litphoria

The level of realism expressed on a profile.

(I'd like to get discussion on this, please, because I'm not sure how to word this. It was brought up a long time ago as an idea to both replace the realism interest and to give people the option to express if their profile or playstyle is realistic, cartoony, or anything in between.)

I imagine this has to do with if a profile is played with all natural laws, or if they are bent a little bit for narrative convenience, or bent a lot (e.g cartoons). This would let us search for find realistic profiles to find profiles played completely straight, or maybe find cartoonish profiles for those that obey nearly none.

My concern with this, is how certain things would fall into this. For example, I might have a science fiction character, who has certain high tech abilities such as nanotech for fast healing. While regeneration would certainly not be 'realistic' as compared to the natural laws, the character might otherwise have realistic reactions to things. I think making that judgement call might become more complicated than not, if this is what I understand it to be.

If that is the logic, though, then isn't 'cartoony' just as consistent if the rules are set up beforehand that 'all the way through' is normal and acceptable? (just using that as what I think of as a cartoony example.)

I definitely think we'd have to have a category which is "realistic" as in "could happen in real life", then one for "internally consistent" (dunno about that name). However, if someone is looking to just play in the reality we all live in, the site should be able to allow that person to find other people who want to play within those rules.

Then slightly less strict rules, then even less strict rules, and so on.

I definitely think we'd have to have a category which is "realistic" as in "could happen in real life", then one for "internally consistent

That's my intention, yes. There's no hard line betwern realistic and unrealistic as most sci-fi and fantasy things have layers of realism to them.

My concern is much like Skkikik, while I understand that there are many shades of grey to realism, choosing which one is right for my character, and finding which one is actually a match to mine would become complicated and tough. I think that this would be more messy and confusing than helpful and searchable.

Maybe instead of separating it into how something would work, right here, in the real world, this trait could instead be categorized by the concept of plausibility and consequence so that it'd be less confusing?

People getting married, moving in together and paying taxes are all pretty plausible in a modern setting. Space travel, monsters, and varying sentient races are all pretty plausible if they're explained in their respective canons.

People with vaguely explainable and mysterious powers or stories that break their own "rules" on occassion would be pretty implausible.

A character that has basically no "rules" or consistencies and doesn't have any explaination for anything that that can or cannot do (like a cartoon character who explodes in one scene and in the next is chasing someone down the street) would be impossible.

The words may still a little too subjective but the descriptions are what I'm trying to get at; having it depend on how much consistency is dedicated to a profile rather than if we know that it can happen in the real world. That way searching for specific settings combined with a realism trait would be much more meaningful.

There are people who exist nowadays. People which have existed, vikings, knights. People which might exist, yeti, the secret knight of the temple. Fantastic people, elves, demons.

We already have realism under interests, why does it need another field? That, and people are already confused about what it's supposed to represent.

I guess the word would be "verisimilitude" or possibly "detail orientated role-play" with "dreamlike" or "detail-light" for looser levels of internal logic in the play.

It'd be a good way to set expectations before the RP on what level of detail you'd want from the play