User:SkunkWerks



=Introduction= This is all OOC info about me, but then again, it's a user page and I promise you much of this regards my involvement in Roleplay, so why not?

Some of you may know me by this name through the Official Realm forum, but may not be as familiar with my presence as a Roleplayer on Earthen Ring. Aye, it's true, long before I was being called a Troll on the WoW forums (and a few forums of other MMOs) I've been a tabletop PnP (that's Pencil and Paper) Roleplayer for about 15 years running. As in a lot of cases, RP troupes break up and well, I found the MMO setting to be terribly convenient to get my fix for RP.

At first I fiddled in "chat-based RP" (not really sure if you'd call it MUSH, MUD or whatever, I wasn't well-versed in those terms as I think I got involved at the tail end of their popularity) as MMO's hadn't yet reached their full splendor anyway, and I ended up helping ro administrate a portion of a White Wolf Games-based RP setting. It was pretty big. Big enough that White Wolf was considering co-opting it as their official online presence at one point, as I understand it (and this was back in the day when games like Vampire: the Masquerade were still a big deal). It was also big enough to make the Oprah Winfrey show at one point, where we are all vilified as "a cult of vampire-worshiping satanists" or something to that effect.

After that, I started fiddling with MMOs, leading emthrough City of Heroes, and eventually, here.

This sort of information, I suppose, gives away the "big secret" about who SkunkWerks is, but then again, to my mind, it was never really a big secret anyway. And while I don't broadcast who I am, finding it out really isn't terribly hard if you want to. For more information on why Skunkwerks has, and always will be "my main", see this.

=Roleplay "Style"= I suppose everyone's got one. Mine primarily involves inclusiveness the the rejection of pretentiousness, reclusiveness and exclusivity in Roleplay. I also believe in promoting good player relations first. Because if you can't stand the people you play with, you're probably not going to enjoy anything you do with them, Roleplaying included. This also leads me to say a few things that bear relevance specifically to Roleplay in the WoW environment- and in particular in regards to "RP Servers" and how they should ideally be treated (or perhaps, not treated).

Bear in mind, this is all my opinion, of course. But maybe it will help you, the reader decide how (or perhaps even not) to interact with me. If you get something out of it, cool, if not, well, I can't really offer you back the time you spent reading it.

Exclusivity/Reclusiveness
I think a lot of Roleplayers forget that an MMO is a communal setting for RP- an environment where ideally, every character is on an equal footing with one another, and has an equal right to what I like to call "spotlight time". This might not be true in an IC sense (not everyone is a Lord of Stormwind, a High Magister of Silvermoon, etc.), but it is always true in an OOC sense. And if you recall from above, I believe relations between players need nurturing before we start worrying about the relations between characters.

Or to put it in the short form: IC drama = good/OOC drama = bad.

For a variety of reasons (most of which I'd probably attribute to the typical tendencies of people who get involved in Roleplay as a Hobby) people in these MMO RP settings get very "cliquish" and "clannish" about their relations with others outside their normal accustomed circle of acquaintances. They tend to ignore such people more often, and even get a bit "catty" if forced to relate with them. Mind you, once again, I'm not speaking of IC conflict due to some ongoing storyline between characters. I'm talking about Roleplayers and their tendency to stick their heads in the sand when people (and circumstances) come along that they aren't familiar with.

Obviously, this doesn't help player interaction much, and Roleplay fails along with it.

Reach out to other people. Don't be so quick to dismiss them. Introduce yourself, say hi. Encourage other people to interact by your examples. Because, if the fact that you are excluding other people from your "reindeer games" isn't enough to motivate you to do so, the fact that you are probably hatching the same stale plots over and over and over with the same sorts of players over and over and over should.

Pretentiousness
Then there's pretension. I suppose maybe my reading of it isn't the only one, but I notice this in a lot of roleplayers (and sadly often in the ones the necessarily nebulous "everyone" seems to regard as quite good). So okay, what the heck am I talking about, I mean, Roleplayers should excel at putting forth false pretense, right? They are after all, pretending to be someone else. And once again I guess I have to say that the problem comes in when the pretense crosses that elusive IC/OOC line- and it does more often than it should, in my opinion.

It comes out in a lot of different ways, some uglier and more obvious than others (e.g.: "godmoding"), but some are more subtle. Now you can see here that I have a penchant for verbosity. I like to write a lot of stuff, but oddly enough, I think you'll find that while Roleplaying in WoW, I try to keep most of my speech and emotes fairly brief. Why? Well, WoW RP is a different format for one thing. See this here? This is my typing space. Now look behind you. The chair your sitting in, and that desk in your living room or bedroom you've got your computer at? Ok, that's your reading space.

