Roleplay

[Iselore]

(This is not a post about changing shard mechanics, it's just a suggestion on improving roleplay in second age and therefore improving second age overall, as I see it.)

I'm new here myself and I apologise in advance if I have developed the wrong impression about the state of roleplay here.

From what I can tell you seem to have a few roleplayers scattered about in various guilds and 'alliances' and so forth, instead of a cohesive community. I think this is harmful to maintaining regular activity and promoting any kind of spontaneous roleplay amongst the different guilds. Events are good, but they are not easy to organise properly and not everyone can attend them. There should be some level of interaction that goes beyond the standard events (that may or may not happen) if you want a community to flourish.

I want to suggest forming an umbrella guild for all of the role playing community. You could set up some kind of neutral location (akin to a player town) with a central meeting place such as a famous tavern. If you had a hub such as this, activity would be easier for individuals to find an engage in if they chose to. It also helps to organise the smaller pockets of players into a group that essentially is looking for the same thing, despite how they might go about achieving it. As long as individuals are free to play the characters they wish to play within an established set of rules (such as the roleplaying ROE that I read) I think this can work.

This would also provide a home for more neutral roleplayers, people who don't really see their characters as belonging to any distinct organisation or group of players, but who would still enjoy roleplaying with others and belonging to a community.

I can't really see the particular benefits to being in so many separate guilds and organisations, since guilds themselves are largely OOC in function. They serve only to isolate players when really they should be interacting. You can easily form a guild within the guild, denoted distinctly by your titles from within the umbrella guild and there's nothing stopping anyone from having their own guildhouses et cetera. You'd be able to fight with fellow role-players if you so choose and recognise them instantly (only in so far as you know they are likely to roleplay with you, obviously not using OOC information to your advantage etc).

So this is just a suggestion from a newbie and it may not be workable or even possible, but I just thought it might help to keep roleplay alive and well here at second age. Please comment and tell me what you think.

[Maahes]

These are all very good points but in my opinion, it would the community itself that would have to be responsible for building an active roleplaying community. The initiative has to come from the players, after that you will be sure to have full support of the staff. There have been successful roleplaying guilds here, I'm sure if you started to bring your ideas to the game players would follow.

[Iselore]

This post is aimed at the players and I agree completely that it should come from them. After all, this is their community. The reason I placed it in the suggestion area was that I think that my suggestion is one for improving the shard, not because I wanted the staff to do something about it. I believe that the players are just as responsible as staff are in finding ways to improve the shard. Not everything that enhances the second age experience has to be related to game play balance and UO mechanics. I'm sorry if it seemed like I was asking for the staff to do something about this.

[Maahes]

excellent! Thanks for clearing that up