Roleplaying Guide

This section is divided to two parts: Creating and Playing the Character Part I: Creating a Character There are few things to remember when creating a character for roleplaying purposes. Naming: You should consider well what to name your character as you cannot change it afterwards, this is because how Ultima Online is build. A good guideline is not to write it with capitals (like JACK) or have strange "kewl" spelling (like JaCk). Also names taken directly from other famous fantasies or your favourite TV-program doesn't sound very fitting (Aragorn or Homer Simpson). The names of Britannia origin from the medieval England mostly. First names are basically first names from planet earth, so finding a good name should not be hard. The names should be like Leoric Bouchard, or such. A good source for medieval names can be found at: Ye Olde Dictionary of names. Background: It is important to have a background for your character. That information would include your town of birth (Trinsic, Cove, etc), what he/she has done earlier in life and so on. It is important that the background is so to say believable, we cannot all be the Avatars, the lost children of the King or dimensional travellers. Also it is important in my opinion to have the story to fit in world of Britannia and it's fiction. More detailed background you have written to yourself, the better. This way you have all the vital information you need when interacting with others. Also make sure that his or her background has an affect to characters personality. Personality: Figure out how your character acts and behaves. Is he/she generally rude to everyone? Does he/she support the Virtues or is he/she perhaps thinking they are for vein? Is he/she heroic or rather a coward? Is he/she word ready or silent thinker? Is he/she very wise or stupid as a troll? Remember to create strong and weak points as well as no one is perfect and everyone has his/her weaknesses. Description: As the Ultima paper doll doesn't tell much of character appearance it might be a good idea to write more about the characters appearance in the Character Profile scroll that comes with the Second Age. Here is an example what you can write: Vernagh Age: 27 Height: 6'1" / 1.82 meters Eyes: Blue Home town: Trinsic Vernagh is a quite tall man with a normal body structure. His hair is light coloured and so is his skin. His face has a deep scar on the right side, just on over his eye. It is a small wonder that his eyeball was not damaged when he got the scar. The hair is well taken care of, and the beard is carefully shaven. His armour is always polished, and he takes great care of it. He speaks in a slight upper class Britannia accent, though it sometimes gets mixed with the Northern "towns people" accent. However this to be more accidental than in purpose. Part II: Playing the Character Speaking: As citizen of Britannia you speak naturally old British (How fare thou? Hail, to thee! Etc), however if you feel old English too hard, normal Modern English is perfectly acceptable. Things you should avoid in all costs is using the Internet slang, because it looks very bad and lazy, and most importantly it breaks the atmosphere. Good examples of slang you should NOT use is: u (=you), sup (=so whats up?) and so on. Also ": )", "face" marks etc are out of the question. The list is endless, just use correct English grammar and you should be fine. When you want to express feelings or emotions of your character you should use emotions, like: *smiles*, do not use " : ) " or other Internet shortcuts to express feelings. You can create emotions by typing: :, and then typing your emotion like "smiles". You will learn it fast. Always remember to mark when you are out of character, it is very important. By default you are expected to be in character when another role-player approaches you. It is a good way to use OOC: at the start of every sentence spoken out of character, also putting your out of character sentence inside ( ) is a good way. Remember to stay in character while talking to someone, and not suddenly say like "My cat is in microwave, do you want to chat about it?", the correct way to say it would be:" (OOC: my cat is in microwave, want to chat about it?)". However it is recommended that you stay in character unless you have extreme need to talk something OOC. Then it is good to remember that when you are in character there are no terms like pk, player, ultima online etc. Pk means a player killer and when in character there is no players, you are the character you represent and you life in Britannia, and you do not know anything about "players". A good term for PK in role-playingwise is a brigand or a murderer. Acting: Remember that you live in Britannia not in modern day earth, so all the ethics and values are not the same. For example people did not show their love so openly as they do today and having in-deep relation without marriage would be very strange (of course there was secret affairs, and not so secret ones, but they were not spoken in public). People did not consider different things healthy as today people, meat with a lot of salt was very tasty and the health issues were not considered at all (or they believed that a large amount of salt was good). Also differences between Lords and peasants were great, and it was uncommon that the different classes would socialise with each other in much depth. Also the manners were very important among nobles, so bows and calling people "good sir knights" or "miladies" was very common. Stats: A role-player does not use numbers to refer his or her skills. Instead a blacksmith with skill of 70 could say he is an adept blacksmith, rather than: "my skill is 70.1". The Game Mechanics: As in every role-playing game the "rules" are made to players for guideline, nothing more. Dying is specially at least my favourite subject to talk about. It is a fact that you die a lot in Ultima Online, however in role-playing you do not have to consider death as a death, it is in many cases more realistic that your character just suffered a near fatal blow and survives from it with help of an healer. Death in role-playing terms should be rather permanent, where do you think all those graves did appear on graveyards? Characters in the Ultima fiction is are NOT immortal and do die permanently if killed according to all Ultima fictions. So treating death that you do not want to be permanent as a serious injury might be a very good idea. Also getting guard killed might be more like getting beaten, you could also act as you got arrested and throw in jail. There most certainly is prison sentences, even if it isn't in game system/engine. Lastly do remember you do not know other character's name before asking, there is no names hanging above your head in real life either.