OOC shenanigans

[Kyriel]

Keelhaul the newspawns! Batten down the hatches! Hoist the mainsail! Full speed ahead!

[Spillages]

Hey, that's their choice, to come across as clumsy clueless. It's adorable to see, and gently mock, and I'll be the first to educate em, but hey. They seem to be doing fine mechanics wise. Why not spend the time and thought to seem vaguely proficient as well.

If everytime someone started a task, I needed to treat them like a first year apprentice and walk through the process of building a window or furnace, step by step, and all they were providing was oh, cool, yeah.... what's this thing? I'd stop pretending to care quite quickly.

Rp'ing clumsy, but being exceedingly proficient at the mechanics side, just feels tack-y. :drumroll:

I want to make sure I understand this right. A player who understands the interface, and can make their character do anything that is mechanically possible in game, but yet roleplays a character that is always tripping over its own feet is tacky?

[iavatus]

I want to make sure I understand this right. A player who understands the interface, and can make their character do anything that is mechanically possible in game, but yet roleplays a character that is always tripping over its own feet is tacky?

In some ways, yes. I've had a character who did everything in the How to Kidnap book 101, perfectly and with not the slightest hesitation. And then spent the rest of the time carefully blubbering like I was the scary one. I still respected the RP and definitely the mechanic knowhow to do it all so quickly and effectively, but there was a strong dichotomy there. I'm not talking over a minute, I'm talking within seconds. By the time I had realised, and I was awake, there were 4 events looking at me, and each one tightened the noose that much more.

Like blind characters who never misspeak, can hear everything perfectly, never hand something to the wrong person. We're people, we flub up and forget. But consistently having a disability or effect, even when it's dangerous or annoying, part of the deal. Otherwise it's just a lazy way of getting attention. IMHO.

And tacky was chosen for the boat pun. Otherwise, would've gone with jarring. Can use that in boating, but generally when you ram into an island.


But, boats. A boat is a magical thing. It goes the direction I point it at, as fast as any direction. Throwing real nautical terms and techniques, makes only the slightest sense. It's supposed to be impenetrable jargon anyway. Read some of the master and commander books, or any Patrick O'Brien really. If you understand it, you know more then most, and enough to bluff away.

Describe what happens, not the gritty details

*Baconface looks pleased, as the wind catches the full sail, straining at the leash*

*Baconface pulls some ropes, and turns the wheel*

That's really all you need, imho.

[Marian]

I want to make sure I understand this right. A player who understands the interface, and can make their character do anything that is mechanically possible in game, but yet roleplays a character that is always tripping over its own feet is tacky?

My take on the original post was more about people not RPing much at all. Playing your character as an expert sailor who knows all the tricks but never mustering up the interest for anything more detailed than something like the *waves rope around* example to represent that.

Reading other replies now and maybe my take on it was wrong but eh.

[Kyriel]

Yeah, I have more of a problem with bad emotes than not trying to emote something you really don't know anything about. It doesn't mean you have to be silent all the time, certainly, but if you're not going to put a modicum of effort into looking up how a sail works, just lean against the rail and chat.

Now, I have one character that I play as being not so good at math... and so he's constantly handing Town Leader in Unnamed Town the wrong change.

[Marian]

Your char speaks the language of Gazoport or Xiria or wherever she spawned. If you have to say ‘Italian’, you aren’t trying hard enough.

I missed this one earlier. But no, my characters don't speak the language of any specific town, they speak the language their brains were wired with upon spawning. English sailors could make a newspawn pop up in a Polish town. That newspawn wouldn't speak the language of that town, obviously.

But I'm still surprised at how strongly some of you feel about this, and I'm not really sure I'm comfortable with this kind of attitude that a huge chunk of the player base (the majority, even?) are poor RPers just because they may not be meeting someone else's personal standards. I'm also still not understanding what the connection is with using a word for a language, and copy and pasting entire songs on the radio or plagiarism of copyrighted work is supposed to be. But 'specious' is one of those words like 'ignorant' an when internet peoples start throwing it around it's usually a sign the discussion's about to go downhill fast and best to just back away slowly and change the subject...

