The OOC Masquerade ?

[mietze]

I think there will always be an element of hiding PC actions though. To me, keeping your status as engaging in traitorous activities or being a spy isnt an ooc masque, I tend to see masque as more of a "what are you", not "who are you", but that is probably heavily influenced by my WoD background.

[peasoupling]

You could restrict wikis to things like common, publically available information and hooks, because I personally find those really helpful. Meeting people in bars or public parks all the time as a default can get old.

And I have a vampire on a VtM game, but my character has no way of telling if someone is a vampire IC or, generally speaking, any information about them, so things get a bit... "Gosh, crazy weather we've been having, uh?"

[ZekeTheG33k]

@Pyrephox

[mietze]

Also, I think I have been fortunate because even when I-player knew what someone was, with someone I had really built a RP connection with, and something happened to out then or they outed themselves, the fallout/discovery/reactions by both/consequences have always been exciting and surprising and I got to see yet another glimpse of the /character/ not the generic label on their sheet.

[TiredEwok]

@Ghost

And nothing I said even involved metagaming. I didn't say anything about using it for personal advantage. I simply said that it kind of makes it obvious what sphere a person plays in. As for your example of the PCs who work at night? Sure, that is an exception, but they can still go out to other parts of the grid if you're not RPing where/when they work. So my opinion is still very valid. The OOC masq did not work and was a ridiculous thing for people to have had enforced upon them. Point blank. Full fucking stop.

[Ghost]

I think some of these points have hit the nail on the head.

Each game should ask and answer the following in this manner:

• Is this game a collaborative storytelling/writing game where it is acceptable to utilize wiki/log information as writers to work on scene ideas together? ALL information is to be considered IC, but designed to be shared OOCly for coordination (key word, there) of scenes/plot/plot twists.

• Is this game based on an architecture of rules acceptable PvP that involves elements of politics, secrets, and sphere competition? If so, only information gathered through verifiable IC means should be acted upon, and strong separation between what the player knows and the character knows needs to be practiced and enforced. Collaborative writing is encouraged, but the useable information in character must be obtained through IC means (rolls, role play, logs). This can result in unexpected failure, loss, character death, and places less control of the stpry outcome in each player's creative control.

Both approaches can be fun, but when you have some players doing A and others doing B, you have problems.

[peasoupling]

But also, in spite of the above, I've had fun playing a rare and weird character type and have people going 'WTF' at them and try to puzzle them out. But she did have a wiki that listed her mortal job and hooks, it just didn't include any kind of information about her supernatural status.

[Auspice]

I am personally not a fan of OOC masq. I know not everyone who has the 'You can't tell who or what my character is!' on their wiki is trying to be twee, but so many who do are that I just find it tiresome.

You know why I want to know who/what your character is? RP Hooks. It makes it easier for me to figure out reasons for us to RP.

Because jesus. fucking. christ. am I sick of spending thirty fucking minutes on channel trying to come up with how we can RP together because you're too goddamn lazy to put effort into it. 'Let's go here to RP' 'Nah, I wouldn't do that' 'How about..' 'No, that doesn't make sense for my character.'

Add in someone who is 'a mystery!' and they won't give you shit to work with.

I know on 'OOC Masq' games people are meant to just wander around the grid, but I'm not that kind of person. I don't wanna just wander or lurk.

So I see someone who is being 'sekritive!!!' and I just think they're someone who either, a) is really, really boring and can't think of anything actually interesting about their character, or b) thinks they're way more interesting than they actually are.

Telling me what faction/sphere/whatever you are gives me instant ways to hook in to your character so we can RP. People who use that info for mechanical advantages are problems.

And you know what we do with problem players? We show them the door. (Or we should.)

I'm personally tired of policies that hinder collaboration and RP made in the spirit of hindering problem players rather than just getting rid of the problem players.

[Arkandel]

@peasoupling The way I see it it's an option - it should be there, but it doesn't need to be utilized.

So for example I run into a random character at a coffee shop. I don't need to glance at their wiki to see which sphere they're in, or view their RP hooks to see how to best engage them. But I can, it's an option at my disposal. If I don't like being spoiled, or prefer to only act using purely IC information then nothing forces me to take a peek behind the curtain.

