Pokécharms

Followup question - is it okay for there to be a narrator, so long as I voice my character?

This might require a few responses due to the character limit on profile messages but here goes. ^^

First - the occasional fourth wall breakage can happen, but don't overdo it, please - as some people might find it tedious, distracting and/or immersion-breaking.

Granted, we all have moments in our lives where we feel like characters in someone else's story and may play it for comedic effect - but unless you're in some kind of a parody RP where everyone does it all the time a-la the Samurai Pizza Cats, you should probably exercise discretion and common sense when occasionally leaning on the fourth wall.

Re: Narrators, that's kind of a question. As the RPing style enforced here is that of third person, past tense, story format - posts are supposed to look kind of like a book would (alas, a good chunk of the RP forums can't string together two sentences to save their damn lives, but I digress).

This means that by default there is some sort of a narrative voice going on! But the narrator is not and honestly, should not be, a character in the capacity of interacting with the cast and the other RPers - it should rather serve as sort of a mirror into your charcter's' mind.

Typically, different characters have slightly different narrative voices based on their thoughts and reactions to the goings-on around them - and the narrative voice, in that sense, is also a part of the character and is used to give the readers additional insights into the character associated with it.

Basically. Use narrative voices to reflect what your character feels about the situation. Don't have your character petulantly argue with some omniscient all-seeing asshole with a dramatic voice that no one but them can hear. Unless, again, this is some kind of a parody RP where everyone and their goat is doing something utterly silly. This ain't Samurai Pizza Cats, you know what I'm saying? xD

Yeah, I get it now. As far as the breaking the fourth wall, I just wanted my character to describe one of the cities like "(???) City looks like it was made in some creative 16 year old's mind!"

Pff, that's perfectly fine. ^^

Well, that's the first fourth wall break that I've heard of that isn't so bad, but I have seen pretty bad ones. There was this one from a couple of years ago where the guy's character literally can fourth wall break and know the character sheets (so basically everything) of that character, even if it wasn't said in the actual RP, yet. Or he would know a little bit of the goings on from the discussion thread.

Now I have no idea if that constitutes as too much, but it sure did seem like it at the time, as it was a bit too meta.

If this site were played like a DnD game, they would surely be booted, unless they were all okay with their fourth wall break and metagaming that they just kind of casually slipped through.

It's not really a question of metagaming, tbh. A character shouldn't know things about other characters if they haven't witnessed them or been told about them within the scope of the plot itself.

Metagaming, to me, is - for instance - tailoring a character, their learned skills, etc, to the requirements of the setting to an excessive degree. Excessive min-maxing, essentially. Some of it makes sense and is even welcome, but too much of it, and especially when it comes at the expense of what the CHARACTER would be likely to do rather than the player, is where one needs to kind of stop.

Using knowledge about other people's characters that the character should NOT be privy to in-universe isn't so much 'metagaming' as it is a lesser form of godmoding, and quite frankly would not be acceptable.