What is HRP anymore?

General Discussion
1

HRP, or High Roleplay, is a style of roleplay that’s (apparently) so difficult to achieve, people need to sell their soul for it. But what does it actually mean? What counts as HRP?

  • It’s using a lot of emotes and being expressive.
  • It’s typing fast.
  • It’s being an asshole to everyone except your superiors.
  • It’s strictly following ML and the SOP. (bonus if you’re an MP)
  • It’s having good and quirky gimmicks (e.g., funny emote macros).
  • It’s having a typing quirk.
  • It’s making people laugh.
  • It’s… nothing. It’s a buzzword just like “Cade theory.”
0 voters

Discuss…

1 Like
2

Playing a consistent character and being willing to interact with fellow players outside of the PVP. Being funny is optional.

11 Likes
3

It’s playing a character—not yourself, but may contain aspects of yourself—and remaining true to that character, the setting, and the events that are occurring, consistently. It’s a very simple concept: exist in the world.

In CM13, though, when people think of HRP, they think of subjecting people to the ego of /me character flashbacks and longform text.

7 Likes
4

I’ll say what I tell everyone about “HRP”. Open up your Byond hub, and start scrolling until you find an HRP server that’s non-ERP. You’re gonna scroll for quite awhile, and the reason that is is because nobody wants to play that crap. So HRP is apparently a desirable goal, and yet nobody wants to play it lmfao.

Best take I ever saw, and I think it might’ve even been on the CM discord is there’s only 2 types of servers; servers where you have to RP and servers where you don’t. Command and NCO standards take care of the rest.

7 Likes
5

People who punish other people for LRP think HRP is so much fun and quirky, but in reality its 60 people in one server not talking to each other until shuttle leaves the station

6 Likes
6

If the rounds werent so fast I’d change my answer, but I tend to notice what people are doing before I can identify them, never mind remember them

3 Likes
7

“high roleplay” servers end up being no-fun-allowed servers in my experience. Part of the reason they’re ghost towns is because admins on them are constantly hovering over people’s shoulders, ready to interject and tell them how to roleplay “properly”.

You have the wrong name
Your character wouldn’t know that
Why are you walking into that part of the station don’t you know you’re not allowed
You can’t attack my character you have to do this instead

And a lot of the conflict and mechanical interactions are gutted; greytide of course gets you banned since you’re not an antag, so there’s subsequently nothing ever happening. Even the antags have to play by strict rules and half the time someone dies you get an adminhelp complaining about you.

So, naturally, nobody plays on those servers. All the actual fun is sucked out of it.

CM strikes a great balance where you have an ever-present conflict keeping people preoccupied, and there’s room for downtime here and there to actually do some extra roleplaying. Most of the roleplaying is even softly enforced by the game mechanics - people lining up at requisitions for gear, deploying on the alamo, going to briefing.

Roleplaying on CM is so ubiquitous that people don’t even notice that they’re roleplaying.

5 Likes
8

Using this post to take the opportunity to mald about people who act like jerks/rude/low-key self-antags due to their “character” and “RP”.

In film media you always here about method actors doing asshole-ish things while they stay “in character”, Jared Leto sending rats to his co-stars on Joker, Shia Lebouf refusing to shower for 8 months for Fury. Part of the reason I think why we hear this is because 1. First is, well, media picks up on these things because it’s more likely to garner clicks and attention. And 2. As Robert Pattinson said, “you only ever see people doing the method when they’re playing an asshole.” I see quite a few people using RP or some quirk about their character to be unnecessarily rude, stand-offish, refusing to take criticism or advice, and slow down or make the game worse for others. The worst I’ve seen of it, with surprising frequency, is the QM/RO “RP” of requiring requisition clips from people asking for orders. It adds literally nothing to the game, is not a fun interaction, and hinders the marines fighting capabilities. MP’s jailing on things that are technicalities. CT’s and Corpsmen refusing to take advice or help (sometimes not an RP thing though, just a stubborn-ness thing).

Anyway, all’s to say is that I like when people RP “nice”, or at least where their only quirk isn’t being a standoffish jerk. If I’m in an RP kinda mood I try to be pretty jovial with things, if not a bit sassy. “C’mon man, splint that head, you gotta damn fracture!”, or “That’s the third time you’ve died, private, I better not see you again!” (of course I’ll help them again if they go down). Okay malding over have a nice day.

