Since people are tired of me posting, these will be my last posts on this board until December 20th, 2001. Hence, please take up any issues about this with me via page. I might ask to talk to someone about a post they make via pages or mail, but please feel free to decline.

With whatever credibility I have left, I most strongly urge you to read this and give it a moment of thought.

I am a poor roleplayer. When I see people like Nightingale, like Regulus, I confess I fall into envious longing for their creative energy, their eloquence, their ability to make a character so compelling and genuine. Yet of this art, which I profess no great skill at, I feel compelled to speak. This issue, which so many have called trivial and unnecessary, is so vital to me because it has aroused opinions on both sides of the great dichotomy: "serious" versus "silly" roleplay. I agree with the following tenets, as I understand them, of "silly roleplay" and add my own caveats.

1) "Every character has a silly side." I agree. Yet, I differ. Many characters have a silly exterior. Zestien is most of the time a comic relief character: she's eccentric, zany, lighthearted, extremely cute, and a bit dim. I do portray this. Yet more vitally, I strive to forge a deeper, truer identity. Because she has this silly exterior, does that mean that at her core, she is not an individual, that she does not have her own identity, her own mind, her own feelings, her own soul if you will? No. Further, I choose to focus on this inner spark, and develop it, and experience it. While a scene may be to the observer comic and laughable, it may be that to Zestien, it is immensely distressing and confusing. While I roleplay in that scene, that is what I predominantly feel. When I review the scene OOCly, sure, the comedy comes out more strongly.
Someone complained that I was arguing about bits of IC reality that only exist in my head - yet, indeed, all characters are born of imagination. The creative process focuses imagination, strengthens it, coalesces it, gives it form and shape and feeling, and the ultimate mission is to let that imagination ascend to a reality bridged empathically with our own.

2) "This isn't reality." If you mean that M3 does not take place in 2001, on our Earth, you are correct. If you mean that we should not strive to build a piece - perhaps just a single entity - of 2214, I cannot help but be distressed at your opinion. M3 need not echo our lives, although our history may factor into it and teach us common occurences, and common reactions, that we might compare them and both make our roleplay more genuine and appreciate it more. We might read "The Jungle" to gain empathy with the reploid labouring in the UN's factories. We might study writings from the American Civil War, to learn of the heartbreak of when, as the song "Civil War" describes so poignantly, "Everybody's fighting for their promised land." Pardon the dark nature of both of those cited examples: We might just as well learn to appreciate genuine comedy from literature and history. But more importantly, we must go beyond dressing up old themes in new images and new names, and invest our time and energy in creating something new. Science Fiction and Fantasy have always concerned themselves with "what if". "What if" there were magic? "What if" people lived on the moon? "What if" the planet lived under one government? "What if" machines could think and feel? These two noble genres work to create and explore new worlds. I'm sure this seems bizarre to some, but it is why I love to roleplay, and why I love to write fiction. "Fiction isn't real". Oh, yes. Yes, it is, when one truly wishes it to be. As a very young child, while other kids played basketball or jumped rope, my friends and I would "play pretend". A lot of people scoff at that. But ... that's all roleplay is, to me. A zealous, perhaps more than a little insane, love of make-believe. If you've never laughed at a joke, even one that wouldn't even nudge a smile onto your face OOCly, traded between two characters, you have not experienced true roleplay. If you've never cried over a character's agony, you have not experienced true roleplay. If you've never opened your mental eyes and seen the still-blue skies of 2214, or watched a Reploid walk down duracrete streets, or mentally turned your head and seen a "make-believe" character sitting beside you, you have not experienced true roleplay. Am I delusional? I suppose. But I should rather fight to create something real than idly regard something that I consciously declare "nothing more than trivial fancy". I don't want to hear "It's based on a video game where a little blue robot runs around beating up bad guys hiding in garages and steals their superpowers."

3) "Angst is bad." Sic et non. I don't want to call angst bad any more than I want to call comedy bad. Both can and do arise from "true roleplay", and both have their part. Both become vile and destructive when excessively imposed upon IC reality. Moreover, I don't see why people link realism to angst. I suppose those people are so hateful of "reality" that they feel that emptiness is the only place devoid of pain. Or perhaps they want life's sweetness without life's bitter pangs. I find that both angst and comedy are more rewarding and beneficial when in the context of a "realistic" world. I'll use Star Wars as an example. People hated The Phantom Menace. It was childish and stupid. The humor didn't make anyone laugh - it was kid stuff, toilet humor, without a single bit of realism to it. Let's look at the trilogy. I for one /much/ preferred its humor. Why? Because it felt more real, and more genuine. "I used to live here, you know." "You're gonna die here, you know." was a brilliant exchange. Why? Because there was the harsh reality of impending doom to offset Han's sarcastic retort to Luke's optimism. There was more to that than a witty exchange. It mattered who was saying what - we appreciated Han's hard-liner pragmatism, and the personal strength and eccentricity embodied in, "NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!"; a sentiment which was finally waning for the moment due to his situation. Han was a very real character, yet a very humorous character. Also look at Shakespeare in Love. Rife with matters of life-and-death, yet also filled with perfectly "IC" humor. On the flip side, angst that has no substance is annoying and unnecessarily disruptive. If a character has no soul, I am not moved by that character's ranting and supposed "misery". Your characters are NOT PUPPETS OR PROPS TO BE USED TO EVOKE RESPONSES FROM OTHERS. Anyone who plays their character as a mere puppet, a hollow facsimile of a person, does not have my respect. They will not move me to laughter, nor to tears, OOCly. My character probably isn't going to care much either, at least not in the way the player obviously wants.