Yeah, I have more of a problem with bad emotes than not trying to emote something you really don't know anything about. It doesn't mean you have to be silent all the time, certainly, but if you're not going to put a modicum of effort into looking up how a sail works, just lean against the rail and chat.

I have literally used *does various sailory things* as an emote so I really can't talk. But if I were to ever play a serious sailor I"d probably do some research. Some Cantrian things just don't make any sense, no matter what. The direction of the wind never matters, and the tide is always moving in exactly the direction you want to do. Not even get into things like smelting iron with your bare hands...

[LittleSoul]

I wouldn't necessarily say it's the majority just because people with that opinion seem to pipe up more. I've been lurking this thread, and.. I don't understand that line of thought either. There are some things in Cantr you cannot make purely IC.. and language / language group is one of them. Making it IC by giving it some made up name only makes more confusion even if the intent is to create more immersion.

I can't find the quote, maybe it was in another thread, but iavatus posted a wonderful quote that summed up how I feel about OOC when it gets to the point where we try to over separate it from the game. It came down to this. You could name all the human world sounding things a bunch of gibberish but then you... basically have a game full of gibberish that no one can understand.
There's a line, but a society simulator / RPG that isn't a pain to play will never be completely unaffected by OOC things. We have to base game mechanics and limitations off of something.. and that is real life. What we know.

And language group is one of those things where if you didn't make up the name to start with.. if you start pointing at polish characters and calling them ageobits or some other made up word.. I doubt it will even catch on since.. we already call them polish, and no one else knows what an ageobit is, and also, if we do that new players aren't going to know what the hell we're talking about either. That's one part of cantr 'culture' I'm not sad about not evolving.

TLDR;
Look at it this way. Polish, english, etc might as well be those made up words in cantr since there is no england or poland.
It's your association with those words in real life that's making you think of the countries. Your characters just know those words as descriptions.

[Marian]

It was this one. This thread just moves really fast.

"...We could have told you that our character paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything would have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it also would have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful."

Isaac Asimov, on why we call a spade a spade in sci fi.

[Alladinsane]

All things go in cycles... I was a very young and new player when this came up:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=19640&p=417759&hilit=wind+cries+mary#p417759

We generally agreed that we thought plagiarism was in bad taste and iirc staff said they would not allow it.

Part of the problem with this is that we in staff do not always see some things that are spoken or transmitted that are ooc. I know that there was a major radio issue recently where certain messages were not being heard in certain locations. There has been an effort by one or more characters to isolate and identify the problem, but "holes" still seem to exist. These are mostly created by the geography of the maps... much like RL.

The point of that paragraph is that people in staff do not always hear these things. Thats where we depend on you, the player base, to tell us what you heard and provide concrete and timely examples of the things you have an issue with. Our hopes are that:

1. It will be worked out IG... Those who speak of wanting to grow our community need to heed this. Help people out; give advice; tips; constructive criticism.
2. Someone will tell us in PD... that does not mean that every incident you report will be addressed, nor does it mean that we will keep you in the loop regarding the outcome of your complaint, in fact, we will probably not tell you a thing other than: "We'll look into it". We do this to protect the identity and privacy of the players reporting and reported.
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Within RL, there is a legal concept of "Public Domain" and it may vary by country.

I think its 75yrs within the U.S. (I know of at least one of our players who probably has a greater knowledge of this, but may or may not choose to share that information) when a song or piece of writing can no longer by copyrighted, with exceptions. AFAIK... we are not taken to court by the descendants of Mozart (arbitrary example) for using his works.

I don't know the time period for cantr, but I would submit that "The song of Donii" may have existed in this game so long (it was here when I joined 5 1/2 yrs ago) in cantr that it may be a "cantr domain" property unless maybe the publishers of whatever book it was plagiarized from bring suit against this not-for-profit game. Discuss as you see fit.
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DISCLAIMER IN TINY LITTLE FAST TALK FONT:

All of the preceding post was the opinion of one person, not an official PD position. Any resemblances to anyone, alive or deceased and either fictional or real is purely coincidental.