I can type as much or as little as I like, and you can decide to read as much as you like or stop reading whenever you feel like it.

In WoW, I am sharing a space with other people. And as such, I feel I should try to be considerate not only to the people I'm directly Roleplaying with, but also to the people around me in the "background" who are also trying to Roleplay at the same time.

I've seen extreme cases of this, where people will hammer you with 10-to-15-line paragraph emotes. There's a few things to be said here- not the least of which involves good writing and how it relates to the concept of 'K.I.S.S.' (short for 'keep it simple, stupid'), also known as brevity. If you can't do it in 1-3 lines, you're probably not doing a good job in the first place. But as we're also talking about Roleplay, another issue comes to mind. I type at, oh say 50-60 words a minute. This is pretty high for your average computer user (and I look at my keyboard too, like I'm not supposed to), it's not exactly clerical speed, but I've got an edge on a lot of folks.

Since when should the acronym "WPM" mean to Roleplay what "DPS" means to Raiding?

Yeah, you heard me. Stop spamming my chatbox with extraneous crap. You're not that important, and if your character isn't trying to dominate the setting, then you are certainly having a good go at dominating my reading. Knock it off. Three lines will most likely suffice where you bludgeoned me with thirteen.

Most characters can't read minds (ok, maybe some, but frankly claiming yours can kinda borders on godmoding anyway). Unless what you're thinking is really, really obvious: show, don't tell. I don't have access to your internal monologue. I have, as an outside observer, only what I can read on your face to go on (which, incidentally, is why the channel's called "Emote" rather than "Narrative"). This isn't a novel you're writing here, and even if it were, since when did novel-writing become a spectator sport? Ever watched someone write a novel? It's pretty freaking boring.

And if you're thinking "well, some people might miss out on my great RP," I've got news for you, if your emotive expressiveness doesn't interest me enough to inquire or investigate further, then it's very possible that you're not interesting, or that my character is just not interested for their own reasons. Let it lie. Find other people who are interested, or otherwise inclined to be. If you think you aren't getting it across clearly to me and maybe that's why I'm not biting, okay, that's fine too. However, the solution to this isn't necessarily making your emotes longer, is it?

"zOMG THIS IS AN ARPEE SERVUR, WTF?!?!!"
Guys and gals (hey, it works for Sarah Palin, right?), I'm going to let you in on a little something I've been thinking about, more or less since starting to play this game and roleplay in it- well okay, it's not exactly something I've kept secret or anything, but here it goes anyway:

Creating and labeling specific servers as "for RP" is probably one of the dumbest things an MMO can do.

...if it isn't a complete waste of time for the company, it actually tends to be more harmful to RP than it is helpful to it.

Yeah, I know... blasphemy, right? How could I say something like that? Well, if I haven't driven you off already with my heretical tone, then I'll trouble you with the following primary reasons:


 * Unlike the difference between PvE and PvP servers, the difference between an RP server and any other is in name only. There is no ruleset you can create that will promote better RP, nor discourage griefing and other behavior detrimental to it.


 * Despite the above fact, people are not in any way discouraged from thinking that those two letters in Parentheses somehow make for WORLDS of opportunities for the company hosting the MMO to enhance their roleplay experience, somehow. Now not only has the company wasted it's time promising the consumer what it cannot deliver on, but the consumer is now wasting a whole lot of time demanding that delivery.


 * Because of point one and in despite of point two, Roleplay and Roleplayers thrive just fine in many places in many MMOs that don't have those letters and parentheses, and in fact, they're often happier for it.

Take LotRO for example. Now there's the Holy Grail of RP right? I mean, it's based on Tolkien, and pretty much any Ropleplaying game in a fantasy setting is based on his work. So they'd like, totally have to have RP Servers, right? They don't in fact. But does RP happen there anyway? Oh most definately. And it's a similar situation with City of Heroes. I mean, sure, Players themselves will often declare one particular server as the "unofficial RP server" (as I understand it that was Virtue in CoH, and Landroval in LotRO) but you don't get a whole heck of a lot of this animosity between the RPers and Non-RPers. And this is because everyone understand that the MMO is first an MMO and only an RPG second.

