Talk:RP Primer

Excellent article! --Tom 10:20, 12 May 2007 (CEST)

(Cleaned up the old discussion to make room for the new one -- Aquitaine)

Dos & Don'ts?

On looking at this again, particularly in light of it being referenced from the Serious Medieval Atmosphere page, I noticed something else I thought would be a good change: the reworking of the Dos and Don'ts into Musts, Must Nots, Shoulds and Should Nots. It makes it a little more complicated, yes, but distinguishing your characters is much, much more important for the average player than, say, developing their NPCs. The latter is something that's really only for those interested in writing a good deal of narrative RP, but the former is something that every single player should be doing. --Anaris 23:47, 6 January 2008 (CET) --

I don't agree. Developing NPCs simply for their own sake is just narrative RP, but it also forces you to develop your character's relationship to those NPCs. As they say, 'you can tell a lot about a man by how he treats his servants.' It is difficult to come up with good character traits in a vacuum. One of the best mechanisms to do so is to drop your character into a situation with other characters (some under your control, some not) and see what happens. --Aquitaine 14:30, 10 January 2008

Agreed... You typically won't want to elaborate on random characters that have nothing to do with the plotline. A name is usually symbol of some importance, so I tend to never name my NPCs. "A scout", "a scribe", "a servant", "soldiers", etc. NPCs are all of low rank, so they aren't even worth my character's attention, much less mine and whoever reads the RPs. -Chénier 20:40, 10 January 2008 (CET)

I assume that 'agreed' is with the parent since that's the complete opposite approach to narrative writing. The importance of a character or event to your character has an orthogonal relationship to his (or its) importance to the reader. One of the most famous relationships in dramatic history is between a noble and a commoner (Henry V and Falstaff) even though it was barely worth noticing 'in character' to other nobles around Henry. The rules our characters follow to be medieval are not the same rules we follow writing them. Indeed, I have no investment in (and thus patience to read) about a noble yelling at some generic scribe; but if the same scribe makes an appearance over and over again and has a history of being abused, then he's both a sympathetic character and a funny one. --Aquitaine

If it's a recurring character, than yeah, he would be worth mentionning. What I was saying is, if it's some NPC that only does an appearence now and then, or only once, and doesn't really play a role in what happens, then he's not worth naming. -Chénier 22:21, 10 January 2008 (CET)

Of course -- I suppose I should distinguish between a real NPC and an 'extra.' Not all NPCs should be developed by any means.