4) "We're here to have fun." Yes. Absolutely. Yet we are primarily here to create and explore. To me, that's fun: it's the most impossibly fun task in my mind. Will it always make me 'cheerful', per se? Well, no. Will all scenes be comedic? No. But as I read logs, and as I look over scenes well-roleplayed, I always smile fondly a little at the characters, and at their world. There's something like nostalgia in watching old scenes, the IC emotion of the moment rushing in like an inexorable but invigorating gust of wind. The laughter, the tears, the smiles, the screams, the friendships, the rivalries, and everything in between. To me? That's fun.

5) "We have dramatic license." Sure. Let's hop back to Star Wars. Was it realistic that a dozen elite Imperial troops couldn't hit a couple of people penned up in a Death Star corridor? Eh, it's not ludicrous, but it's pretty odd. But it was important to move the story along. More to the point, it wasn't any less 'roleplay'. The characters were obviously bloody well aware of their situation. I think too many M3 players would have had the 'good guys' leap out from cover and charge right at the Stormtroopers, due to their OOC knowledge that their chars would be okay. That's not good roleplay. Good roleplay is exchanging the OOC thought "Oh, those are just gumbies. THEY can't hurt my character." for the IC thought, "I had better keep my head down, lest I lose it." Does that mean there's no IC heroism? No. Sure, some people /might/ charge down the corridor at the Stormtroopers. That might even work (think Han going psycho and chasing after the troopers, who fell back). But ... be willing to consider the idea that your char might have just overestimated his or her abilities and/or luck. Here on M3, we don't have (for the most part) the same difficulty as someone playing a human: it's hard to kill a Reploid, so we can usually 'consent out of death'. Characters (i.e. Reploids/Androids) also generally are a little more gutsy, since they recognize that they aren't as fragile as fleshies. Improbable stuff happens all the time. Just remember that it is "dramatic license": license/freedom to bend rules TO ENHANCE DRAMA (Drama = roleplay, whether 'tragic' or 'comedic). I urge you to have some respect for the IC world, and not push these rules too far. I even more strongly urge you not to let this 'dramatic license' damage your roleplay.

6) (?) Another issue not necessarily related to "silly" roleplay: Fairness. Briefly, 'fairness' as I hear it shouldn't be here. There's nothing 'fair' about, for example, Bass beating Templar into the ground. I don't feel it necessary to roleplay for Templar to be able to stand a snowball's chance in Anthem's coffee against Forte. Quality of roleplay is not proportional to the "importance" of that roleplay in the IC world, necessarily. Sure, you might say that roleplay becomes more profound when it more loudly echoes through the IC world, but that doesn't mean that every character needs to change the bloody world in a massive way. As for NPCs (pardon my bringing up the catalyzing subject; I realize it's become a 'dead issue' that ought to be left alone), I don't think that putting names and faces on some of them at certain moments makes PC roleplay any less important. That sounds like egotism. Rather than looking at NPCs as a threat to your image, think of them as something more IC for your character to react off of. Sometimes, chars react to NPCs as well as PCs. Nothing wrong with that. Still, yes, it can take 'camera time' away from PCs. But it's no more wrong than writing massive spam-poses in booming rhetoric, which tend to drown out other player's shorter poses. (On that topic...I think pose length/eloquence can be used in different quantities to express character 'auras'. E.g., Bass is an awesome, in the literal meaning of the word, character, and he ICly dominates scenes. So, sure, use long poses to maybe give that a bit more emphasis, just as authors use stylistic techniques to make content-based points. But I digress) Just as a disclaimer, of course, I /FULLY/ support consent. I've said this starting a few months ago, but I shall repeat myself: You, as the player, are an author. You have every right to wish the setting to be toyed with a little bit, although I encourage you to have some faith in your co-authors. Still, things that directly affect your char are things in which you have a lot of say. I would urge you to avoid taking Terry's line of "I'll just blow them all up, BECAUSE I CAN AND BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CHEAT BY USING NPCS!" (And no, I have no problem with Terry, outside of his views. I make no judgement about him as a person, or even him as a roleplayer; I only protest what I felt his post sounded like.) I repeat Storm Eagle's sentiment once more: "We're here to tell a story. Not play a game."

If this MU* is unanimously in disagreement with me, I shall leave. Not out of spite, of course, but because true roleplay is what I am here for. I hope I am not alone.

I hope that you will forgive me for my anger, and I hope more that you will understand what I have written here, and understand why I seem so wounded and furious when I hear things like Terry's post. I hope that you likewise understand why this issue, which started with some question about NPCs, is to me worth every 1 and 0 entered into the bboard database.