Is that so terrible a thing? I don't think so. I mean sure, some games offer more widgets suited to roleplayers than others. LotRO for instance offers Player Housing and a pretty flexible music system where players may share custom music and performances with one another, and CoH has a character customization system that would put WoW's to shame any day of the week. What has two letters and a couple parentheses ever given us though? Save perhaps for the imagined notion that a lot of complaining about a "problem" Blizzard can't ever hope to fix for us anyway is a worthwhile endeavor.

And while I know I don't need these widgets to have an enjoyable RP experience (PnP gaming, 15 years... if anything it ought to tell you I've got an imagination powerful enough to turn a piece of paper into a fully emotive character and a dirty green table laden with chips into a rolling plain of fantasy excitement), I'd frankly rather Blizzard put their time into any one or more of those than pursuing pie in the sky.

...even though pie is good.

Still, yeah. RP Servers. Same situation as any other server: Roleplayers are a minority and Roleplaying isn't exactly a popular hobby with most folks. Is it any real surprise to us that a majority of players prefer to do other things? I don't think it should be, personally. Unless that is if we've totally deluded ourselves in this fantasy dice game into thinking we really are wizards, warriors and warlocks worthy of such a bastion against the "banality of a cruel, cold world".

Yeah, it sounded like a ridiculous metaphor. That was intentional.

=Characters= Two years, and some shuffling around (with more likely to happen with WotLK coming out)... It's brought into being about ten characters at any given time for em on Earthen Ring. Presently, I am directly responsible for the following characters:

Allied

 * Aphotika- a feral Night Elf girl who has an affinity with felines, and in particular, her bosom companion and "brother", Nyx.
 * Vesperal- a very old Kal'dorei who runs a secret society of rogues and mystics called The Masque who puts forth a public front as a group of traveling actors.
 * Skunkwerks (of course)- a whimsical and impetuous Gnome of the "absent-minded professor" archetype. Brilliant, but whose tendencies towards distractability frequently make him a danger to himself and others.
 * Sharael- an amnesiac Draenei woman whose inability to recall her past before the crash of the Exodar haunts her steps.
 * Senivel
 * Malchiae

Horde

 * Facet-
 * Cualgne-
 * Tenebrai-
 * Siderael-

=Addons= I am always fiddling with addons of all sorts. I've never been a huge fan of the default interface. I think it's clumsy and tremendously inconvenient. I am however very fond of the fact that, in WoW, I don't have to deal with it. Not too surprisingly, my penchant for addons also extends into my Roleplay as well. Many of my character's traits rely on the use of addons to varying degrees. And so, to help another player "interface" better with my characters, I'll list here some of the Addons I utilize for Roleplay with links to where they may be found.


 * MyRoleplay- a fairly new RP addon as the history of RP addons goes, MyRoleplay (AKA: MRP) has a predecessor in the old FlagRSP mod (whose "direct" successor is technically FlagRSP2) and it's function is similar to that addon: to allow a player to write and display to other observing players short bios and extra information about their characters. It remains, to my mind, the best of the trio of competing addons for this function including FlagRSP2 and ImmersionRP (which I believe has fallen into disrepair since).  However it is inter-compatible with both other mods, so it's not necessary for players to specifically have MRP, though there are fields for information in MRP not contained in the other RSP-style mods that would be missed otherwise.


 * Tongues- This is another new RP addon, but it has a history in a far older addon that was actually authored by Rook Greymantle of Netherbane right here on Earthen Ring. That addon was called Lore.  What Lore did (it is now in poor maintenance like so many RP addons and no longer works reliably) is allow a player to speak languages other than the default languages provided.  A more savvy player may even create his own language with only a very basic understanding of the coding.  Tongues is basically a continuation of Lore, and I use this with many of my characters who, through their adventures, have come to learn languages or speak in funny ways.  Having Tongues would help a player perhaps understand some of my characters better as one of it's future-planned features is language learning...


 * Ephemeral- This is a mod that has recently been resurrected from disuse. And what it does is allow a player to create and trade "prop" objects.  Players may write books, create containers that can be locked, and on and on.  I should like to use this more broadly, and yet it doesn't seem as though this addon is in wide use in the Roleplay community here on ER...


 * Roleplay Helper 2- This addon allows a player to add a bit more "flavor" to their interactions in the world with NPCs (both hostile and otherwise) by automatically triggering speech and emote in response to in-world events- such as speaking to an NPC, being hit in combat, or even Trading with other players. These emotes and sayings can be custom written by the player and have random triggers whose frequency may be set by the player.  Having this is not necessary of course, but it is a neat little mod I thought bears mentioning.