Advanced Roleplayers Guide (WIP)

[Statua]

The Advanced Roleplayers Guide
A guide by Statua to help improve the RP skills of those who have a basic grasp on RP.

This guide covers the more advanced fundamentals of RP as well as some tips and tricks to speed up and improve RP.

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Table of Contents
-1 Introduction on Advanced Roleplay
-2 Playing to Lose Without Total Loss
-3 Immersion
-4 Emotions
-5 Advanced FearRP
-6 Physical RP
-7 Firefights
-8 Passive RP
-9 IC Accents
-10 Ways to Speed Up RP
-11 Outtro/Summary
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Introduction to Advanced Roleplay
Getting you started on the topic, one step at a time.

Advanced roleplay is a skill everyone must have at some point in time if they plan to get anywhere in the world of RP. Players who have these skills earn respect, are more enjoyable to RP with, and can build their characters story more smoothly as well as help other players with their own stories. Advanced RP keeps the stories of all players running smoothly and efficiently. This guide will help the reader become an advanced roleplayer. Requirements are time to read this and a working imagination to make the skills learned in this guide work.

The sections covered in this guide include:

-Playing to Lose Without Total Loss
  >Play to lose
  >Why its important to lose every now and then
  >Benifits of losing
  >Losing without actually losing
  >Winning agaisnt someone without making them have a total loss
  >Techniques and examples

-Immersion
  >What is immersion
  >Benefits of immersion
  >Becoming another person
  >Immersion techniques and aids

-Emotions
  >Feeling your character
  >Controlling OOC emotions
  >Long term emotions
  >Techniques and examples

-Advance Fear Roleplay
  >What is fear RP?
  >When to fear RP
  >Long term fear
  >Stat reduction from fear
  >Techniques and examples

-Physical RP
  >What is Physical RP?
  >Fatigue and Illness
  >Terrain Effects
  >Knowing when to not do something physically
  >Techniques and Examples

-Firefights
  >Shooting to miss
  >Ammunition
  >Roleplaying hits without actually getting hit
  >Win/Loss of a firefight
  >Techniques and examples

-Passive RP
  >Passive and active RP
  >When to enter a passive or active state
  >Alone/Partner/Group passive
  >Techniques and examples

-In-Character Accents
  >Introduction
  >Not overdoing it
  >Accent strength (pronunciation)
  >IC knowledge on the english language
  >Techniques and examples

-Ways to speed up RP
  >Actions: When and when not to do them
  >Combining 3rd and 1st person
  >Using the console to your advantage
  >Binds and keyboard macros

[Statua]

Playing to Lose Without Total Loss
Actually enjoying and storybuilding off loss RP.

Play to Lose (PTL)
Playing to lose is an important aspect of roleplaying that many users try to avoid. Playing to lose basically means a loss in any rp situation. (getting injured and put out of action during a firefight) Sometimes, playing to lose can actually benefit your character, however its most commonly used to build your characters story. Players who never play to lose will eventually find RP boring for them and will grow bored of it.

Why its important to lose every now and then...
Playing to lose is quite important not only for yourself but for others as well. If everyone played to win, there would be conflicts, invalid RP scenarios, and a stalemate. Someone has to lose at some point and someone has to win. There are cases where both sides tie with no losses and no gains but that will eventually get boring as nothing goes anywhere. This being said, you do not have to play to lose for every RP situation, but you should be losing at least 20%-60% of the time (depending on your character and his/her current status).


Benefits of losing...
Playing to lose actually does have benefits, storybuilding being the biggest. Say your character was shot in the arm, fracturing their humerous. You now have a bullet wound and a weakened humerous to add to your story. These may not benefit you, however they make your character and his/her story a bit more intertesting and overall, fun to play as. Every character needs to have some defects. Playing to lose is the best way to add more defects to make your character more interesting and more fun to play as.

There are other benefits to playing to lose other then storybuilding. If you're in a situation where you want to break in a building, but the opposition ahs enough force to prevent you from doing so, they will appreciate you accepting loss and will enjoy roleplaying with you in the future. Remember, your characters IC status doesnt earn you respect, its your OOC RP skills that do. Another benefit to playing to lose is opening up other opportunities for roleplay. If say for example you're in a firefight and get shot in the chest, you now must Roleplay that medically. You will be able to meet the medical teams who are helping you as well as possibly other characters also in the medical center.

