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Guide to RolePlaying

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Guide to RolePlaying

 

Gibur looked at the road ahead, with a feeling of mistrust. The road to Portland was well known to be dangerous and for the first time in months he experienced a haunting feeling, he was scared. A soft humming startled him even more and he spun around only to see an old man dressed in white clothes accompanied by a warrior dressed in some kind of black and red uniform. The old man spoke. “I am the Chronicler…..”

 

The following is a guide with tips for role-playing

 

What is RolePlaying?

 

To role-play is to act out a role you set for a character. In a sense you act as the character you play. A roleplay character would need a few things like background, motivation, goals and traits. To be a successful roleplayer is to know your character, just as a writer would try to know the character /he is writing about.

To roleplay is to act, but in order to act you need to establish a few things as mentioned previously.

 

Roleplay Character Creation

“….. I am the record keeper of the ancient Brotherhood of Bane.” Gibur looked at the Chronicler; What was he doing here? In addition, why is he speaking to me? he thought. Aloud he said: “Greetings, I am Gibur son of…..”

 

There are two approaches to create a roleplaying character in a game such as Eternal Lands.

It will be either that you first create your character and then develop the roleplay aspects, or that you create the role and then go ahead to create the in-game character. Either way you will find that all characters have some roleplay to them, be it the PKer (Player Killer) who claims to not care about roleplaying at all or the healer who spends the days on Isla Prima spinning high tales while practicing the divine art of healing.

It does not matter how you do it, but that you do it. On the official Eternal Lands website, you find brief descriptions of the playable races, and you might want to use that as a starting point for your character development

 

In the following example, we will look at developing the role, before creating the character. We will create Gibur, a male dwarf miner and ore trader.

 

Looks

 

Think about the appearance of your character and decide what s/he will look like. Some things might not show in-game, like scars, but are useful to keep in mind nevertheless. Part from the obvious, like skin color, hair style etc you might also find it useful to note if the character is clean or unkempt, tall or short (for the race in question), fat or thin etc.

 

Gibur is a male dwarf with pale skin, coming from his years spent in the gold mine. He keeps his grey hair and beard trimmed and is generally clean. His most noted item is the brown cape he always wears.

 

 

Background

 

Defining a good background for your character is probably the most challenging aspect of creating a roleplaying character, as it will tend to help define the personality as well.

What kind of family life and childhood did s/he have? Did they come from a big clan, or a small band of outcasts? How would your character be affected by events from their history? What is the best/worst thing that ever happened to the character?

 

In short, the character background answers the question: What has your character’s life been like up until now?

 

Gibur was born in the depths of the mountains. He belonged to a small clan of dwarves know as Ingotdigger. His constant mining shaped his early years, it was his whole world. Gibur dismissed “rumors” about the surface world as pranks and jokes and he always found a way to be too late to join the others in their surface expeditions. This gave him the by-name “the slow” and made him well known for “always being late”. His mother and father were killed in a mining accident when he was very young, so he was raised, if you can call it that, by his uncle Bosur Ingotdigger. Bosur did not believe in pampering children, so he never told Gibur that there actually was a surface. Bosur taught Gibur to mine and that true craftsmanship lies in the hands of a skilled miner. Maybe Bosur can be viewed as mean, but it was his way of sheltering Gibur from the “evil of the world”

 

 

Personality and traits

 

A good starting point could be the background of your character. What earlier experiences could trigger a certain trait or personality? How would your character act? Is s/he shy or blunt? What scares the character and what makes him/her laugh?

 

Try not to make invincible overlords when creating a character. Developing a flaw is usually more fun than to be uber this and uber that. Another way of doing this is to develop a conflict of some kind in the character, like being law-abiding and greedy, which might make you try to steal something if you think you can get away with it and then regret it. Usually it is the small flaws and conflicts that help define what the character is good at as well.

 

Gibur embraces the dark; it makes him feel at home. Out in the open, however, he is weary and maybe a little scared. Gibur does not like new things or new ideas, one could say he is afraid of the unknown, yet he constantly seek to explore any cave or mine he sees, hoping to find the big score, the mother load of ore. Gibur is also always late; in fact, he has not been on time a single day in his life.

