "in head job" or "this girl I met in head" is not roleplay. From a roleplay perspective, your person sounds insane, why is everything happening in your head and not in real life? Do we need to bring you to the hospital to get that treated?

People got way, way too comfortable with referring to out of city things in city. Again, this is a roleplay server, you should be in character 100% of the time. Late night chats are cool, but move it to Discord if anything. Otherwise, you get situations where you pull up to LSC and they are talking about stuff "in head", which forces you the character to either:

1) Break character to continue talking to these crazy people, because everything is happening in their head

2) Try to nudge them back in roleplay, which requires finesse to not break character

Overall, it's bad roleplay. Develop your character more, build their story, enjoy the roleplay. There's a lot of it that's been going around recently, and I know again that I am partly at fault for not clipping and shipping every one of these instances to the government. It's just really immersion breaking when people are talking about their out of character frustrations at Peaceful Street.

Another thing that is present in this rule that is not followed often is roleplaying the whole scenario out before throwing in a ticket. I've seen roleplay come to a SCREECHING halt because people are upset about what happened (seen a lot of cops and SASP do this one).

Perfect example is the other night, we had had a bunch of races happening that resulted in a police chase. One of the racers crashed, police swarmed them. One of the racers broke the rules and held up the officers to get the racer back. Instead of pursuing after them or the rest of the racers, one officer said "We got that on bodycam and sending that to the government. right, yep, time to throw in a ticket" and talking about the progress of the ticket to their partner. I understand, it's frustrating, but you're holding up the flow of traffic and letting all of these racers go instead of continuing out roleplay.

TL;DR: This rule needs to be more enforced as it is highly present within the server. As a result of a lot of breaking character, using terms like "in head" for everything, roleplay has tanked and is turning more into chatroom. People are also quick to throw in tickets and not continue out roleplay.

Really think there needs to be a limit to this based on degree. There's a difference between someone exclaiming because their IRL cat threw up on the rug vs someone going on an OOC rant malding in police custody. The former can be handled with a light touch and corrected IC while the latter probably deserves points. I think this is one of those rules where we need to consider the severity. We RP for hours at a time; everyone does this eventually & we really don't need to make it a staff situation with points in like 90% of those cases.

Generally speaking it's not good for players to feel like there's an axe hanging over their RP & this is one of those rules where its easy to be overzealous.

Diezel

I think the removal of saying terms like "going to the government" would be most beneficial to this. Also allowing people to say someone was "deported" is healthy. If someone you were RPing with for many days all of sudden is banned terms are used regardless. Saying someone is on vacation seems silly, considering they may never come back if it is a bad enough ban. Also these are terms that many many many players use. We would be then reporting 99% of the population.

Things that should be said include

"going to the government"

"someone has been deported"

If someone however uses them as a threat. "I will get you deported" "i am going to tell the government about you" that removes RP. However mentioning them in a passive aggresive manor does not remove that from anything.

"Speaking to the government" makes total sense and helps explain something that is done OOC in a very IC environment.