Guide to Roleplaying Excellency
Skyrat Guide to Roleplaying Excellency
Written by: WehWeh and Nerevar
What is Roleplay
Roleplaying is a collaborative social activity where players interact with one another to create a cohesive story like actors on a stage. Due to the collaborative nature of the activity, players must abide by a set of expectations and standards for it to work, otherwise, it becomes more like improv rather than roleplay. At the core of these expectations, each actor must react in a reasonable way to the actions of other actors to create a coherent storyline, and each actor must abide by a set standard so as to not break immersion.
Players must understand that they must interact with others and add to the story, all without breaking immersion. Due to the social and communal nature of the activity, they must be willing to listen, adapt, and improve to conform to the community and its standards. However, one must not mistake the social nature of the game to think that it is a place solely for them to hang out with friends at the expense of roleplay or others. If they wish to OOCly hang out, they understand that the ghost cafe is most suitable for OOC social activity.
Roleplay Standards
Failure to follow the social contract can result in immersion breaking, most of which can result in low Roleplay (LRP) behavior. The most explicit derives from a lack of intent in roleplaying in good faith. These individuals are more interested in acting in ways that entertain them OOCly, typically at the expense of others trying to remain immersed. These individuals are subject to immediate bans if no improvement has been made.
However, not all LRP comes from a place of bad faith necessarily, as it can come in other forms done entirely in good faith. Even good players with the best of intentions may come off as LRP through slip-ups, bad ideas, or sometimes bouts of thoughtlessness and laziness, so they should always be prepared to make changes and adapt when given critique by others including staff. While we are not interested in punishing good players for mistakes anyone can make, we may have to take action if a player is consistently making these mistakes without improvement.
Employability
- Meeting Minimum Requirements
Characters must meet the minimum requirements for their jobs in a realistic way. All skilled jobs, such as those in science, medical, and engineering, must know how to read, write, and have the skills needed to perform it with relative competence. This means no illiterate engineers, scientists, and so on. Unskilled jobs do not have this requirement.
- Believable Background and Backstory
- Cooperation with Co-Workers
- Following Chain of Command
Sincerity in Roleplay
Taking roleplay with seriousness and respect for others No ‘meme-like’ behavior or overusing modern-day references such as ‘sus’ ‘cope’ ‘seethe’ ‘skill-issue’ etc. IC Goofiness is not meme behavior. Messing around in a way that doesn’t break character or immersion is perfectly acceptable. No texting slang outside of PDA Messages, such as ‘TTYL’ ‘lol’ ‘wtf’ ‘wyd’
Consistency
- Having your character’s values and principles remain internally consistent, while still allowing for long-term development.
- Having your character’s personality remain internally consistent, while still allowing for long-term development.
- Having your character’s skills remain consistent and reasonable in accordance with their occupation, while still allowing for long-term development.
Types of Low Roleplay
LRP by NRP Intent
A player may be LRP due to having no desire to roleplay at all. Sometimes, decent players may engage in this behavior out of boredom. These individuals may act off of an OOC desire to entertain themselves and will act LRP as a result. This is not tolerated at all.
LRP by Implausibility
A player may be LRP by having a character that lacks a basis in plausible reality, i.e. LRP by Implausibility. Skyrat is home to a highly flexible setting with wide usage for making ‘extraordinary’ characters. For instance, our server takes place on the frontier where employment standards are loose. Criminals, undesirables, and less than-suitable individuals may work at the station, due to NanoTrasen overlooking many crimes due to physical distance from the core worlds of the Sol Federation, making their PR in the frontier a near non-factor. We are additionally very loose about sexual interactions on the station, as the company does not crack down on employees taking some ‘personal time.’ However…
- Realistic Level of ‘Power’
Sometimes some traits might seem super fun or unique, such as your character being hundreds of years old, homicidally unstable, or forever avoiding death. However, it’s important to make sure that these traits don’t take away from immersion nor feel wildly out of place. Nobody is the protagonist or main character, and we’re, for the most part, playing people you’d meet on the street. You don’t meet combination neurosurgeons/nuclear techs/special forces members, but you do meet doctors and handymen. Uniqueness on its own does not endear characters to people.
