The Golden Rule

Originally Written By: Jessica/Serenesta??
and found in The World of Fantasy Role Play Owned by Serensta,
which, sadly, is no longer in existence.


The biggest, most common reason for your role play to
become a disasterous, depressing, total loss of a good thing,
is if you allow RL (real life) problems to interfier with
your RP (role play).

This happens WAY too often, with WAY too many
role players.

NEVER EVER BRING YOUR REAL LIFE PROBLEMS
INTO YOUR ROLE PLAY NOR ANYONE ELSES!!!!

Here are two examples of the most common kind:

1. You have become friends OOC (out of character) with
another role player that you have met online.
After so long, as we all do from time to time, you and your
friend have a "difference" or a "misunderstanding" RL,
NOT in RP, causing there to be conflict of some sort between
the two people. Because of this, they are no longer able to
RP with eachother like before, because they still hold a
grudge behind the keyboard for eachother. Not only will this
mess up your storylines, but it can and usually WILL affect
other people's storylines that are involved with yours.

KEEP RP JUST AS THAT, RP!!!!!

You will find that later on, that "grudge" will may away, but then
you are left with a screwed up storyline that never should
have happened in the first place.

2. You are having some major problems RL. Your girlfriend
left you, your parents won't let you "do anything"...
WHATEVER....you get online and take your frusterations
out in character, by doing one or more of the following:

A: Your character becomes intolerable or "bitchy" to others,
when normally that is NOT how your character is.

B: Your character is put in a massive state of depression, but
people wonder why, because in RP, nothing happened for
that to occur. It gets very annoying.

C: You are so angry, so hurt, so stressed or depressed that you
out-of-the-blue decide to just kill your character off, then you
look stupid after your over that RL problem that made you
do that, and are having to get other RPers to bring your
character back to life.

Now I have done all of these before myself, but I learned
from them, and I will never do them again. Either learn the
hard way and find out for yourself, or take my advice and
don't do it at all.

The other half the "Ultimate RP Sin" is vise-versa the first one,
which does just as much damage, sometimes if not more.
It is, "Bringing RP into RL."..

I have seen and experienced this problem way too much since
I began RPing here.

The biggest, most destructive example of this is:

A: In character, you may do something to someone just as
RPing, that he/she may not like either RL or RP, whatever the
case may be. Whether you caused their storyline to change in
some way that they didn't want it to, or they just didn't like
the way your character treated theirs...WHATEVER.

So many times, that person will get angry RL and take
things out on your RL person as well as your character.

Also, bringing RL into RP, or RP into RL, all examples above
and other forms, are acts of moding.

It is such a shame that some RPers cannot tell the difference
betwen RP and RL. They mix it and it causes so many loss
of friends, alot of heartache RP and RL both, as well as
stress and depression RL that none of us need. We come
here to play the game, to have fun, to forget about life's
problems, even just for a while, but it is so easy to combine
the two it's not even funny.

I never claim to be innocent of any of these examples. I am
guilty of all of them atleast once, but I do know that I have
been here long enough to have learned from my mistakes,
and cannot be forced to make those same mistakes again.

I only posted this here in an attempt to save you from having
to go through it yourself.
Because just starting out, you may be
thinking, "How can something like RP on a computer
cause all of that?".

Well my friend.....don't say that you were not warned.