Losing without actually losing...
Whenever someone hears the term 'play to lose' they immediately think a crappy day where nothing goes right for them. This is not the case. If you get shot in the chest, you dont have to admit to complete loss and kill your character, you can medical RP that situation and get back to normal in three or four days. Nowhere does anyone tell you to admin complete loss, unless of course you chose to admit complete loss or administrators of the roleplay department authorize a complete loss. Say you have a vehicle and it's taking fire from the opposition. The vehicle will be damaged, dont avoid it unless your vehicle is authorized as immune to bullets. Assuming it's not, it will take damage. You dont have to blow up the vehicle, killing yourself and destroying anything inside it. That would be complete loss. Instead, blow a few tires, shatrter some windows, mbreak a hydraulic line, do something that needs to be repaired but can be repaired in a couple days or even a couple hours. Thats playing to lose without total loss. It opens up RP for others as well such as the mechanic who will fix the car.

Winning agaisnt someone without making them have a total loss
If you are playing to win and you dont ABSOLUTELY need the opposition to admit complete loss, then dont. Thats rude as it destroys their RP and breaks any RP opportunities that may come up from a proper loss. If for example, your opposition is inhabiting a building, dont plan to blow up the entire building and destroy everything around it. Sure your character may ICly want to do that but some things must be avoided for the sake of RP. Instead, invade the home, cause them to evacuate, get ONLY what you originally arrived for, (be it a datapack) leave their weapons and ammo behind and get out of there so they can start on some new RP situations. (this one is directed at the Combine factions. Please for the sake of RP stop destroying others RP)

Techniques and examples
Playing to lose requires imagination, improvisation, and critical thinking. You must decide what will happen, how it happened, and what will happen next. Dont be hard on yourself and completely destroy something, especially if you've been working on it for awhile. (such as a resistance group) Instead, figure out what can be lost without destroying anything completely. Sometimes a minor loss such as an injury is enough. Sometimes a major loss such as losing a headquarters is required.

Here are some example os a play to lose situation without total loss:

A firefight between three CCA and two resistance fighters where CCA loses.

Spoiler for Hiden:

123: Four 647-E locted sector six warehouse.
456: Rodger. Lock, sterilize, stabilize.
789: Breaching door. Prep. Breach.
789 blows the warehouse side door of its hinges.
Joe begins firing at the dorway with his AR2.
John begins firing at the doorway with his AK-47.
456: Take cover. 123 deploy flash.
123: Deploying flash.
123 rolls a flashbang in the building.
John yells: FLASHBANG!
Joe shields his eyes.
John shields his eyes and ears, dropping his AK-47.
The flashbang blows up, Joe receives shellshock.
456: Move in.
The three units move in the building.
John picks up his AK-47 and begins firing.
Joe grabs for his ears momentairly, then struggling, begins firing at the units.
789: Shit!
789 runs back out the doorway.
123 gets hit in the right forearm.
123: Gah! I'm hit!
456: Ripcord!
456 grabs 123 and runs out the building, dragging 123 behind.
John: Now's the chance. Lets get the hell outta here.
Joe nods. Joe and John run for a window and hop out, escaping into the canal.
456 radios in: Requesting NOVA to sector six warehouse.
098 radios in: NOVA inbound. ETA two minutes.
789: Firing stopped. Checking warehouse.
789 enters the warehouse, weapon ready. He looks around but finds nothing.
789: Clear. No visual on 647-E.

As you can see. 123 got hit but its only a minor injure that can be recovered from within a couple days. The CCA can still look for the resistance if they wish or they can let them go for now and catch them another day.

[Statua]

Immersion
Feeling your character. "I will become another person."-Master of Disguise

What is immersion?
Immersion in RP is nothing more then its textbook definition. It's getting deep into the story, letting your imagination flow and watching the colours before your eyes, without it actually happening on your screen. Immersion can be broken easily by something as simple as a random LOOC chat or someone jumping on someone elses head. Immersion is what keeps people interested in RP and wanting more, thus immersion has a MAJOR major role in RP.

Benefits to immersion.
As stated before, immersion gets your mind in the game and you feel your character. This 'feeling' your character helps you make correct IC decisions and enjoy every little bit of RP. Immersion can create IRL emotions of joy, excitement, anxiety, rage, and sadness. If you ever feel strong IRL feelings when something happens in the game, you have become immersed.

Becoming another person.
Immersion is about being your character. ICly, your character needs to act the way he/she normally would. If your character has anger issues, you need to invoke anger on yourself IRL. You control your character so your emotions should mirror your characters. RP is acting. You need to act like your character would and stay focused. There are many things that can break this focus which I will go over later. It's easy to tell who's immersed and who's not. An immersed person will be shitting bricks when they hear the sound of a CCA unit and they are trying to hide, or they would seem to be in a gloomy state when they've lost something. Someone who isnt immersed wont react to anything going on around them. They might not seem emotionally affected when you tell them their best friend is dead, ICly.

