Titles titles titles!

This was written for Necropolis by my good friend Jacksonian, There is no anatomical difference.

Jacksonian wrote:

Or "Physical Descriptions" as they're called around here.

Despite what my forum account will say, I'm rather new to this community. That being said, I apologize for my abruptness with such a post; I understand it's quite unorthodox for a new guy in a community to start making such overt assertions, but jacyte requested I post something to this extent, so I have. The following is my opinion which, I hope, some will find reasonable, and perhaps even useful. Anyone who's an old timer from TnB might remember a similar "guide" I posted over there a couple years ago. It's the same idea here. With that in mind, I hope you'll take a few minutes to venture through a number of paragraphs I've written. I apologize for the lack of fancy formatting, I've never been adept at font sizes or fancy coloring so I hope you'll find plain text suitable.

To begin with, I'd like to say that I appreciate the current title system, semantically. "Physical Description" is self explanatory and, as such, a guide in itself, really. A Physical Description should be just that: a physical description. I've noticed this is being taken for granted, however, once in a while on the server.

It seems that some have confused the purpose of a physical description. To clarify: A Physical Description (formerly known as a "Title") should be an objective description of a character's appearance. The emphasis being on "objective" for good reason. Many have fallen into the habit of giving subjective, opinionated descriptions of their characters in their Physical Descriptions. This leads, invariably, to metagaming. I've gathered some extreme examples- I believe most, if not all, players here at Necro are above these types of mistakes but these are simply for example.

Bad titles





Now, what they’re doing wrong. The first player has their title set as, “Skinny, Funky looking man.” He's almost got it right with "skinny." However, the title is clearly erroneous (with the exception of the word, “skinny”) as “funky” is an opinionated adjective. In other words, he might not appear funky to everyone. This is a confirmation that the player is falsely assuming that all the other players share his Out of Character opinions about his appearance.

The second character's title is also wrong, but also featuring a mild instance of what is commonly known as "Metagaming." One character’s goals, plans, motives, opinions or thoughts are of no concern to anyone simply reading a title. Likewise, the fact that this character has no goal in life, true or not, is impossible for anyone aside from that character to know (unless he tells them, of course). If the player making Fred Mertz’s title wants to reveal his goals to the rest of the in-game world then he must find an in-character forum, aside from titles, to do so.

Perhaps the metagaming caused by a poor title may seem negligible to you, but it can doubtlessly lead to problems down the road for roleplay purposes. It's difficult to find an example of this, but I can say that like any other instance of metagaming, if allowed to go initially unnoticed, it only has the potential to inflate into something ugly. Additionally, the same goes for a number of things, like injuries. For example, if your character has a broken leg you wouldn't put "broken leg" in your title, you'd say "walking with a limp" or something else of similar nature. No matter how elementary or simple it might seem, titles need to be objective and not omniscient.

Forgive me for not having a proper conclusion. That is all.

Good point.

Best guide I've seen.

This needs to be required reading.

Munroe wrote:

This needs to be required reading.

I emphasize this.