 

 

Finally, put it all together into one package and write out a description of your character. This will help you a lot in clarifying your role.

 

How do I roleplay my character?

 

Now that you have some background, looks and personality, it is time to start roleplaying. But how do you roleplay? A play in a theater is roleplaying, but then you have a script and within a (relatively) short time-frame the play will end and is thus over. Roleplaying in a game is a bit different. You get a character (as developed above) and then you act out a free-form script, i.e. the script is the background and the context of the game. In Eternal Lands, you will try to act as you were a character living on Draia, where there are no cars, no TVs etc.

When people ask you who you are and what you do, be prepared to tell them - just as you would do in real life. Gibur might say: “I am a miner.” And little else depending on his mood. If he is on the surface, he will be weary and eager to get inside.

 

Stay in the context of the game, so do not refer to things your character should not know of, or to things that you, the player, are doing.

What is “context”? The context is what defines the gameworld, the things you cannot really see. Eternal Lands is a fantasy world with a medieval feel, and unlike our world, everybody knows that the gods do exist; sometimes they even walk the lands (according to persistent rumors).

One way to define “staying in context” is the OOC and IC, where OOC means Out-Of-Character and IC means In-Character. OOC can be regarded as “off-topic”. To show that you are OOC you can either send a PM or say what you want to say in double brackets “((some text))”.

 

For example; In the middle of a roleplaying event, John’s mother enters the room, John is the person playing Gibur, to tell him that dinner is ready. So this is how it may look in the game:

 

Gibur sees a spider coming down the hallway, he turns to Lan.

Gibur: ((sorry guys I have to go, dinner is ready))

Lan: ((ok, we will leave you here then))

Lan swings his sunbreaker killing the spider in one good blow then he runs down the hall leaving Gibur to hold the rear.

 

Etc….

 

In Eternal Lands, if you want to emote something, you use a : in front of your message. For example, if you want to swing a sword, you would type : swings a sword , and it would come out as Gibur swings a sword .

 

So find a group of people to roleplay with, go out in the game, and act out your roles. As always, all game rules etc still apply. There is also an in-game roleplaying channel, channel #5. In-game just type #jc 5 to join channel 5.

 

 

Happy roleplaying!

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A few guidelines for better in-game roleplaying

 

1. Try to put all Out-Of-Character chat in (( )) brackets. e.g. Talking about computers and email is OOC, on the contrast In-Character chat (IC) would consist of goblins and gold ore.

 

2. Try to stay away from modern jargon. e.g. Leet Speek, puns, abbreviations, and anything related to modern events.

 

3. If you wish to hold a Role Playing event and you find it hard to get participants then you can either post in the Roleplaying forum or join the Roleplaying channel in-game.

 

4. Role Play events will usually have you running around finding items and so forth, if you do not like it, do not participate.

 

5. Forced Role Play is not allowed. If the other character is a willing participant then that is fine. But saying something like "Gibur Kills Lan" is not good roleplaying and one of the very few rules.

 

6. Play your own character. Do not say what other characters do or say. You may hint to another character what you want him/her to do like: "Gibur went looking for the Chronicler, hoping that the Chronicler would notice his new cloak" This opens up the possibility for the Chronicler to "notice" Gibur's new cloak and inquire about it, thus expanding on a potential twist/turn to the RP.

 

7. Trading if happens during a roleplay event, should be roleplayed. for example:

Lan Mandragoran hands over a fine looking Sunbreaker

Gibur counts some gold coins and hands them to Lan

 

8. When a new person enters the area, it would be nice if you describe yourself to them in OOC.

((Gibur Ingotdigger is a stocky pale dwarf. He is clean and keeps his hair and beard trimmed.))

To speed things up you might add some personality in the description, but in general it is better if you roleplay that part. So instead of adding: ((Gibur fear being outside)) he might say:

Gibur: lets get inside I don’t think it is safe out here under that evil void they call the sky.

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