Immersion Techniques and Aids
There are many things you can do to help you get immersed into your RP. Here's a list of some techniques:

-Create a backstory for you to use to figure out who your character is
-Create a character template to give yourself a summary as well as some key points like flaws
-Think about your characters past and what emotions he/she has felt so far
-Figure out how your characters mind runs and try to mimic it
-Use reference profiles such as IRL people or movie characters to help figure out how your character acts.

There are many different things that can help improve or deminish your current immersion. Here's a few aids to help you get into and stay in immersion:

-Use mood setting music such as sad music for sad times, calm music for passive rp, and immediate music for action times.
-Don't watch irrelevant youtube videos while immersed
-Minimalize steam chat or log off friends
-Do not engage in discussions over the OOC chat.
-Do not respond to useless LOOC chat unless its bothering you and you ask them to stop
-Tell players that are fooling around to stop as jumping on other peoples heads is not IC.
-Request an admin if a player is being disruptive

[Statua]

Emotions
Controlling emotions as well as feeling them to improve immersion.

This section futher explains emotion in immersion and how to utilize it.

[Statua]

Advanced Fear Roleplay
Sh*tting your pants over a videogame.

-PLACEHOLDER-

[Statua]

Physical Roleplay
The energy bar is not your only reference to energy levels.

-PLACEHOLDER-

[Statua]

Firefights
Swiss cheesing someone without actually hitting them.

-PLACEHOLDER-

[Statua]

Passive Roleplay
Wasting time for the sake of RP.

-PLACEHOLDER-

[Statua]

In Character Accents
Giving your character a cool accent without overdoing it.

-PLACEHOLDER-

[Statua]

Ways to speed up RP
Getting things done fast without ruining RP.

Although the description for rp is "slow paced", that doesn't mean you can't practice ways to speed things up a little. There are ways to speed up the pace of RP without losing any quality or important actions. Many people say "you dont need to do an action for everything" which is true. However, these people are missing actions for say cooking a meal, which should have some actions, and are performing actions for something such as walking to a door, which isn't needed, especially during active RP (covered in the Passive RP section). This section will help you decide if you need to type out an action or not as well as help you perform common actions faster. 

When to type out an action or just do it.

When in a passive RP state that won't affect your characters story a whole lot, (such as making a pot of noodles and eating them) you should type out almost every action you do with some detail, depending on the situation. For example, if you're alone and you have lots of time to spare between scenarios (such as taking a break after a mission) then feel free to type as much detail and information as you want. (ie. John Doe walks over to the fridge, sighing. He grasps the handle and tugs firmly, the seals pulling away from the frame.) If however you are passive roleplaying with another person, they may not appreciate the time taken to type out an action. Instead, cut some of the detail so you aren't forcing them to wait. (ie. John Doe walks over to the fridge sighing. He opens the door.) Now the other player can interact sooner, keeping them from getting bored and possibly losing immersion. Remember, you're not writing a novel, you're just filling in actions the game does not provide. 

When in an active RP state, you should keep your actions short but detailed and exclude actions that the game provides for you. When playing alone in an active state, you may skip over actions such as lunging over rocks or drawing a weapon. However if there are others involved, it would be a good idea to include some actions. (ie. John Doe swigs his SPAS-12 around, switching the safety off.) When moving with a group, its best to avoid stopping for actions that aren't really needed, including the one in the example above. There is no reason to use extensive details in your actions while in an active RP state. It slows down the RP and can cause timing issues as well as irritate other players who want to get through the situation quickly. 

Actions that do not require text when in an active state include:
-walking or running from point a to b
-Moving your weapon from holstered to raised
-climbing over small obstacles
-climbing or descending ladders

[Statua]

Outtro
A review on what we learned today and a summary for those who go tl;dr.

-PLACEHOLDER-

[Jasdahlk]

This looks great, Statua. I'm looking forward to reading the finished guide.

[psycho]

In Character Accents
Giving your character a cool accent without overdoing it.

-PLACEHOLDER-

Or wi'ou' e'er' 'od damn cha'ra'ter ha'in' t' same type o' accen' an' e'ery god f'saken cha'r'ater ta'in' li' this.

result> understand no body. kill every body.

[Ossus]

This is one of the best RP guides i have seen to date. Brilliant work, truly brilliant. It's really great to see other people sharing their insight on aspects of role playing and Guidelines. Thanks a lot!

[Statua]

Finished the play to lsoe section. Hope people read it as its a major issue I see in the outlands.