Identity Rule

[Johnny Walac]

I have been getting questions from new players why Pangaea got a rule that allows metagaming.

"Ultima Online can’t provide unique appearances for all players, so we have decided that your name will identify you at any time.
This means that all players you meat know you name, even if it’s the first time you meet them, same goes for identifying murders. "

(Spelling error in rules section btw)

But what we can provide, is a character description option which makes the character unique. With the option Character Profile in the paperdoll you can write your own description. How you look like when people see you etc. I think we should remove the identity rule. You can easily write how your character look like. And about murderers? For a known murderer there should be plenty of drawings and descriptions about him/her.

"Thoeak stand 186cm tall and weigh 90k. He got a fierce brown beard and long hair. He stands before you in a full platemail armor and a spear dripping of venom. He regards you with cold eyes...."

Oh my you suddenly realize this dude is no good. You have seen his face on posters!

My point is. The rule isn't necesarry. We play on a RP shard. We should be able to handle the basics of RP.

[Foxwood]

Ultima Online can’t provide unique appearances for all players

I definately see a problem with this rule. We are not our characters. Our characters are our creations, no matter how complex or simple. Whether it's a twigman or a Mona Lisa, it's not us, and we play our characters like we want to, and make them look like we want to. This is not Tellus. This is a fantasy world in a computer game. I believe it should be "unique appearances for all characters", by the way. I am the player, my character is what we are talking about here. Like Johnny Walac already pretty much stated, this rule is... Wrong. And my opinion is that it is somewhat narrow-minded, and I do not want that to sound personal of course. I respect whoever wrote these rules, and I respect the rule itself, but the conflict between this rule and the fact that Pangaea is advertised as a roleplay-shard makes it just just too difficult for me to comprehend why on earth something like metagaming would be enforced. I am not exactly sure what your idea of roleplay is, but the idea of it is pretty simple, and it is at war with this rule. Some care about these things, the rest probably do not, but there definately is a conflict you can clearly see.

The fact that our characters always have (according to shard rules) the knowledge they should not have (strangers' names even), simply because the player has that knowledge upon seeing another character in-game, makes this rule enforce metagaming, which is not exactly smiled upon on Pangaea IIRC. What the hey? Does anyone else see the problem? This is the purest form of metagaming, the type that we see everyday, and the staff has announced that it will take action against metagaming, should it be proven first. What exactly needs to be proved? The shard rules already recommend us to do this. How about removing this rule, and replacing it with a common sense-rule instead? Try to look at the world around your character, through your character's eyes. It is not 2011 in there, I'd say. No NASA, Police, and definately no hockey championships. Why would they see game mechanics instead of live characters, then? I am no Admin, but the shard description clearly states that roleplay is required on Pangaea. Roleplay is, surprise surprise, playing the role of a character. Alastor Wormsent is not a guy from Finland, that guy from Finland simply plays the character Alastor in a roleplaying environment.

The fact that this rule exists, makes the whole idea of character roleplay just not worth any effort. It does not make it FUN, and it certainly prevents you from being CREATIVE.

Making this rule non-existent is easy, you simply remove it from the shard rules, but making the shard work properly without this rule, RP-wise, requires a little effort from its players. Simple effort: The players simply give their characters unique looks. Of course, on the paperdoll, everyone looks the same (That is the UO game mechanic we cannot change), but really? Screw game mechanics. All that is what the character description feature (lower left corner on your paperdoll) is all for! You want to see what someone actually looks like? You doubleclick their description.

You do not have to be H.P Lovecraft to make a unique character, and it is - unlike the rule states - possible with this simple feature UO has had in it since POL: Character description.

The removal of this rule would give players many more possibilities to roleplay their characters how THEY wish. A simple example would be disguises. You disguise yourself, be it with an incognito potion or different clothing and helmet, or both, and just change your characters appearance how OTHER characters see him, in your description. Mening, how your character appears in his current clothing and nice helmet that covers his face. Simple as that. Stupidity (i.e. via putting on a disguise the character becomes completely unrecognizable by any means whatsoever) is a whole another issue, that can ruin this for those who want it to work. That is where the staff members would step up and enforce these things, to make it not about stupidity and abuse, but to make it fun for everyone, without conflicts between how someone wants to put effort into their character, and the shard rules that make it all go down the drain.