- Relatability
It’s important to keep your character sympathetic, relatable, and ‘human.’ If your character is leaps and bounds above and ahead of the rest of us, why are we supposed to latch onto them? What connections can we make to someone that’s on a whole separate playing field? If your character wasn’t a seven hundred-year-old demon dragon that can shapeshift, breathe fire, never die, and can always pull strings to never get fired by the Company, what’s left that would make this character interesting to watch or fun to be around? Why are they even here out in the sticks sweeping the floors?
- Having Flaws
Part of creating a well-rounded, non-‘overpowered’ character is giving them meaningful character flaws and weaknesses. One should not only consider a character’s dreams and ideals, but also information like what they struggle to do, or who they struggle to be. Round them out by thinking about the skills they have problems learning, or the emotions they have difficulty suppressing, or what they stress about to an unhealthy degree.
LRP by Poor Execution
- Idea/Intent
For instance, you may be roleplaying a character that does not understand normal social norms, i.e. you are playing a felinid with the tendencies of a cat. It might seem interesting to pick up certain feline characteristics such as gifting people dead animals, but unless you execute this well, there is a high chance you may come off LRP. Try using emotes to ‘show’ people your characterization, otherwise, it might have players wondering ‘is this a character, or something they’re doing because it’s funny?’ They’ll have no emotes, writing, or context clues to tell what you’re doing and why you’re motivated to do it.
- Remember to show. You need to demonstrate you are roleplaying and be interactable.
To elaborate, if your character is going around killing random animals and giving them to your co-workers, you better make the effort to show that it’s not to be random or LRP, rather the onus is on you to show that you are roleplaying. If you come across someone that just randomly dropped a body on you, there are no context clues, no emotes, or any writing to show what they were doing and why. It just seems random and therefore LRP.
Efforts must be made to highlight why the character is doing this and to roleplay it out. You must make an earnest attempt to make it feel like you are from a different culture, trying to adapt. You must be reactive to what others do and must adapt and develop your character henceforth.
At the end of the day, if it looks LRP, feels LRP, and does not make sense, it is LRP, despite the best of intentions.
LRP by Lazy Assholery
Asshole characters can be fantastic in moderation. They can shake up social dynamics, and bring something fresh to the table. However, while these characters can be very compelling and fun, efforts to play one can quickly run sour if one isn’t careful. You will need to be careful to avoid being a nusiance or a drain on other players. Know when to be an asshole. Know when not to be.
- High Effort
Effort has to be placed to roleplay this kind of character so that people have something to work with. Roleplay can’t live off just ‘fuck you’ and attacking people all the time. It’s important to show, not tell, that your character is meant to be a jerk or a bitch. It’s equally important to make sure that being a jerk isn’t the only facet of their personality.
- Distinction Between OOC/IC
Tone is never clear over text, nor is reasoning always clear when it comes to a rude character. How many times have you been unclear as to whether a character’s just doing a bit/doing a gimmick, or whether they’re letting their feelings spill into their play? Always put in the effort to let someone be assured that you’re roleplaying a scenario, rather than being venomous as a player.
- Easy Interaction
Characters, naturally, don’t always need to be people we can get along with. Being a perfect, cooperative angel is not what we’re always looking for. However, if a character’s distant to the point it feels like they aren’t even reading your messages; there’s a problem that’s started. It’s on you, the player, to have your characters be someone people can interact with, without them being flat-out impossible to deal with. It’s important to let up sometimes; no one should always be a jerk to everyone who talks to them, and even when they are, the true cold shoulder shouldn’t be common.
- Reasoning
Make sure there’s an actual ‘why’ as to your character being this way. No one is just born unlikable, and no one exists in a perpetual state of being a jerk. Think about what might’ve happened to your character in their past, think about what soft spots they might have, and even think about what might start rehabilitating them. It’s easy for people to tell a character that’s a jerk for the sake of it.
LRP by Acting Like You’re in Single Player
- Characters do not exist in isolation.
