Respecting character

[evilhat]

Thinking about doing character generation for a campaign of rob_donoghue's this past weekend, has collided with some musings I've been having about MUSH play, in order to produce a little bit of a random thought this morning, that I wanted to capture while it's still fresh in my head:
Satisfying roleplay requires mutual respect of character concepts.
In

Comments

[drivingblind]

Yeah. Most MUSHes are low-trust environments, and I think you're really talking about the contrast between high trust (since trust and respect often fly in tandem) and low trust play.

Elements of system and social contract in MUSHes then have to cross the distance between low trust and high trust: system might provide means for reinforcing "this is what I'm trying to be", and elements of the social contract might exist to support folks communicating clearly and respectfully with one another about what's going on in play.

A few random thoughts

[chotii]

Where there is no trust, IMO, there can be little or no conflict. If conflict drives play (and while I agree that it does when the conflict *goes* somewhere, random conflict-for-the-sake-of-conflict has a high likelihood of going bad & causing players to avoid each other ever after, which hurts rather than causes play. In fact, I think CFTSOC is about as meaningless as TS-for-the-sake-of-TS, without the "payoff" at the end except for adrenaline junkies

Re: A few random thoughts

[drivingblind]

Yep, fair enough. I'm not saying that system can substitute for trust; for the record, I'm saying it can be oriented to facilitate it more, or less.

Then again, I'm also a fan of putting a big fat sign out front that says "Your level of trust for everyone must be this tall. If it's not, go find another game to play."

[seraphsmorgan]

MUSHes take a double hit in that most players will only have what they can read to react to AND the fact that all interaction is happening in pure text all the other subtle indicators that are normally in play in live game environments are not there to provide additional clues to key off of. This can of course work both ways - someone who has a natural charisma or is very expressive in person can also be poorly represented in text due to poor typing/writing skills.