MY THOUGHTS: Should Roleplay Communities Change Direction? How Can We?

MY THOUGHTS:
Should Roleplay Communities Change Direction? How Can We?

OPENING​

I've been in this community for a while now, and I feel like it would be meaningless for me if after all the time I've been here, I didn't try to contribute something to the greater community. And while I'm no developer, I believe I can perhaps shed light on a very hidden topic that I feel is very important.

I'm posting here because I want to talk to the people who are in the Garrysmod roleplay community. I believe Cloudsixteen is a pretty active spot dedicated specifically to Garrysmod roleplay.

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I often think about the Garrysmod roleplay community, and how we have progressed both in size and direction. Since my time on Garrysmod roleplay, I can't help but feel that there is something grand that community elites (owners, lore experts, server managers, etc.) could be doing that is never focused on.

I'll try to paint this picture by giving a backstory. There is a very specific form of teaching philosophy in modern academia that is through performances. These performances are fictional stories, or poems that sometimes have a plot to explain very deep subjects in philosophy that would otherwise be very difficult to explain through definition and rote memorization (just sitting and reading flashcards over and over again until you memorize it).

Just to specify a little bit more what I mean on fictional stories explaining philosophy:
There are short stories that have characters that go through the regular narrative of a fictional tale, but the 'moral of the story' instead serves as a better way to explain the "meaning of life" or how we perceive the "meaning of life." (This goes way deeper like explaining metaphysics, and branches in metaphysics like ontology and all that other high theory stuff).
Here is a list of short stories that explain philosophy through fiction.

I really do believe that video games have a very similar role that can explain these deep concepts in a way that is not just generally "educational," but very interesting and fun. What better way to tell a fictional story than a roleplay community dedicated to the embodiment of lore and living within the world of that story in a state that does not have an end.

e.g. The research done in certain FalloutRP communities about the way power armor works is far beyond what Bethesda is capable of explaining in a Fallout title. That's amazing.​

I believe there is an issue within modern academia that revolves around the fact that philosophy is just really damn confusing to the regular person who doesn't study it for four years in college. Yet after reading a lot of philosophical arguments, I believe that there are studies being made that are very important to the way we perceive information and how to come up with answers to greater problems in our lives.

If you're reading this up to now, you're probably asking. What the hell does this have to do with Garrysmod? Why do we need to simulate fictional tales that explain philosophy? Why can't I just have a server that revolves around the general fun of getting gear, exploring the map, and fighting factions.

Well, to answer this question plainly. You don't need to do this. But, I believe that the way roleplay has progressed in the past 7 or so years that I've been here has been a bit diluting from what we know is roleplay. The whole concept of IC; that we are actors in a universe in a greater story, I believe, has become muddled. That the IC function of the chatbox now serves as a unique form of communication for the purpose of playing a DarkRP server. The fact of the matter is, as long as we're focusing on the culmination of gear, wealth, and strength we're never going to do it as good as DarkRP. And I don't think Garrysmod Serious Roleplay should be limited to this direction.

e.g. We have explored HL2RP to the max. Any developments such as the factory system are only quick fixes to make a very overplayed schema seem unique again. Furthermore, the fact that roleplay has now diluted to focusing on gear, wealth, and strength we have become a unique form of DarkRP.​

I'm not going to get into why I think we got here as I'm already in a deep tangent, but I'll get back to connecting this to my main point.

The reason why I bring up philosophy as a means to remedy the direction many communities have gone through is because I believe by having a focus on our universes to serve as a production knowledge (the way people in RP research things like crazy like the power armor example in FalloutRP) to explain philosophical questions and simulate real life can bring us back to what made Garrysmod an amazing space for roleplay that I believe is far more enjoyable than roleplay alternatives.

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Now, I know a lot of you may not find this interesting and that's completely fine. But, for the future server owners who are following me up until now. I want to give an example on how I think we could implement this.
(For those of you who are confused but interested, I think this is a good place to focus on).

Let's take a roleplay universe that is fairly popular and diverse, FalloutRP.

Setting:
You have the NCR, Caesar's Legion, and the Wastelanders who may or may not create smaller Player Based Groups in Fallout: New Vegas.

Factions:
Instead of having the NCR and Caesar's Legion duke it out to see who has the better CS:GO players. The focus on factions would be to serve as political simulations. That we must start thinking of the NCR as a political institution first with a military, rather than a military with a goal to just annihilate Caesar's Legion.
What is very unique to the NCR and Caesar's Legion conflict is that the NCR is a faction that is very morally stable in 21st century thinking, but does a horrible job at doing it. NCR towns have a re-occurring theme of corrupt officials who not only use taxation to increase the wealth of council members, but have sheriff's and deputies who deal with the slow bureaucratic system of the NCR by just executing people when the jail cell gets too big. Furthermore, you have Caesar's Legion that is the embodiment of being morally backwards in the 21st century with slavery, misogyny, etc. But have proven time and time again that if you are accepted by Caesar's Legion you will be living a life of luxury with an economy that is strong, towns that are safe, roads that are safe, etc.