Roleplay is, as said, a social activity. While this is also a somewhat normal video game, we place roleplay before mechanics wherever physically possible. Even if your character is a loner or an introvert on purpose, it’s on you to leave some hooks for others to roleplay with. If your character does nothing but put off classic ‘leave me alone’ signals, it’ll be extremely hard to interact with your character and harder to have fun with them too.
- Skipping Over Roleplay
Roleplay is necessary at all times, though the standards are naturally laxer when mechanical situations arise that prevent you from interacting. A ticking timebomb or a detonating supermatter is a good reason to swap over to mechanics and get to work immediately, while a patient with a 1% inflamed appendix or someone without their combat indicator on holding a weapon is not an excuse to jump straight to mechanics. There are times when a person essentially has the choice to not roleplay even when it’s possible, and we’d vastly prefer you to choose roleplay. It’s possible to skip over social interaction in the kitchen, for instance, by making yourself and others a bunch of nutriment pills at chemistry, but this deprives both you and others (let alone the chef) of interaction.
- Characters must react to others and consequences.
It’s not encouraged for players to completely ignore others. Roleplay should be responded to with roleplay, and emotes should especially be followed with emotes; when convenient. However, it’s also encouraged for players to understand that their actions have consequences, and sometimes ‘no’ is an answer. Breaking character to firebomb Cargo for them denying you an item with valid reasoning, or wordlessly attacking someone for inconveniencing your character, are both against the spirit of what we’re going for as a roleplay server. Likewise, ignoring a hostage situation to flip or spin or break character to tell the antagonist that you can just be revived at Medical, is also not what we’re looking for.
LRP by Lack of Effort
- Not using emotes enough in normal roleplaying situations
As a roleplay-focused community, we do both expect and encourage players to get comfortable with using the emote key more often. Casually throwing in emotes here and there can do a great deal to help humanize your character, and to help offer a window into your mind regarding ‘what my character’s currently doing/posed like/like as a person.’ Much of what defines a person as a certain personality is not only what they say, but their body language and nonverbal cues too.
Throwing in emotes in between dialogue like “huffs, bristling up and broadening her shoulders,” or “fidgets with her jacket zipper pull, the anxious sound of the tab over iron teeth being easily heard,” or even just “slams her fist against the table, her teeth on display,” can add a lot to the experience, and it shows that you’re willing to put in the effort to portray a character.
We do also encourage players to do more long-form emotes when time does permit, too, especially in calmer scenarios like the bar. However, if you’re not the type to ever make an emote at all, even when the situation does permit easy writing, this may not be the server for you. We don’t always expect our players to jam out paragraphs of emotes at a time, and obviously, we will offer you an incredible amount of slack in situations like doing surgery, but you will be frowned upon for never doing any emotes.
- Relying too much on mechanics and not enough on emotes
Often, mechanics both can and should be substituted with roleplay. While not everything can be done in this way, as not even the most poetic emote can kill a man, it’s preferable in many situations to try roleplay instead. For instance, intimidating someone using a gun can be done by simply shooting at them, but it’s also fully possible to try an emote. Adopt a menacing stance, spin your revolver, and tell them what they have to do if they want to see the next sunrise. Conversely, instead of spinflipclapping and pixelshifting around nonstop because someone dared make you wait longer than five seconds, try an emote about your character anxiously shifting from foot to foot and fiddling with their belt loops. If you are confined solely to mechanics and refuse to do any sort of writing, you’re probably not going to fit in here.
- Not spending the effort to show how your character is acting
Ultimately, if you are not going to put in the effort to emote and show what your character is doing, this is not the server for you. We are not asking much besides some effort with writing.
LRP by No Value for Life
- Have a sense of self-preservation, no matter who you are playing as.
Frontiersmen are tough people. Naturally, many characters aboard the station will be people that are somewhat used to pain or physical struggle, and we naturally do not expect every crewmember to be a complete coward.
However, it’s important to still roleplay that your life and body have value, as in having a sense of self-preservation. Being completely lackadaisical about your death is not what we’re looking for, no matter what offscreen means of resurrection your character supposedly has. One should not be casual and joke about losing limbs, or begging an antag to finally shoot them in the head and ‘get it over with’ just as a casual taunt.
