I was going to write a post about tying your professions into your RP, but that’s going to have to wait.

Instead, after events at Noxilite’s RP event last night, let’s talk a bit about how NOT to try insinuating yourself into a group of RPers.

A bit of backstory for you:  Noxilite gathers weekly in The Barrens, to catch up with one another and swap news and stories.  Newcomers are almost always welcome, as long as they’re polite and not there to disrupt RP.  We really only have one rule, which is: no harm comes to anyone at the fire.  If you try breaking that rule, you’re probably going to end up with some very angry Noxies skulking and looming and hoping for a chance to relieve you of most of your blood.

So, when a low-level blood elf asked Pill about a good RP guild, she told him about the RP night and suggested he come along.  He whispered Gharr, the guild leader, and came along to see us.  After a few minutes of hitting on the Sin’dorei ladies present in Thalassian (these are the times I wish we could learn other races’ languages…), he asked Gharr for a word in private.

Turns out, his story was that he’d been sent by… someone… to kill Gharr for… something… but had “thrown away his blade” when he realized Gharr wasn’t really a bad person.  Being naturally suspicious, Kansin — a troll rogue who is very protective of others in the guild — snuck over to see what was going on.  It became evident rather quickly that this player was in far over his head, and with every hole poked in his story, the lore-bending and other eyebrow-raising claims grew more and more ridiculous.

After a while, Kansin, giving the player a gentle out, suggested he either go back to Silvermoon and find the names of who had hired him to play the assassin, or to come sit quietly by the fire.  Instead, the elf ran off, waited a few minutes, then yelled “AAAAH!” and came back, collapsing.

With an arrow in his shoulder.

Because “they’d been watching” and knew he hadn’t carried out his job.

At which point, of course, at least three of us asked the logical question: if they’re hiding in the hills with arrows, why not just… shoot Gharr themselves?

The barrage of questions quickly made the player back off, typing into /say things like, ((lol this didn’t go the way I’d planned it, idk what to do next lol)).  And ((let’s just forget it and start over tomorrow lol))

Now, how and when and even if one should ever retcon is another post all by itself.  I don’t think the eight Noxies and friends who were there are going to be quite so willing to pretend that we’ve never seen this rogue before, especially after we dedicated an hour or more of RP to his story.  (Or, more accurately, to reacting to his story; Gharr and Kansin spent the majority of the time trying to help him salvage the plot while the rest of us looked menacing around the campfire.)

What I’m addressing here is the way he went about introducing himself to the story, and pitfalls he could have avoided.

The player’s ultimate goal, he told us at the end, was to join the guild.  Now, I’m not sure if he expected a guild invite at the end of the night, or if he viewed this as an introduction.  Noxilite requires a bit more interaction than one night of RP for us to throw out the /ginvite.

But let’s take a look at the fail.

What he did right:  talking to one of our members beforehand, and subsequently asking the GM some questions.  He also started out well enough, even if his declarations of admiration for the female blood elves was a bit over the top.

Where it went wrong: everything after that.

The assassination storyline failed on multiple fronts.

  • Walking into RP suggesting you’re there to attack someone without first clearing it with them makes for some awkward moments. Even though his plan was never to truly attack Gharr, the mere suggestion that he was there to do so borders on godmoding.  It would be one thing if a player who had an RP history with Gharr had sent the kid.  This guy made up some nebulous NPC that had hired him — that suggests there are NPC enemies for Gharr that Gharr’s player hasn’t approved.Had he checked in with Gharr first, he might actually have found a bit of story there that Gharr could have let him latch onto.  However…
  • He didn’t take into account what the guild’s reaction would be, either. Someone comes up and threatens our leader in front of seven of his friends, you can’t expect us to pat the would-be assassin on the head and tell him not to sweat it when he changes his mind.  With a little extra questioning, the player might have found out that the last time someone threatened a Noxie, they ended up facing a very angry Wall o’Tauren.**  Last night we had a low Tauren-count, but Linedan loomed enough for ten while we sorted things out.
  • Once he “decided not to do it,” he didn’t have any answers prepared for why it was ordered in the first place. Sure, there are assassins who take on jobs not truly knowing anything about their employers or their targets — hell, it’s part of what made Grosse Point Blank such a great movie.  But when it’s the basis of your introduction to the guild you want to join, you’d damned well better have answers deeper than “I don’t know.”  Otherwise, your story leads…exactly nowhere.  And there’s no hook for the people you’re trying to draw into the story.  (Though, again, I point you to the first point — he really ought to have checked in with Gharr before deciding there were random people Out For His Head.)

