I wanted to bring this part into a seperate thread, as there is a whole 'nother debate on it and I didn't want to muddle the other area too much.Finally, here is my suggestion, which I am going to be starting a separate thread on: "If you can't accurately represent it, you can't do it." If your character is in the woods, so are you. If your character is in the lab or in a cabin busy resurrecting someone, so are you.
As an observation from having participated in Final Haven for a while now and run the past event, I think the single biggest impediment to the game is the act of narrating what your character is doing, as opposed to acting it out. Time and again, most people state, "A LARP is not a Tabletop game" and I wholeheartedly agree.
I'm tired of hearing people say, "I make like I'm fixing your armor up, but I'm really going over here to talk to someone" or "My character *would* be sleeping here, but I'd personally prefer to sleep in another character, so if someone comes into kill me, come get me..." This is a ridiculous practice and creates far too many complications and disturbing situations for other people who are really trying to roleplay their hearts out.
Aside from the debate on how many characters a player should be able to play. The rest of the rules seem very clear on how these situations should be handled:
There is no out of game. So you can't sleep "out of game" (save for extraordinary circumstances). If there are 20 bunks and 22 people in a House. Guess what? Two people either need to sleep on a floor or make nice with some other place and sleep there.
This is where we fall back to the "If you can't accurately represent it, you can't do it" rule. The cabins we sleep in are what they are. They are no more and they are no less. This is true in Brighton and it should be true in Phantara.
If your character is waiting to get resurrected. Then your body should be lieing there. If your character dies, and you have any hope for them coming back, then stay there. Don't run off and say "my body is there" and throw a hat down which in no way represents you lieing there. If you get up and go off to NPC, your spirit has left permanently. Otherwise, you should be representing your body in a very significant way, so that people can poke, prod, steal, burn, and raise you if they want.
If you're hiding in the woods, because you've run from an evil man, you should be crouching behind a bush. It creates an (even more) artificial situation when you yank the person out from NPCing, tell them they have to "sit in the bushes... and we can't tell you why... just act natural..." and then see who gets a head start on things. It's just plain bunk.
If something comes up that prohibits you from doing something you would normally do, then roll with it and react as if it is in game. When we seperated house members in Frostfell, there were actually three seperate cabins and we escorted you in game to those cabins. We find out later that people were claiming they were really sleeping in another cabin and thus would not have been attacked. Wrong. "If you can't accurately represent it, you can't do it."
I am flattered that I (and many of the other Orcs) get compliments on our roleplaying. I think the reason is because we all employ this philosophy. "If we can't represent it, we don't do it." We are where our characters are. We are wearing what our characters are wearing. We look how our characters look. We look the age our characters look. We sound like our characters sound. And we act how our characters act. Nothing more and nothing less. We don't tell you, "I speak in a funny accent..." or "I smell really bad" or "I really look 140 years old." When you get into that you get back into table top. If there's some reason why Sara isn't at an event, we tell you Iza is off and away and she is inaccesible to even us. She's not "sleeping in the cabin." This philosophy also prevents another cell phone incident (as an example).
Man, it's time to start living your characters and ROLEPLAYING. That's my election platform... please vote for me.
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