At the end of the day, your character has a life off-station, and that life is not, in our eyes, worth throwing entirely away for five seconds of laughs or to be the one-man hero that hunted down an antag. You will violate policy if you are completely lackadaisical about losing your own life/getting grievously injured.
You do not need to roleplay as if you are a coward, but you must have a sense of self-preservation. Being fool-hardy does not make you look cool. It just makes you look like you can’t roleplay. Additionally, if you roleplay as if other peoples’ lives and bodies also have no value, you will face a DNR/pacification/server ban. Rhetoric such as ‘go ahead and kill them, we can just clone them’ or ‘Central can revive them’ or any similar phrases in what’s meant to be a tense lives-at-stake situation is completely against the spirit of what we’re doing here.
LRP by Protagonist/Sore Loser Syndrome
At the end of the day, we’re all just another employee. We’re all cogs in the machine, and in the infinite universe, our characters are a speck. That’s okay. It’s what we intended with the setting we’re in. It’s important to keep this fact in mind when designing your character and to remember that when it comes to being ‘just another employee,’ your character will sometimes lose.
That’s, also, okay. While we all relish in victory and tales of overcoming greater odds, it’s necessary to allow your character to lose in the first place. Circumventing being fired or disciplined with ‘I have a special deal with the CEO,’ or circumventing being held captive with ‘I have an offscreen means of guaranteed revival’ feels less like employing a character’s background creatively, and more like a self-insert too precious for the player to see struggle.
‘Protagonist syndrome’ often comes with the concept of ‘playing the hero.’ Space Station 13 is a multiplayer game, and like most other multiplayer games, there aren’t protagonists, so don’t force yourself into being one. You will die and have bad things happen to you, that are inherent to the nature of the game, what matters is how you handle those things.
If you can roll with the punches and accept defeat at times, you’ll have a far more enjoyable experience, and you’ll be able to show an angle to your character that you otherwise wouldn’t. But stuff like a Janitor tackle-gloving a highly-trained Syndicate agent after they say “Please evacuate, I’m about to set off a bomb,” isn’t what we’re looking for. Always trying to be the ‘hero’ of the story, even when it makes no real sense, is both gamey and against our roleplay standards.
LRP by Mixing OOC and IC
It’s important to remember that roleplay consists of, well, roleplaying a character. They’re not you and should never be. We do embrace characters that may have some similar traits to you, the player, but characters should not be a vehicle for the player’s exact thoughts or desires. Self-inserts are a poor character type to have to deal with, both for those who play them and for those who play with them. Everything that happens to your character should not be felt as if it’s happening to you, the player, especially given bad things are almost always inevitable in a roleplay. For those that play alongside self-inserts, interactions can feel limited and potentially risky as one doesn’t want to do anything that might hurt the character.
Common traits of self-inserts are anything between the player getting upset when the character doesn’t get what they want when a player has little to no variation between their characters’ personalities, or if they’re simply viscerally incapable of letting their character lose or be poked fun at. This halts roleplay.
On the other hand, IC and OOC should be kept separate, as this is an entirely separate world with entirely separate people from ours. For example, if someone is playing a speciest in a well-thought-out, thoroughly-roleplayed fashion, you should not be hitting them with caustic messages in LOOC or thinly-veiled OOC-in-IC in your dialogue. If a character breaks up with yours, it isn’t the player cutting you off; it’s just a scene in a roleplay, it’s nothing deeper than that. However, if you are OOCly uncomfortable with the current scene, such as a roleplay featuring topics you might find traumatizing or triggering, please do not hesitate to tell the other player in LOOC; and contact staff if they refuse to stop. Roleplay is about the effort made to both create a story with someone, and to make it fun with them. If scenes are legitimately unfun for you OOCly, we’re happy to help correct them within reason.
Roleplay Assistance
Third Party Roleplay Guide: https://springhole.net/writing/how-to-write-character-who-are-different-from-you.htm
https://springhole.net/writing/spot-and-handle-parasitic-roleplayers.htm
https://springhole.net/writing/character-core-drives.htm
https://springhole.net/writing/why-people-might-not-want-to-roleplay-with-you.htm
https://springhole.net/writing/general-roleplaying-tips-and-advice.htm
Return to policies page