Finding Rp

Our game environment is weighted towards proactively seeking RP, and tries to help foster organic situations where roleplay can develop. We try to strike a balance between roleplaying being very accessible and easy to find by putting yourself out there, but without also being pressured or bombarded relentlessly into scenes a player might not particularly enjoy. If someone wants to play a character and try to be one of the big movers and shakers of the game world, trying to sway the political opinions of hundreds of characters into their favor, great. If someone else wants slice of life RP and quiet scenes once in a while and to avoid the tumult, also great. We believe we can accommodate both.

There's different styles of players trying to find RP organically, using IC contact only, and some players wanting to touch base OOCly first. Both are okay. We very much encourage the first, since we believe it's more immersive, but of course it's totally fine for someone to page another person to see if they'd like to have an RP scene or ask in a chat channel or the like. Now as depressing as it is to mention in regards to ooc communication, we kind of have to- this is a game of adults, and we have a higher bar for civility and courtesy OOC than some games, so if you ever experience any kind of harassment or even a hint of someone not taking no for an answer, please contact staff immediately.

When we design characters, their backgrounds are usually written while trying to answer the questions of, 'What stories can they get involved in' and 'what hooks do they have to foster roleplay'. Some players make this more explicit by listing RP hooks in the +finger information for the characters, as valid reasons they have scenes. For any roster character you take, check out the organizations they are members of, using the '@org' command. Each organization can be anything from a family to an institution, with the most common being a noble house, and characters are also members of the @org for houses up the fealty chain of their liege. Each organization has its own goals, stories and roleplaying going on varying with the activity of the characters involved, and most have bulletin boards (the @bb command) and chat channels to help aid communication internally. You can type '@org <name of the org>' to see a write up of just what the organization is about, and see your character's member statistics in the org (more on what that means later with tasks). But ultimately orgs just exist to foster roleplay between members and to create stories between the org your characters are in and others.

All orgs can be joined organically through roleplay, and some have to be- the secret societies don't tend to advertise, and characters that win the trust of others might find themselves caught up in story arcs they never knew existed with a major impact upon the game world. If you feel your character should have been a member of an @org and isn't, you may contact staff, it might be an oversight (particularly if it's an OC and you didn't really know an appropriate org existed when you created the character). Otherwise, you can always roleplay with members of an org and try to be recruited.

Aside from orgs, there's numerous ways to try to get involved and look for RP oocly. The bulletin board system is almost all with announcements that have something to do with RP, such as the classifieds board that has characters trying to seek another for some reason or another. The @family command will show how a character is related to others, and can be used on any character (whether PC or NPC) to look up and down family trees, and most love to build up relationships with their IC family. Player characters are able to set their RP hooks by using the '+rphooks' command, adding one will show under your 'finger' information, and you can try to find other players using hooks that interest you with the '+rphooks/search' command. Don't be afraid to reach out to someone, particularly if you can find a reason to do so ICly.

Now our preferred method is finding RP through In Character means and organically, where players don't feel the need to break immersion to find a roleplaying scene. Even when using the ooc means above, many players prefer an IC messenger attempting to reach out and schedule a meeting, as that can feel less intrusive, so we encourage players to first use IC means like a messenger, such as

message chanse=To Chanse Grayhope. So I hear you know a thing or two about smuggling, and I had a job come across my desk that might interest you. We should talk.

Players are encouraged to just roam around the grid of public rooms, checking out scenes that show on @where or +hangouts, and use @directions to go to the rooms and just jump into the scenes. When entering a public ongoing scene, characters are free to jump in, but it is considered courteous to not do so in a way that would disrupt the current flow of the scene. In many public room, there are places you can see with the 'places' command, that you can 'join' or 'depart'. These allow for targeted communication only seen by those at the place, so your characters can have hushed conversation at a table, or snarky commentary of a political summit at the Assembly of Peers, as the case may be. Use the 'tt' command for tabletalk to talk/pose at a place.

To look at other occupants in a room, the 'here' command gives a short abbreviated list of every character in the room with basic information about them that might be helpful. The 'glance' command allows someone to see a short version of using '@sheet' on another character. To add a short note of how your character appears in the room, you can use '+roomtitle', such as '+roomtitle Reading Quietly' or '+roomtitle Loudly Arguing' or the like to note in parenthesis a current state for your character. Similarly, if you'd like to add on a temporary addendum to your character's description for when someone 'looks' at your character, you can use the '+tempdesc' command to do an add on, adding a potential blurb about their current state (such as being battered up from a recent battle, for example).

The +room_mood command can be used to help add context to a room or generate roleplay, such as noting a current change that's happened in a room. Anything that would have significant game ramifications has to be cleared by staff, such as room_mood describing a recent attack or the like, since it has to be reflective of the game's current state. On the other hand, if a bunch of characters got into a brawl, it would be perfectly fine to drop a +room_mood describing the bar they were in as trashed.

Aside from showing up in rooms or sending messengers, there's several IC ways to reach out to others. Journals are a major part of theme, and all white journals are considered public, IC knowledge and are easily accessible- they are in many ways the social media of Arx. Some players find great success in building relationships just by writing journals that other characters would feel compelled to respond to, for good or bad reasons, or showcasing their writing. Similar to journals, characters might catch another's notice using the 'praise' command and attempting to increase another character's stature with NPCs by publicly speaking well of them in a more offscreen manner. Also, characters can write books by purchasing blank books from the market in the City Center and then using the 'write' command, and writing in common Arvani, or using the +lang commands to write in another language.

In addition, there is an OOC and IC construct called the @cal (meaning Calendar) or +events that is shown on http://play.arxmush.org/dom/cal/list/ - This list of both upcoming and past events shows a public record of what might be upcoming that would interest you that you can then join, or past public IC records of past events (public event logs can be taken as IC knowledge by word of mouth or recordings in a world where journals are omnipresent). Players are encouraged to attend or, if they are feeling bold, run their own and help generate more fun RP for the game.