[LittleSoul]

Thank you Marian, that's the one!

As for this plagiarism business I'd like to question it. I agree it's in bad taste to pull in direct copy and paste from some song or book or anything remotely identifiable as something made from a famous artist outside of cantr.

But I don't really understand how it's anything more than bad taste. People post lyrics on sites all over the internet so that people can find them, or they post lyrics or poems or pictures in forums like this, etc etc. I suppose the difference is taking credit or not taking credit for said works, but.. I don't think any of those sites or forums have license or permission for their users to post those works and I doubt they will ever.. ever get sued for it.

Technically, the game is not making money or advertising off of these notes with outside works on it and.. there is nothing to sue for since there are no damages and the game is not making money off of these works.

Technically, it's the fictional non-real character taking credit for the work and not someone who is any kind of threat to the artist it came from since.. you cannot buy, sell, redistribute etc those works to people in the artist's real life work market. They're not losing money.

So I guess I mention this because the word 'plagiarism' is so harsh, and I wonder if Cantr's policy was set this way with the line of thought of 'better safe than sorry' so the site wouldn't have to deal with the hassle in case someone got twitchy over their works and threatened to sue?
Again, I'm not defending people who do this in the game, it just seems like a bit much to call it plagiarism when no one is losing money or causing damages, and I'm just curious.

[Alladinsane]

True, I didn't even think of sites that post song lyrics.
They do include the name of the artist on those sites and that may be their "loophole".
But its a great point LittleSoul.

I was even reminded of how colleges expel for it.
But then I was reminded that you cannot even 'recycle' your own papers and writings in college, such as turning in the same paper in two different classes (law and economic theory as a possible example) or you could be accused of:

"Plagiarizing yourself"



Speaking of obnoxious.

Tawhk amongst yourselves, I'm verklempt.

[Kyriel]

I doubt anyone's going to actually care if someone posts song lyrics in a transient medium like a chatroom or web game. They rarely seem to care if anyone posts them on the web, after all. I think the real problem with them was mentioning RL places and OOC concepts. (That and the formatting made me cringe. Come on, at least put in a space or slash where the line breaks would be and not just let the words run together.)

[Snowdrop]

TLDR;
Look at it this way. Polish, english, etc might as well be those made up words in cantr since there is no england or poland.
It's your association with those words in real life that's making you think of the countries. Your characters just know those words as descriptions.

This, exactly.

[Marian]

I'm not even talking about the legal aspect, but it's plagiarism to rip work off from someone else and present it as your own. Or maybe 'plagiarism' is just the politest word I can say about it, because it's lots of other unpleasant things too.

Used to be a member of a writing site, and every so often we'd get these people wandering in and putting up things they'd stolen from other sites and just barely altered by changing the characters names, if they'd bothered to do even that much. They were considered the very lowest of scum and immediately banned whenever caught. It wasn't really about the legality of it, but the (lack of) ethics. True, they were stealing stuff posted openly on the internet, but the question was more 'what is wrong with this person in the first place that they would do this and what enjoyment do they get out of receiving praise for someone else's work anyhow'.

The copy and pasted songs are just annoying and slightly disruptive in their OOCness. There's no RP involved so whoever's doing it isn't really even trying to pass it off as their own, they're just trolling. While whoever started the Donii religion was allowed to effect the game and other characters with it, and I wonder if they really enjoy looking back on their character's life and patting themself on the back knowing their big impact on the game was in spreading around a lot of OOC notes they didn't even write? It's like if I had a character that claimed to be a poet and I just started spreading around a bunch of stuff from William Wordsworth and claiming I'd labored over it for days. Where is the accomplishment there and what's the point, and should other people be expected to just nod and smile and praise my character for their genius?

I've read some IG poetry lately that took real effort to write, and it even took specifically Cantrian things into account. Makes the other look even worse in comparison.

[Kyriel]

Yeah, and so much the worse when such blatantly OOC things aren't just dismissed by the characters. There's acting OOC, and then there's encouraging OOC activity.