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Rundown: rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

How do you balance a character being perceptive and detail-focused without being infomoddy?
I know there's a trap a lot of players fall into when it comes to playing hyper-intelligent characters like Sherlock (just an example and not at all the particular character in question) where OOC knowledge bleeds over into IC knowledge when there's no feasible way the character should be able to know certain information, so what's a good way to avoid this trap?

Obviously, good OOC communication is a must, but what other steps could be taken in addition to this? Would it be reasonable for said hyperintelligent character to be able to draw from anything that might have happened on the game's network, provided the entry was public?

I assume a good safety net would be to OOCly contact the other characters involved in a scene and ask them directly what your character should be able to observe in said scene, and briefly explain what their conclusion would be via train of logic, but what else?

[(Anonymous)]

Always keep in contact OOCly is actually the main thing you can do. Try to make sure the stuff your character "just knows" or figures out is done in a way that it's fun for you and the other player, because obviously if someone has been plotting something for a while, it's dickish to walk in and say your character figured everything out already.

I personally would avoid using the network as a collective source of information unless plotted out with the players involved. No, it's not technically infomodding, but people don't expect someone else to be constantly looking at their posts to track their characters. This used to be more common in the past and was why the whole "private/locked 50%" trend used to be more of a thing. And while this is just my personal experience: everyone I know who does this with their character is usually kind of an asshole about it (ie will insist it's okay for their character to infomod a conversation had on the network between two unrelated characters ten months ago that they read and still remember for some reason because it was public), and I find it pretty off-putting.

Also, this is something that generally helps me, but trying to keep their knowledge to things you can make a logical connection to helps a lot in making other players more comfortable. I play a character who is so smart, there is no explanation for how he figures things out, but I do so in RP because it's more fun to play that way. Save the hyper-perceptiveness for specific scenes where it'd be fun to utilize, or would help the thread/cr progress in a certain way. And don't be afraid to give them blindspots if that, too, would be more fun.

Basically my whole point here is: utilize their intelligence in a way that makes things fun to play, not just to prove your character is smart.

[(Anonymous)]

In my experience, stick to what the player reveals in a tag/writes about in a "first impressions" journal post/other public free-to-assume info, including long-ago network posts.

And of course, avoid taking metatext like inner dialogue into account! Sherlock noticing that a character is crying sadly is fine; Sherlock magically understanding that the character is crying because they had a flashback to when they were 8 years old and dropped a popsicle on the floor = not fine. I've found that keeping an actual list of concrete details/facts can help differentiate between the two.

A reasonable way to offset the "am I being infomoddy" feeling can be to have your character notice all those details, but build the wrong picture out of them. Misunderstandings happen all the time even with smart, perceptive characters!

More generalized advice would be to know when to pick your battles. Sometimes tags aren't as descriptive as you'd like, in the sense of being helpful in expressing the true breadth and depth of what your character might notice.

[(Anonymous)]

A friend who plays Sherlock made a permissions page, for players to describe their characters' appearances and things that would be okay for him to notice or assume about them. If it's not on the page or not in the prose, they don't reference it (unless they ask oocly, if it's something that comes up in a thread).

The thing to remember is that hyper-intelligent/detail-oriented characters can be wizards about that in their own universe (though even they fuck up at times), but they might not be outside of it. Don't be afraid to make them struggle for information, or to just be plain wrong if they're in a jamjar environment that's out of their norm. Holmes isn't going to peg a Cheeto-dusted, fedora wearing neckbeard as a lolicon gamer, for instance.

[(Anonymous)]

My character is not hyperintelligent, but he is very, VERY good at reading people. Even after only one or two meetings, he can draw conclusions about their behavior and what they'll do next.

As a general rule, I tend to drop this as a general note in the descriptions in the first couple of times he meets a character so people have a chance to respond. It might sound tedious, but it really helps the other player to know going in that they're dealing with an intelligent, detail-oriented character. Generally, I figure anything in meta-text is up for grabs. If they're nervous but hiding it or have a kind heart or blink when they lie, he'll pick up on that. After CR gets established, it's easier to know what to expect he'll pick up from them as time goes on. With my oldest CR, some that's three years old at this point, they honestly don't care if he practically reads their mind because he's been around them so long.

But I think the most important thing is that don't be afraid to have your character draw the wrong conclusion! As an example, in the first episode of Sherlock, he gets all the details right on John's sibling, but mistakenly comes to the conclusion it's his brother rather than his sister because she goes by Harry rather than Harriet. In my own case, my character isn't completely infallible, so if he's tired or drunk or just doesn't care, he's not going to pick up on all the little clues he normally can figure out. He might think someone is interested and being polite when they're really annoyed and wish he'd leave them alone. Or if someone is a closed-off person, he might draw the wrong conclusions about their personality from their body language or lack of verbal clues.

No one is right 100% of the time, so having your character occasionally be wrong will help everyone feel more at ease during the times your character is being right.