You and Your Character: Keeping IC and OOC Separate

This is not aimed at any one person, it's for all of us and for all new people who come on board.  We can all use a reminder from time to time, and hopefully this will help as a guide for new recruits to understand what's expected.

First let me be unequivocal:  here in SoL we take the IC/OOC separation very seriously.  People in the past who could not manage this separation have been asked to leave.  This policy will continue in the future.  This is not negotiable.  

You are not your character.

Your character is not you, not even an idealized version of you.

Other people are not their characters.

I get it, believe me.  We are playing a fantasy game in an exciting world and our characters can do amazing things that we can't do in real life.  There is an element of wish-fulfillment in our characters; they give us freedom in ways that mundane life (as we used to say in the SCA) doesn't allow.  

If this is a positive thing (and it is) then why is it so important to separate IC from OOC in roleplay?  Because an RPer who cannot do so is only going to create miscommunication, negative drama, and misery not only for themselves but for the people who play with them.  It is impossible to cooperatively, objectively, weave a fair and unbiased storyline if we cannot distance our own egos from the action.

Sometimes miscommunication and accidental OOC drift happens.  When it does the best thing to do is communicate clearly and work to solve the problem quickly. Etharion and another character had simmering IC conflict after he advanced to Advisor.  At one point he made a comment in his journal that she seemed annoyed with some success he had, and her player contacted me privately to say that she hadn't given him any IC reason to think so.  I realized she was absolutely right.  The only annoyance she expressed clearly was in her journal, and I had very carelessly allowed that knowledge gained OOC to color Etharion's perception of her actual, IC words to him.  I apologized, made a small edit to Eth's journal (I think I changed "annoyed" to "unimpressed" which was much more in line with the actual dialogue that happened afterwards), and all was well.

What I did not do was get OOC butthurt and think that this player was being a big meanie by using her character to disparage mine.

This has happened in SoL before. We have had RPers who got OOC hurt out of IC slights;

We've had RPers who got OOC angry about a particular friendship between three characters by forming an IC clique of their own that worked against them, but there was NO WAY they should've known IC about this other friendship;

We've had RPers who ragelogged when their uber-awesome combat emote which had them singlehandedly taking out the boss and a half dozen minions IN THE VERY FIRST COMBAT TURN was not honored (seriously, he emoted that he did a backflip and stabbed everyone in midair before landing on the boss's shoulders and cutting his throat);

We've had RPers who ICly used information gained OOC because their excuse was they're rogues or spriests and always sneaking around the Keep eavesdropping on everyone (and claim because they're such awesome rogues and spriests there's no way anyone could catch them at it, even catch notice of a footstep or shadow that shouldn't be there);

We've RPers who used OOC knowledge IC because they claimed that they had a little information network that fed them all these IC secrets;

We had a player whose character pulled a knife on his senior officer and threatened to castrate him because the officer was not addressing a particular situation the way the player wished to see it done, and he was basing this on OOC knowledge when NONE of the characters, even the officers at that point, were supposed to have an IC clue what was going on.

These people are not in SoL now and they will not be welcomed back under any circumstances.

There is a common thread among all these IC/OOC fails.  All of the players had their OOC egos so deeply invested in their characters, their characters had to succeed at everything. The characters had to be right, all the time.  If they OOC didn't like how a storyline progressed, instead of trying to talk it out with someone they retaliated IC.  If they were offered constructive criticism, they took it as a personal slight.  It was not about mutual storytelling and world building, it became a game of winners and losers.

If they had a bad day in real life, it bled over into the game.

We've all had our bad days and extra-bad days, and if you guys had a dollar for all the times I've griped in ooc chat you would be rich.  But if I let every bad day in real life turn into a bad day for Eth, he would not be the affable and good-humored elf you know.  He would be someone you don't want to know.

The officers and other people who create storylines STRIVE to make stories that will give everyone a chance to stand out, to make a difference, to be a BAMF.  Success is a good thing for our characters.  But failure is sometimes a better thing, because without failure your character will not grow. Please try not be so invested in your character that you, the person behind the screen, get hurt or upset if your character fails, screws up, or things just don't work out for them.

Players, please, if you feel that you the player are starting to get hurt or upset or uncomfortable by what's going on around you IC, stop the action.  Party up and talk it out.  If necessary, pull in an officer to try to mediate or just give an unbiased third party view.  We will never ask someone to leave over an occasional slip.

But when it becomes a consistent pattern of disruptive behavior, we will ask players who can't keep IC and OOC separate to leave.  Yes, it's really that big of a deal.

Bumping this for newmeats.