In a similar way I don't have to know which alts staff have, however I still consider it the sign of a healthy game if that information exists out there as part of checks and balances. Should there be a suspicion of wrongdoing and their +sheet is available, well, it can help tell me if there are any shenanigans going on.

[TiredEwok]

I get not wanting to know what a person's PC is before you/your character finds out during the course of RP. It's fun to puzzle that out and succeeding in discovering that ICly can be deeply satisfying. But, on the other side of the coin, it can make it hard to find reasons to RP anything truly fulfilling. But that's been said by someone else, previously, so I won't beat that horse into glue.

[surreality]

I don't think it's viable for a number of reasons. Others have been mentioned, these have not that I've seen.

1. If you're using published material or an existing IP game setting, players already know considerably more about the world and what is in it than their character is ever going to know. This is especially true of games like WoD and others with 'secret societies'. You're typically not even supposed to know vampires exist as a mortal character, let alone who is or is not one, but you do as a player, for example. We already trust players with this information before we even let them into chargen and we expect them to know these things well enough to play the game properly. This is non-trivial and should not be overlooked.

2. People have limited time for their happy fun time games, more so than when this hobby was younger -- so were most of the people in it. Being able to find like minds and characters with similar interests (even if those interests include having a conflict between the characters) via open information to get the things done that people will enjoy, and not waste their limited time bouncing off walls and being confused as a player is considerably more important than it was in the 90s. The average player's priorities have changed. This is also non-trivial, and not to be overlooked.

[Auspice]

@surreality said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

People have limited time for their happy fun time games, more so than when this hobby was younger -- so were most of the people in it. Being able to find like minds and characters with similar interests (even if those interests include having a conflict between the characters) via open information to get the things done that people will enjoy, and not waste their limited time bouncing off walls and being confused as a player is considerably more important than it was in the 90s. The average player's priorities have changed. This is also non-trivial, and not to be overlooked.

This is why I do not wanna waste my time spending 30-odd minutes trying to figure out why our characters would even meet up in the first place.

This is why I like wikis, why I like @faraday's RP hooks on peoples' sheets on-game/portal pages. Because I can see an interesting character with an RP hook that is super appealing and go 'Hey! We should meet up sometime!'

I got limited time. You got limited time. Now neither of us is sitting around twiddling our thumbs going 'Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh'

[Ghost]

One time, I randomly chose a person on +who and sent them +text code like this...

+text <Player>=Yo, we got people coming over in like 1 hour. Bring the herb. Peace.

Player paged me with:
"I think you texted the wrong person".

I replied "lol no I didn't. Wrong number."

"Uh. My character is a cop"
"Oh well."
"Oh shit, he's your character's neighbor, too."
"Werd. I'm down."
"Sweet"

[Thenomain]

We all feeling good? Yeah? Nice and positive atmosphere? Cool. We deserve it.

A lot of us reading know what it's like to be in a room RPing and know that another character is there invisible, listening. Back in the day this can mean that the conversation changes, quite suddenly and suspiciously, from undermining one character's plans to the movie night.

Does this still happen? I don't know; the last game I've been on with this as a consideration we had to open a job with staff and wait a few days for an answer. But in talking who knows who else is a vampire or a witch, that does seem to be dead in the community. I'd give it about a decade in the ground at this point.

But there's more to OOC Masq then knowing the potential power set of characters that your character might have reason to play against. Ghost's example is one. Mine is another. I don't think that's dead, but I also don't think it's unhealthy.

But it's not cut and dry. "You can't know I'm here. I can't help that there's no code supporting invisibility." Things that we decide our characters know IC based on decisions we make OOC affect other characters. This is a tool, intrinsically nether good or bad.

The key to me is if it's fun and reasonable. Is it plausible? Cool. Is it reasonable in the IC nature of the game? Awesome!

I know there are people already lining up their responses with those like "that's never happened to me" or "I'm not responsible for the fun of others" or "just don't make a game where that's possible". Pretend this post doesn't exist because it doesn't affect you, your play style, or the kind of games that you play. Here's your cookie and feeling of self-worth. I'm honestly kind of jealous.

For the rest of us? Let it roll!

[Bad at Lurking]

Personally, I find wikis really useful for rounding out the character and the world they are in. Obviously, if a game's wiki or somebody's page asserts that information on it is strictly OOC, I don't use it. Nor do I ever use information regarding supernatural stuff/powers/etc unless I've seen those or had them described to me, ICly.