2 Likes
9

the only roleplay that should be tolerated is emergent roleplay

anything else is thinly veiled fetishism, or boring, or usually both. this is why many HRP servers do not have antagonists or severely limit their scope

tl;dr @Wintermote‘s (good) post, almost everything on CM is emergent roleplay

4 Likes
10

Well said.

1 Like
11

HRP is something, the more you try to cultivate, you will only succeed in eliminating.

4 Likes
12

Only one from those proposed answers could be even close to something resembling HRP.

In short HRP on SS13 servers is not acting (in character) like anonymous all-knowing online troll with ADHD. Pretty much it. How far you are on that scale is defined by how little you act like one.

You have LRP, where you just do whatever you want, mainly about only you having fun by “beating” other players in one way, or another, most of the time by somehow preventing them from playing (clicking a dude with toolbox till horizontal being the most common example, but stunning, cuffing, stripping naked and then shoving into a small room with bolted/welder doors counts).

On the opposite, the object of your search, is HRP, where you often put other people’s enjoyment above your own and gain “fun” and enjoyment from that.

Lets say you play vanilla SS13 and you notice a cultist going out of the maintenance for a while. LRP player would click the cultist till horizontal and/or call the sec by just saying “cult in “X” maintenance” on comms. MRP player would call out a weird guy in a hooded robe on comms. HRP player would start a conversation with cultist about stuff, or pretending to be scared a bit, depending on the type of character he is playing. There is also fourth type of RP, which I call “Zero Role Play”, in this situation ZRP player would not do anything, but continue with whatever he was doing at the time. Silent PFC who just shoots xenos and says nothing but “*medic”, or calling out Queen, or Xeno who just fights and says pretty much the same as PFC, those are ZRP players and they are perfectly fine.

“Quirky” gimmicks, typing quirks, making people laugh, using a lot of emotes and being expressive, all of that are tools that can be used both in LRP and HRP way. On CM most often than not, they are used in LRP way.

“Vanilla” HRP servers tend to put a lot of pressure on “realism” and “realisticly”, life on a space station would be boring. The way SS13 allows players to communicate doesn’t help either, everything goes trough chat box. GMod RP servers have it better because you can act in more ways that writing text and then holding ctrl while pressing arrows in order to spin like that toy for autists that was popular few years back.

I personaly think that it is impossible to achieve fun HRP with random people (who have no stakes in the game) without heavy moderation.

Those “boy’s only club” servers, those that shall not be named, get away with it, because to hop on them, you had to put some effort and gain trust. CM has certain roles whitelisted because whoever made them that way in the first place understood it.

PvE is a fine example. You gotta be luckey to roll and get a chance to play and if you act stupid, GM just makes you disappear, so everyone atleast tries to not act like a spoiled teenager with ADHD chock-full of hormones. There is also no pressure from the players on the other side who are not hold to any RP standards other than not using net-speak in chat.

6 Likes
15

Hrp isn’t real

I guess when I mention it about people I just mean “quality interactions, everyone should interact with this person because it’s fun”. But I’m a big believer that gradients of RP a la hrp mrp lrp don’t really exist, there just Is RP or Isn’t RP

To acheive the highest RP one can acheive………Open a word document and start writing a short story. Bam.

2 Likes
16

The real HRP in CM is:

  • Fragging xenos as marine
  • Fragging marines as xeno
6 Likes
17

i think this poll is just missing the point of what it means but i mean HRP is mostly used as a meme to just represent Good Roleplay :tm: when its mostly a word about rules.

NRP is no rules relating to roleplay, ic, or ooc (you can say ooc things in ic and will not be punished)

LRP is rules relating to keeping IC things IC, so you cant bring in irl stuff or other ooc stuff into ic, but otherwise aren’t enforced to roleplay (this is where gimmick stuff thrives, just in the social sandbox of the game)

MRP means you have to play a character. Doesn’t matter what the character is, but u have to act like the character, and rules are intentionally kept slim and unimpactful on gameplay.

