Urban Roleplay

Out of boredom I was trying out roleplay cities in SL this weekend. Back when I was relatively new I used to RP as a knight in a medieval fantasy kingdom, but that seems to not exist anymore. These days the only medieval roleplay I can find in SL is Gorean horseshit.

So, instead of checking out medieval roleplay places, I looked for urban roleplay types this time. But first I had to decide on a character to play. I used to play text based roleplay, so to me the atmosphere of my character is very important. I decided to make Daman a cyborg using the items I got from the Steam Powered Industries sale, and I added a rebreather mask from Pandemic.

Once I had the look I needed two more things, a storyline and weapons. I decided to wait with weapons until I found a place to play, because every city uses a different combat system almost. Daman ended up as a war veteran from an unnamed war that will take place in the future in the Middle East. After a hostile attack with biological weapons, his left arm rotted away and his lungs got scorched. Cyborg technology was still growing with children’s steps only, so he became an experiment. He was given a mechanical arm and electronically controlled lungs connected to a breathing mask permanently stuck to his face. He can still talk with the mask on but his voice has a broken, metallic tone to it.

The first city I tried was City of Lost Angels. It looked like a very interesting place to me. Lots of people, interesting level system (CCS). It’s opensourced, which to me is a huge bonus, and second, you get XP for Roleplaying as well as combat. So even if you’re not a warrior, but purely a roleplayer, you still get rewarded. The reason I didn’t stay in CoLA was the fact that it was uber laggy. It was the first urban RP sim I visited, so little was I to know that was common. Either way, the lag convinced me to leave it be after walking around for a little while.

The second city I tried was a place I visited once or place to make photographs. Toxian City. I liked it a lot less because the level system works purely on combat and not on roleplay, on top it’s closed source and you have to pay for the actual combat system (DCS2). CCS you can get for free and you just pay for the weapons. Which are already damn expensive enough (I paid 2500 L$ for 2 SMGs and a cannon). Also, when I visited it this time for roleplaying, it turned out just as laggy as CoLA, so I left very quickly.

Because I had already wasted money on the DCS2 combat meter, I decided to just see if I could find any other DCS2 Sims. I found Dark City which advertises as low-lag. I really liked this place. At first I ran into a girl who loved to chat. Though the conversation felt a bit forced and was pretty much the stereotypical RP introduction. Still, that was more my fault than hers because I was dealing with a rowdy dog in RL at the same time and thus wasn’t giving it my full attention.

Next, I ran into some other newbies, sadly they didn’t want to roleplay, instead they invited me to an OOC tagteam shootout. I figured it wasn’t a problem. Until a Moderator popped up and begin saying I broke the rules. Yadda yadda yadda. In the end, she turned out to be sympathetic, let me off with a warning, and we kept talking OOC for a while. I don’t blame her for misunderstanding the situation. I just blame one of the people from the other team who suddenly decided it wasn’t fun anymore when she was losing and complained about it. After all she was the one who invited me to start shooting at her to begin with!

Oh, since I was shooting some whiny neko bitch up already, I guess you can assume by this time I had gotten my weapons. I had bought my weapons after I visited Toxian City actually. I had this CCS and this DCS2 system, and I knew I’d use either of those two permanently. So I looked for a weapons seller that made weapons enhanced for both systems.

I ended up with Black Ops. He has a huge variety of stuff and high quality. Most of the people I met prefer Breach over Black Ops. But I visited Breach and wasn’t impressed. Half of the vendors in the store were affiliates, and none of the weapons that were in his own vendors really interested me. They looked nice, sure. But they weren’t what I was looking for.

What I bought at Black Ops was Hellsing’s Harkonnen cannon and Blade’s dual Macs. Only with the cannon I was under the impression I was buying a rifle. Enough to say I was surprised by the size when I put it on. I know I should have paid more attention during the anime, I have the entire series on DVD and I still didn’t figure out it was an actual 30 mm cannon. The problem with a cannon is that it shoots only once every 5 seconds approximately. To make up for that though, one hit does about 30% damage to a character in Dark City … so I guess it evens out. Still, the Macs are more effective.

Anyway, one of the reasons I got these guns was that they’re advertised as enhanced for both DCS and CCS. With a simple command I can switch the bullets. They also have standard RP bullets that work with any system (including the two aforementioned, but in those cases they do less damage).

So far I’m loving shooting shit up. While I was making the pictures for this post actually, I was suddenly ambushed by a scripted monster, a solitary vampire soul. It almost went bad when I realised I didn’t have my reload gesture activated and had to manually type in reload, but I vanquished the beast in the end. I got badly burned, but the thrill was worth it. Haven’t felt that rush in SL until now.

~ by Daman Tenk on January 23, 2008.