I sometimes see complaints about roleplaying sims and rules, the rules put visitors off. People aren’t familiar with terms such as OOC or IC or Get Out Of The Way. However there are often times when rules are there for a good reason, although sometimes they get TLDR.
So I found out the other day whilst taking some photographs on my own roleplaying sim when I was told off for dressing as a Dwarfin. I quickly headed back to find fellow protesters on another sim to march on the town hall about these rules.
At this point my chief Elf slapped me and told me to behave, pointing out that there was no way I was going to be able to build a story arc that explained how my Evil Drow Wizard had turned into a mining Dwarf with an army of Gnomes! I had to admit, she had a point.
Rules in roleplaying sims are often there to guide the roleplay, if people make too much stuff up, it can undermine the roleplay, if people don’t make enough stuff up, you’ll undermine the roleplay too! However sim owners or the administrators of roleplay want the sim to stay in theme most of the time, they will from time to time have out of character events, but the rules are there to try and make a roleplay sim stay in theme, it undermines the roleplay greatly if you’re based in the middle ages and somebody arrives on a jet plane.
However a balance does need to be struck because people may want to explore said sims even if they don’t want to engage in the roleplay, this gets tricky. Then there are character applications, choosing a race, choosing a name, this can get overwhelming to someone who just wants to dip their toes into the water and explore a bit of roleplay, I mean you’ve just landed, why are you being hit with all these notecards and warnings? Yes it can be offputting but unfortunately there’s no easy answer here, an OOC instance of a roleplaying sim would be nice but the technology isn’t there to deliver that and it would probably be very expensive were it to be there.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, don’t ignore the roleplaying rules of a sim, even if you’re the sim owner!
I have a non-anthro cat avatar I often use if I just want to visit and observe in a roleplaying sim. A house cat skulking around is rarely out of place in any setting.
We have rules on animals, largely to discourage the pink panther from appearing but good call, a house cat fits in pretty much anywhere, even in space!
Statistically speaking, house cats have a considerably better survival rate than humans in space 😛