We play on a RP shard. We should be able to handle the basics of RP.

Precicely. And almost everyone I have run into in-game, on any of my characters, has roleplayed on the level most comfortable for themselves. This is how it should be! It would be closer to perfect if peoples' characters could actually CHOOSE whether to tell others who they are or not, upon meeting them. I know my character would've been like "Nice to meet you Bob" if Thoeak had introduced himself as "Bob" upon their first confrontation. Public descriptions of Thoeak would have made this different of course, Alastor may have actually recognized him had he actually seen these descriptions. But that is how I do it, and prefer it. To each their own.

This rule is far too restricting on any RP shard of any level, even on light RP-shards like Pangaea. It takes away a lot of fun from those who are here to have it.
Ultima Online's mechanics never prevented anyone from giving their characters unique appearances (go visit other shards, it works there, so why will it not work here?).

Characters can, and should be given descriptions.


My 2 cents
-Foxwood

P.S. Despite the long rant (I hope it made at least some sense), I do love it here. I would just really like to see this rule removed. We can all think for ourselves, we are not toddlers.

[Glarundis]

let us have common sense
i would like these changes ,but it's too complicated.
Because you've met so many ppl IG with more than one of your chars, sometimes you can't really know if that char of yours knows that other char, or was it another of your chars that met that char IG?
Sure, you can try to not come up to someone and know who he is, but it's a bit hard if you go further than that.
But it can be annoying if you are a red and someone has never seen you before and starts like "you're a bad person i'll go away" or whatever. But hey what can you do...

The best way would be something that I don't think can be done with uo
When you meet a char, you have the option to attach a name to that char.
Like this, when you first saw a char the first time you met him, we wouldn't have a name, because you wouldn't know him. And if he lied to you about his name, you would have his name wrong. You could also let it appear red to you if you want, if for any reason your char doesn't like that char.
But I doubt these are doable with the UO mechanics.

My idea is, let's try to atleast not know who's who even if you haven't met him IG. But the perfect way it should be, it just won't happen with these mechanics. There are too many players to keep track of who you know and who you don't.

[Mike]

Basically it sucks ass that we have a rule that identifies reds as reds, and that we know someone's name without having met them before. But I think the game lacks the tools we need and the player base lacks the comittment and maturity for it to work any other way.

[Glarundis]

even if you couldn't edit other char's name, we'd just need a [known] or [unknown] tag that you could attach to characters

about red chars, it's very simple
We stop having red and blue
So if you've never heard of that person before, you don't know he's a robber (as it makes sense). If you get robbed by him, next time you'll run away.

[Johnny Walac]

Complicated? This is far from complicated. Either your character knows the person or not.

[Quintoz]

So tell me, why do you need an unkown or known tag to RP you don't know somebody?

[Melkor]

If we had a dedicated scripter, this thing could be simply resolved with a command that enables the target of your choice to know you by your true name, otherwisee would see nothing above your head, or something else entirley.

Well anyways, I still have the same opinion with that rule as I had when it was introduced, its unecessery and as Foxwood said, promotes Metagaming which should not be so rampant as it allready is for quite a while.

I could be nostalgic, and say that back in the day, people didnt want to tell you stuff over icq, theyd simply reply "find it out ingame" or "ask me ingame", which helped promote character interaction, but those days are long gone.

We could even go as far as to ressurect the old idea that, incognitos should remove the red colour off your character, if not the potions or the spell, then definatly tekstones incognito.. with appropriate drawbacks ofcourse.

EDIT: Also, its really not that hard to remember if you saw a certain character ingame or not, if you have brother/sister characters you can even fix a RP mistake with a simple "My sibling told me about you".

[Johnny Walac]

If we had a dedicated scripter, this thing could be simply resolved with a command that enables the target of your choice to know you by your true name, otherwisee would see nothing above your head, or something else entirley.

We don't need script to resolve this thing. It's roleplay. Either your character knows him or not. We don't need a script to tell us that.

[Glarundis]

Can you make a list of every character each of your character knows?
I can't.