The takeaway for the player here is that they have to make a choice in which political institution to operate in. Not that the NCR are the good guys and have cooler gear, but that as a player I want to be spending my time learning about the inherent struggles of bureaucracy in the Fallout universe.

Now this might sound VERY boring. Like, who cares about "learning about the inherent struggles of bureaucracy in the Fallout universe." The fun aspect is here though:
When the NCR and Caesar's Legion get into a battle, it'll not be because we know that's what happens in the Fallout universe, but it will be because of the clashing of ideas from both sides of a very individualistic moral question on how players in your community believe the world should be.

e.g. When the NCR finally decides to get their CS:GO players to attack the Legion, the battles won't be arbitrarily decided by an event. But will be because there was an event where a player was sick of the way the sheriff's were treating them in the settlement of Primm that was owned by the NCR, and Caesar's Legion saw it as an opportunity to exploit the weak loyalty to the NCR in that region by winning a battle and giving free food to the people of Primm.​

When we start having factions act like this. We are not only forcing the player to think about how things are done in the real world, but we are doing so in a fictional realm that makes reading books, roleplaying, playing videogames fun.

Players:
The focus of players in this new form of thinking would be to educate while having fun. The main takeaway here is not that we are trying to convert Garrysmod roleplay into a fun math simulator where we make this space about school when some people come here to escape school. But that we create a space where roleplay is given meaning. Now, in this example the player's role the second they get on the server isn't "Let's go loot some rich bitches and get gear," but it will be to delve into the story of Fallout in the realistic simulation we make roleplay into.

e.g. When the player wants to be a merchant. It will be the job of the admin to create a system that allows them to become a merchant without giving them the almighty power of the trading menu. That the admin will provide a scarce commodity in the map that Wastelanders can control and provide to other players. (Trade routes can be a system that is implemented here).
- When you do this. What you're doing is having the player think about how things happen in real life. Rather than giving the player the instant gratification of being spawned a Laser Rifle, you are allowing them to actually work to get it which will be more rewarding when they finally get their hands on the Laser Rifle they had to help make by getting it from the Player Based Group that controlled the only factory with spare parts in the region.
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Settlements:
Personally, this is my favorite. And I have actually been toying this on my own recently. I believe that the creation/controlling of settlements is currently an integral part to many universes. They not only become a hub for roleplayers, but the way in which they are currently maintained and protected get close to what I'm speaking about.

Instead of having a group of friends run over to a settlement and attract roleplayers to go there because traders are there. Players should think about how settlements are formulated in the beginning. The way in which this happens is from common political phenomenon's in real life like Enforcement Policy. In order to be the dominant government of a settlement, you need to have an incentive for players to be there. If there is a hunger + thirst system the gamemode has in place. Rather than that hunger + thirst system be a function that nags the player to get food and water like a bad survival game. It should be a political entity that has settlers thinking "Hey, maybe if I control the means of drinking and eating that these players need. They will listen to us when we want to do other stuff with the settlement. And I'll make a police force that makes sure no one steals my monopolization of food + water."

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CLOSING THOUGHTS
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Wow, this was much bigger than I intended it to be.

I know what I'm saying is very radical and perhaps not pragmatic to server owners. I know this is a little bit funny to the people who just want to go on Garrysmod to have fun and leave the thinking to school. I also know that this proposed idea may only serve to a much smaller minority that is most definitely counterproductive to today's focus on maxing out those 40/40 or 80/80 slots.

But, I believe this idea is a sustainable remedy for the fact that the Garrysmod roleplay has become very mundane and repetitive. And I believe that there are brilliant people in the community that can come onto these servers and actually roleplay in a space that yields some kind of real world result when your game crashes and you need to go interact with the real world.

If I got at least one person to at least take one concept that I mentioned in this post and implement it into their server, I will have felt that I did my job.

 

I still like HL2 RP after all these years. The fun, at least for me, lies in the interaction between characters and the unique situations those characters find themselves in. Those things you mentioned (settlements, player factions, merchanting) can all be implemented in HL2 RP as well.

 

don't talk about change unless you're willing to act upon said change
just do what @Gurrazor said in that one post he made its easy to find

 

"cs:go players"
the whole stereotype of s2kers all being good in csgo breaks down kinda when you realize that gmod and csgo are wildly different games with different weapon bases

 

+ have a good admin team
+ deal with your players
+ don't do drama
+ use common sense

-- nice server kids

 

don't give literal 10 year olds positions in staff or "gamer girls."
im talking from experience and @cash wednesday can vouch for me with this one

 

-snip-

On-topic:
Don't make the server too over-complicated, make things fun
Most times using something that's true and tested is better than being 'Unique' and 'Different'
Don't run it like a business
Listen to your admins
Listen to your players
Don't ban people because they disagree with you
Don't kick people because they joined mid-event and you can't be arsed to deal with them
Have one of your admins deal with troublemakers or interrupters by taking them to the side and away from the role play temporarily until things are dealt with
Make sure you have an appropriate rule list for both your admins and your players
Don't have your admins squeal at people and think they are better than everyone else, just because they can use commands and noclip.
If people that come on your server want to shoot at things 'CS:GO'-like, then that's unfortunately something you may have to deal with; this is why you set rules down before things can become a problem.