HRP (as i see it) means you have to try and create a story and more importantly, immersion with your roleplay. So the objects and gameplay scene become props in your story, instead of the main core being the game itself. And also theres just high rules roleplay and that means HRP too.

2 Likes
18

Daniel… when are you playing i need to do some hrp.

2 Likes
19

It’s crazy how one of the only people that seems to actually understand what roleplaying is in this thread is getting fucking patrice reacted over truthnuking everyone.

However, as it currently is, HRP is a buzzword, yes MRP-LRP-HRP is used to “tag” what kind of server you are going for, but these tags are also completely fucking stupid as the level of roleplay and general requirements on your as a player are always a bit different.

Cabal here makes a very good point. Without some sort of filter, reduction of player numbers(insert communication theory), while everyone can type, interact etc. at once without some kind of order to it like in a tabletop roleplaying game it’s very hard to achieve fun roleplaying when PFC John McMoron will run up to you and start talking about how he epically chungs xenos and drinks his unga.

And for what roleplaying it actually is, it’s playing a character that is in some kind of setting.
You should play a character that is realistic to a setting and generally conducts himself as a person would in said setting.

Go watch Aliens.

7 Likes
21

i’m not going to respond seriously to Cabal’s post when he maintains gmod rp is good and doesn’t recognize that genuinely immersive roleplay emerges entirely organically regardless of people’s way of typing or talking and regardless of how serious people take shit

a true evac hold at lifeboats where it’s down to the wire and everyone is a step away from death, even if 80% of those players are quote “““zero rp””” is more immersive and HRP than the GTA V Online bartender roleplay Cabal’s espousing ever will be

“Vanilla” HRP servers tend to put a lot of pressure on “realism” and “realisticly”, life on a space station would be boring. The way SS13 allows players to communicate doesn’t help either, everything goes trough chat box. GMod RP servers have it better because you can act in more ways that writing text and then holding ctrl while pressing arrows in order to spin like that toy for autists that was popular few years back.

this is plainly ignorant of human motivation

people want to roleplay

people don’t want to type back and forth a meandering pointless time-wasting conversation with a neon-hair static

bastion of hestia (the original) allowed people to self-antag w/ good motivation and this, like all things organic, was HRP

blackstone had almsot 0 moderation except banning ERP, the admins were just silent game-masters that’d dish out punishments is secret; and this was some of the best roleplay ive ever seen

life on a space station is not boring and if you can’t achieve fun HRP with random people without heavy moderation, i don’t want to engage in RP with you, because your “heavy moderaton” is the antithesis of what i enjoy in roleplay

look at that i psyop’d myself into responding seriously to Cabal

6 Likes
22

Where do I say it depends on people’s way of typing, or talking? Please, point me my direct quote where I do.

Where do I say it is good? All I said about GmodRP was the quote below. If you find any other in this thread, please, point it out, where I say Gmod RP is inheretly “good”.

If people don’t take (atleast a bit) seriously the situation their characters are in, then how can this be immersive? Almayer gets hit by hijacked DS full of xenos, and totally “organically emerging” RP PFC says he hopes his bong didn’t shatter on impact, because his thrid wife would be pissed off at him for buying another one. Immerse yourself into the world of pothead PFCs being concerned about their weed when their life is at stake.

But I am saying that “Zero RP” guys are perfectly fine.

Many people do. Not all of them want to. If they did, we wouldn’t need that much rules about RP and CO/Synth/Pred/Fax Responder wouldn’t be whitelisted.

That is the exact thing I am saying and I did by mentioning how SS13 chatbox isn’t helping.

You can’t do it without heavy moderation when there are trolls and plain grieffers around. If entry point is so low stake, some people don’t value it and they grief. The entire system of CM proves that heavy moderation is required, otherwise whitelist wouldn’t exist. How your “perfect roleplay environment” deals with bad actors without heavy moderation?

If you want to get from the “realistic” point, then yes, life on a space station is boring, just like life on a cargo ship is. You have your regular chores and nothing really happens all the time.

Just because you have some ill conceived notion that I’m just trolling all the time, doesn’t mean I do.

2 Likes
23

Prophetic.

@George It means people are passionate about the topic. Not a bad thing.

1 Like