Why is roleplaying forbidden?

[AletzN1]

I know is in the rules and that it is Squad's call. But, why is roleplaying forbidden, on a sci-fi game's forums? Just want to know why, not here to actually discuss it.

[NASAFanboy]

I know is in the rules and that it is Squad's call. But, why is roleplaying forbidden, on a sci-fi game's forums? Just want to know why, not here to actually discuss it.

I don't know. Probably because there is another website for it.

I really don't want to make another account, though.

M

[vexx32]

Doesn't seem like either of you two were around when roleplaying was a big thing on these forums, eh? That was well back before 0.14, at least. I got here right as it started to become a huge firestorm (essentially).

So, the basic concept of most of the roleplaying-style games as it were was that one person or a group of people would be a "country" or a "faction" or what have you, and would compete against other individuals or groups. All well and good, right? Well, not so much. You see, naturally this leads to it getting extremely competitive, and people don't like to lose and so forth. You inevitably end up with situations where just about everyone is breaking the rules of the game in order to win, and/or taking the game from that thread and allowing it to encroach upon other parts of the forum. Things like deliberately spamming others' threads in the Spacecraft Exchange in attempts to discredit them or make them look bad, etc., all for the sake of the game; some people could even go so far as to starting semi-separate wars and fights over PMs, which literally cannot be moderated directly unless one of the participants deliberately brings a moderator in, and even then the moderators could only be getting part of the story.

Now, naturally, moderating such a thing is a hellish nightmare (N.B.: I was not a mod way back then) since each thread tends to have its own rules, which first of all nobody's really following too closely, and second of all are very poorly worded and leave a large amount of loopholes. The forum rules are all well and good, but inevitably at some point the users and players of the game start to get it in their heads that since they made the game, they get to dictate the rules within that thread and that the moderators should stay out of it. I'm not 100% sure if this exactly happened here, but I've seen it happen in other places often enough to say that it's fairly likely it did. So simply keeping everyone to the usual rules of decency and civility is practically impossible unless we want to be handing out infractions and bans every other day.

One of the major reasons this tends to spiral out of control is that people start to identify too closely with their characters within the roleplay and forget to clearly draw a line between the game and the rest of the usual forum interaction. It all becomes part of the game, to them. If it was only one or two people doing it, it'd just be a matter of reminding them every now and again to keep it within the confines of the thread and the game, but... it tends to be the case that when one person does it, everyone just sort of picks it up and runs with it until serious infractions start getting handed out.

People don't draw the boundaries well enough, and it has long since been decided that if roleplay is to happen, it should not happen on these forums at all. At least if the roleplaying is on a totally different website, people will be better able to draw the correct boundaries between roleplaying and correct forum etiquette and interactions with other people. All it takes is one single person to overstep the boundaries of the thread and then suddenly either everyone thinks it's okay, or simply does not want to be left behind in the game by not following suit... and then everyone is doing is. As such, even though being extremely concise and specific about what's going on helps... we'd still err on the side of caution and say it's not allowed at all for the simple fact that one bad apple ruins the bunch... like wildfire.

This is generally my personal view on the subject, but as far as I have been able to tell is also pretty much the official word on roleplaying pretty much as far back as I can remember. I remember taking one glance at the roleplaying that was going on at that time and just vowing to stay the hell out of it

Edited November 22, 2013 by vexx32

[AletzN1]

Woah .14? Didn't knew! Well thanks for my internet history class vexx32!

[vexx32]

You're welcome :3