Pro-Tip:
So many others have also came here and posted large threads like this, it's a subject of high debate that never really gets anywhere; because no one actually really listens or implements the ideas.

Things I have learnt while doing my own server and running into plenty of problems and learning from my mistakes.

 

Regarding what servers should do, we're providing a service that is equivalent to immersive virtual worlds e.g. EVE Online. What makes them successful makes us successful, I don't think it needs to get very complicated.
- Interaction between players
- Escapism
- Experimentation
- Purpose in life
These are the main motivations for users.

 

i think a big problem of servers that want to go beyond a simple fun time with events thrown in is the lack of a realistic economy
it's clearly not an easy thing to create a virtual economy, but think of the potential with a solid working economy, stores actually mattering, TOKENS actually mattering, bribing, money makes the world go round

 

if you can pull off an actual economy you're set, its not difficult its just a matter of actually working to achieve it and not letting it slip up due to laziness or something else.

 

the only way to really have one is implement hunger/thirst needs, which everyone hates anyways

 

you can't fix what people roleplay when solo
it peeves me that solo rp is frowned upon made fun of as well; if someone wants to write, let them write

you just need a group of people, say like 5 to kick it off, but they need to be actively working on it
training wheels obv need to be applied for the majority of the beginning but once established what people do solo should / could be swayed if it turns out alright

 

hl2rp has gotten more and more horrible honestly, drawing players that aren't full o a cup of shit in is really hard to do, because most of them are just whiney children, or everyone is depressed for some reason.

there are way too many hl2rp servers locked and "under dev", and I barely see Cider, Atomic or Phase Four servers, probably just looking in the wrong place but, from what I see in the communities section, it's just hl2rp after hl2rp, and so on.

 

thats why i said ban anyone you don't like
its easy
/plyban retard 0 (n word)

hope i dont get snipped and sniped again

 

Banning people YOU don't like is stupid, and is why hl2rp is being ruined in the first place.

 

ya i agree

no its more like don't deal with players who are whiny or trouble makers in the first place

 

imo at the end of the day the most important thing is having an underlining community you can trust on

i have about 15 guys who i've known for 6+ years, we hang out a lot and we've even gone as far to actually meet up in real life.

it helps to have that sorta thing because at the end of the day you know who will be at your side and they'll be there to help you out

 

In my capacity I've tried to implement some of the ideas I mentioned. Of course it's not easy to do it in the scale that I wrote about, but the one that was the most successful was allowing the direction of settlements to be determined by the player by sort of hinting different ways they can go about to control it.

For instance, in the simple MetroRP scenario there was the Red Line the Reich and the station in between the two. Instead of assigning the Red Line or the Reich to win it over in a planned event, or to assign a Player Based Group to control it from the start what I instead did was create a very minor thirst/hunger system. This system really didn't kill you if you didn't focus on it, but it made life difficult if you outright neglected it. Now, the interesting thing I added was a communal stove + water pump where people were able to simply get their own water bottle for like 1 bullet (cash) and if they had raw meat, they were able to cook it and eat it on the stove. What this meant for the station is that it was going to be a really crappy lifestyle if no one governed the people because everyone would have to hunt for meat individually if they wanted to eat.

(I should mention here we also had a system where Nosalis would spawn randomly around the map and if you hit them with an axe after they died they'd spawn meat that you could cook and then eat).

What a PBG figured out (which I found very interesting) was instead of outright claiming the station to be theirs. They went out and they assigned people to hunt for food and bring it back to give to the people living in the station. As a result, they basically controlled the food market for a wide variety of people.

Now, what didn't end up happening but what could happen is that if another PBG wanted to rival that, they could easily stand by the water pump and ICly stop people from getting water. In which case both PBG's would have to duke it out in order to control the means of hunger + thirst.

In this way, these PBG's are thinking about the environment they were in and they actually ended up simulating many textbook concepts you'd learn in a Political Science 101 class. I think in this mode of thinking, roleplay can be very fun.

 

I wanted to mention in my closing thoughts that I don't think this should be the final solution. But perhaps a 'better' alternative to the repetitive structures of roleplay in Garrysmod.

And as a sub-point, to realize that having a unique universe like WW2RP can end up just being a re-skin of HL2RP if it's done the same way (i.e. Combine -> Nazi, Citizens -> Refugee's)

 

I think you can limit yourself too much by thinking about the direction of current servers. I remember the Half-Life 2 RP servers of 2011 being different to that of 2013, and much more today. If people have been playing this gamemode for 6 years or more, then surely something good originally kept them going. Trying to reinvent the approach of running a server is ignoring the knowledge of what worked in the past. A simple approach of: If it's fun, do it worked for them. The truth is, the RP community on Garry's Mod has always been a fickle and confusing thing. Do what you makes you happy, because any server, no matter what it does can fail, and most people will move on some time in their life.