But, that having been said, wikis are basically a really good organic substitute for 'common knowledge' and office/school gossip. In the real world, we find out all sorts of things about people. Who has a reputation for being popular? Who is kinda bitchy? That quirky guy down in accounting? Total Jesus freak. The IT manager? Dude is a leather daddy on his off time!

And the same goes for neighborhoods, businesses, etc. As a substitute for background information immersion that we all get, wikis work fine. (Though I'd encourage people to lie on them about minor things, because office gossip often gets it wrong.)

The problem with an OOC masq taken to the extreme, banning personal pages, is that you raise the bar for engagement with every single person to silly levels. Okay, Joe Gangrel, who is hanging in a coffee bar for ...reasons... should be a man of mystery. (And odd smells.) But Stacy, who works in the same building as you and is dating Officer Marcia, the cop on the beat in your neighborhood, should not be tabula rasa.

[Taika]

I loved the IC Rumors rfk had on their wikis.

[Alzie]

@Thenomain said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

I know there are people already lining up their responses with those like..."I'm not responsible for the fun of others"...

If I had a penny...

[Jaded]

@Seamus
I have not read other's replies in this forum but I will offer my thoughts on this:

I had a character on The Reach that I did not make a wiki for, because mostly I hated the wiki they used but also because by that point I had gotten pretty lazy about keeping wikis up to date and I stopped caring.

When I got into RP with the character I had noticed a huge difference in the RP that I received. People were more interested in meeting the character and there were fewer slip outs during scenes because there was actually genuine curiosity. I had one scene where another character kept trying to figure out precisely what my character was in terms of splat, by discreet questioning and the subtle use of powers.

I had more fun on that character than on my other Reach characters precisely because people could not be 100% certain whom or what they were dealing with. I think in this case the whole keeping up with wikis and adding PBs was more harmful to creating RP than facilitating it.

Now to contrast, RFK used wikis and PBs quite openly but also made it policy that what was on the wiki was in-character information that could be reasonably discovered about your character without in-depth investigations. This meant people were more circumspect about went into their wiki and how they treated it. Since it was a single sphere game there was no need for some kind of OOC Masq - and it is here that I think wikis worked best. At a glance, you could get an idea of things known about a character, their status, and other details without having to spend time investigating it and in these cases I saw these things generate quite a bit of RP.

[faraday]

@Jaded said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

I had more fun on that character than on my other Reach characters precisely because people could not be 100% certain whom or what they were dealing with. I think in this case the whole keeping up with wikis and adding PBs was more harmful to creating RP than facilitating it.

That's totally legit, and I'm not trying to downplay your fun in that instance. Everybody's playstyle is different.

But just to offer the counter-example... on BSG:U I had a character whose backstory included being from a moon with an ongoing insurrection, and being a part of this dramatic siege/evacuation incident earlier in the war. While I'm sure I could have milked some drama doling this out as a surprise, I had at least a half-dozen deep character relationships sparked because other players had read that info in my character wiki and hooked into it somehow. Both in terms of "Oh we should have these guys butt heads - it'll be awesome" and in terms of "Let's make up a shared backstory since we were both part of The Incident/both from Insurrection Moon." That was awesome, and couldn't have happened on a closed-OOC-info game.

[Auspice]

@faraday said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

@Jaded said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

I had more fun on that character than on my other Reach characters precisely because people could not be 100% certain whom or what they were dealing with. I think in this case the whole keeping up with wikis and adding PBs was more harmful to creating RP than facilitating it.

That's totally legit, and I'm not trying to downplay your fun in that instance. Everybody's playstyle is different.

But just to offer the counter-example... on BSG:U I had a character whose backstory included being from a moon with an ongoing insurrection, and being a part of this dramatic siege/evacuation incident earlier in the war. While I'm sure I could have milked some drama doling this out as a surprise, I had at least a half-dozen deep character relationships sparked because other players had read that info in my character wiki and hooked into it somehow. Both in terms of "Oh we should have these guys butt heads - it'll be awesome" and in terms of "Let's make up a shared backstory since we were both part of The Incident/both from Insurrection Moon." That was awesome, and couldn't have happened on a closed-OOC-info game.

It also enables people to run plot.

"Ooh, I really like what you have going there and it gives me ideas. Mind if I use it as a hook for some plot?"