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What is roleplaying?

Roleplaying is when a person creates a persona for their game character and tries to faithfully portray that persona with its strengths and weaknesses, virtues and foibles. When playing Discworld in this way a roleplayer will likely act rather differently to someone who is treating the game as a competition.

Conventions

Roleplayers tend to divide their communication and actions into two categories. In character (IC) and out of character (OOC). In character is when the player is roleplaying the character, out of character is when they're just chatting with friends or need to discuss game mechanics.

Supported, not required

Unlike some other virtual worlds out there, you are not required to roleplay on Discworld. However, if you are into roleplaying, you will find there is a sizeable group of players on the mud for you to play with and Discworld tries to support those who choose to roleplay and those who choose not to.

What kind of role you want to play is entirely up to you, although we do prefer you to stay in the setting of Discworld. (This is hardly a constraint; since this is such an eclectic place, it would be difficult to actually find a role that would not fit with the possible exception of a Tolkien elf :)

Roleplayers on Discworld usually build their characters on guild identities. Apart from that, they form their characters with lots of humour and the numerous resources the mud has to offer: clothing, emotional expression, character description, titles, the numerous ways of communication, etc.

Roleplaying mode

To support the roleplaying community, you can enable roleplaying mode with the command "options personal roleplaying = on". When you put your character in this mode a number of commands work in a more in character manner. For example "score" no longer shows numbers but gives a textual description of your status. For example:

> score
You are Ceres the Recruit in the Djelian Guard.
You are in perfect health and you are full of energy.
You should consider training your skills.
You are evil and in the service of Pishe, the Goddess of Slight Showers.
You will not flee.
You are unburdened and quite comfortable.
You have an "arrangement" with Death.

In addition many out of character commands (such as tell and remote souls) are disabled and others will be unable to use those commands on you.

Roleplaying board

There is a roleplaying board in the Patrician's palace. Please use it in a nice way, in character or out of character. It might give you good ideas and also show you who else is interested in roleplaying.

Roleplayers and non-roleplayers

Please respect other players' style of playing, even if it is not yours. Non-roleplayers may get a little confused with you. In addition if you are not roleplaying please respect others who wish to roleplay. Also remember that a roleplayer who comes across as brusque or rude may simply be playing their role, it may not be personal!

Creator interaction

When dealing with creators, coders and liaisons alike, remember that they have a job to do and you should consider all creator interaction as out of character.

See also

earmuffs, describe, options

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