For whatever reason, however, after his first twenty minutes of hanging out around the fire (the first ten of which, by the way, Gharr was offline to go buy me ice cream…) he decided that Gharr wasn’t such a bad orc after all, and didn’t really deserve to die.  Awww, an assassin with a conscience.  After dragging Gharr away to confess his abandoned deathplot, and after a good long grilling by Gharr and Kansin, elf-boy decided to slink away, presumably to try finding more information on who had sent him.  This was good!  This was at least a little promising, that he was willing to go think about the story and come back the next week with something more fleshed out.

Or so we thought.

Cue the AAAAHHH!, and the elf limping back to the fire with an arrow in his shoulder.  Begin the second round of fail.

Now, of course, you have a guild full of people standing around, looking down at him dispassionately.  Gharr and Kansin had enough time to relay the conversation to us, so the rest of us were… disinclined to assist the wounded rogue.  More story fail:

  • If the people who want Gharr dead were waiting in the trees to shoot you if he didn’t do the job… why didn’t they just put an arrow through Gharr themselves? He hadn’t thought that one out, either.
  • We tried giving him another out:  consider that the men who hired him sent him bumbling into a gathering full of people who are fairly deadly in their own rights.  Maybe they really didn’t want Gharr dead, and were instead trying to get rid of the rogue himself? Set the poor kid up to fail, get him out of their hair.  But he didn’t take it.
  • It then came out that he thought that we’d offer him protection from his unnamed NPCs. Again, rather poorly thought out.  Our characters would be naturally suspicious of that — first you were here to kill our guild leader, now you want to be protected by us.  How do we know that’s not another ploy to get closer to the guild, for more opportunities to do Bad Things?  Granted, I don’t think the player would even have considered that possibility, based on his lack of forethought in other areas, but that’s what was going through several other heads at the time.
  • At which point, he disintegrated into the ((lol this didn’t go where I planned idk let’s start over tomorrow lol ok?))  I’m not exaggerating  the lols and idks.

Still not quite sure what will happen if this rogue returns next week.  Honestly, from what he displayed last night, he’s not going to fit in with the guild.  I tried gently explaining, in whispers, that he might want to rethink the way he’d introduce a character to a group of people he didn’t know, but by that point, he had already tied his RP shoelaces together and tripped all over them.

What this boils down to, for someone looking to introduce themselves to a new group of roleplayers:

  • If it’s an open RP night, observe for a while, see what you can pick up about the group dynamic. Are they at ease, bantering about their days, or is there some serious, heads-down plotting going on in low voices?
  • If you’d like to set up a storyline as your intro, talk to people first. You will very likely find people willing to work with you to help set up an introductory plotline.  The advantage here is, they can help you tailor it to fit with the other plotlines already in progress.
  • Don’t go bending the lore. Once his story started falling apart, our friend started making all sorts of claims about the government of Silvermoon that had Kansin thinking he’d been hit over the head one too many times.  People are going to catch it, and call you on it.
  • Try to anticipate some of the questions you’ll get. You don’t have to have a whole long epic plotted out, but if you’re arriving under shady circumstances, be ready to get grilled and have some good answers prepared.  Who sent you?  How did you know where this group would be meeting?  Why shouldn’t they just throw you into a volcano and have done with you?

I think if our would-be assassin friend had tried just a few of these things, he’d have had a much better reception.  Granted, with all the lols and idks, (and other aspects of his IC conversation) I don’t think he’d fit in well with Noxilite overall; we’re kind of big on people using proper grammar and punctuation in our ooc channels.  But for pickup RP, he has a lot to learn.

**Noxilite and friends don’t take kindly to people threatening Davien with harm.  I ought to dig for screenshots of her sitting calmly behind the Wall o’Cows while someone postures on the other side.

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