Help » The Responsibility of All RPers

Do players have a responsibility to make sure that everyone else is having fun, too?

We asked this question of our community, and 24 people turned up to debate. The results were fascinating and deeply edifying. Below is a summary of some of the most interesting consensus' that were reached.

If you are interested in seeing the road that was taken to get there, I encourage you to read the full chat log.

So let's do it! Do players have a responsibility to make sure that everyone else is having fun, too?

The answer was always YES. Some players went so far as to turn the question on its head, saying that it's not that players are responsible for one another's fun: making other people happy and interested is actually the object of the game and the only way to "win".


But there were also a number of caveats proposed. For many, that responsibility has reasonable limits. For example, most felt that if they were to be responsible for their fellow players, their fellow players should accord them the same courtesy, and repeated shows of disrespect indicated a deeper problem that would need a direct, OOC discussion to resolve.

In fact, the need for strong OOC relationships in a community came up over and over throughout the two hour discussion. No matter how far the conversation wandered, it always came back around to OOC understanding, maturity and friendship being what makes a game possible and worthwhile.



More than that, it seemed that maintaining good OOC dialogue was what allowed people to know what being "responsible" toward one another actually looked like. How can we help other people have fun if we don't know what they like and what crushes their spirit for a game? Cups of tea vary widely!



Who is responsible for what was also somewhat flexible. New players were just considered to have the responsibility to be open to learning, improving and discovering what being respectful even looks like in a RP community (after all, it can be hard to grasp the idea that you can do some pretty darn nasty things In Character, and still be doing no offense Out Of Character.)



And experienced players weren't off the hook for constantly trying to improve their game (defined as generating more fun, not as winning) and being open to suggestions, either.

However, experienced players acquired additional responsibilities, including:

• Welcoming new players and helping them learn the ropes -- even if this was just by pointing new players to someone who is better at - or has more energy for - teaching than themselves
• Maturely dealing with drama, such as by stepping in as a neutral third party and helping two quarreling friends to see both sides and come to a resolution
• Being mindful of upholding the IC continuity
• Playing responsibly

It wasn't that experienced players needed to be super heroes, always giving of themselves and never looking out for their own fun. It was about striking a healthy balance, and giving back now and again.



A community that isn't able to do this is one that's on life support, as it can only ever lose members, never gain them.



The more we dug into the topic, the more essential player responsibility proved itself to be. Conversation frequently turned toward the "consent rule", a practice of requiring a player's consent before anything can be done to their character, including harm or death, and how most people use it to protect themselves from other people behaving irresponsibly in RP. A little bit of polite tension arose as to whether the consent rule could itself encourage irresponsibility, by encouraging people to refuse the consequences of their own fictional actions and making the game less real, fair and fulfulling for the other players.

For me, one of the most striking moments of the entire chat was when I posed this question: If this were an alternate universe where you completely trusted that everyone RPed in a responsible manner, would you feel okay letting go of the consent rule? and everyone simultaneously agreed they would give it up entirely, even those who had previously been its most vocal supporters.



The big takeaway for me from this discussion is that part of the definition of being a responsible role player is putting effort into helping other people's narratives have meaningful conclusions, on the small and large scale -- whether or not the plot includes death.



For those of you that don't know this phrase, "metagaming" is the practice of using out of character knowledge to augment the behaviors of your character. It is almost always used selfishly, in order to "win" or beat the other characters. An example might be learning in an OOC discussion that a pleasant invitation for tea from your very best friend in the world is actually a trap, and then angrily refusing that invitation IC even though in the story itself, there's been no indication that anything is out of the ordinary. Here, Nero is proposing that there's actually a time and place for using OOC knowledge ICly, but that it's to help other people have more fun, not to beat them.

If you want to read more of this discussion on how to be responsible for other people's fun, I encourage you to read the full chat log: chat log.