(by Kilarith Duskleaf)

This is a first Dusky Rambling, the idea is that I pick a theme, pop out my phone in the bus or the train and start writing anything that comes to mind. Though I will not only be talking about RolePlaying, I'll try to find the problems and possibilities my subject sets for RPing.

Get ready, hold on to your dentures and put your hands in front of your children's eyes, it's about to get messy !

Call me "Bubbles"

Now I am probably the only one in this case, but have many of you spent more than a few minutes underwater in the lands of Tyria ? Oh, Yah ! That reminds me... I spent over an hour happily swimming about... It's like I forgot to breathe !

Calm down, I'm not stupid, I saw the inventory slot and the little "Hey Look Listen" style pop-up that says "Oh god, you're entering water... You might get a cold !" - lucky my mother didn't design the UI. But I just can't accept it : a world where science is at a cross between the industrial age and the year 2042 (when we'll be capable of making artificial gills), but with everything in the Middle-Ages !? I'm fine with a techno-magical heroic-fantasy world (who didn't love Arcanum ?), but this is about a nanometer away from having big blue remote-controlled space-monkeys invade Tyria to suck Thundershrimp out of the sea with tractor-beams !

Now I know this is one of those "it's just like that" kind of things where people pour molten iron down their ear-canals because we're just too much in love with the game to want to criticize it. But I have a way of convincing any good RolePlayer that they would have done better to let us drink 6-packs of gillyweed juice before diving than instantaneously attaching a futuristic looking gas mask to our sweet customizable faces :

Now RPing is all about getting the right balance between a fantasy world, personality and staying plausible ; you can't Yell at someone for trying to turn you into a frog, because there is magic, but that doesn't mean you can conjure up a cloud and fly it off to another planet. So Yes, "real" physics are applicable to Tyria, with a few exceptions. But the physics of fluids do apply, don't they ?

So why is it that I had whole conversations with dull-minded repressed blowfish - aka. Quaggan ? Yep' they justified the breathing... But they forgot it turned us into TELEPATHS too !

(Note to people who are bad in physics : you can't speak underwater due to the fact that our vocal cords are adapted to the properties of specific gases.)


A "Friendly" Abode

Now that we have discovered our new-found telepathic abilities - which totally justify using /w and /g for IC chat ! - We get to the fishy business ->drum roll<- ; now Quaggan are a peaceful, cute, bunch of nice fish with a bad temper. This means they have a hard time defending themselves from the many murderous species out there... Talk about an easy way to create events !

The real problem though was that the Quaggan Refugees guarding the place I visited must have been something like 8 levels below the bad guys ! So the Mean-Stingy-Angry-Poisonous-Spinning-Gellyfish would attack me whenever I tried to telepathize to anyone on the village's outskirts ! That would be fine if they were weak, but those idiots had one attack where they charge at you spinning, if they got to me, I would die in half a second ! Unless I dodged the attack, I died.

This gets really problematic when the fact that enemies are in every direction (all 6 of them in a 3D environment) attracts a new mob whenever you doge the previous one !

Big Conclusion

So my big conclusion is that between the huge consistency problems and the uneasy movement caused by strange gellyshark, underwater RolePlaying might be like trying to play video games on an Apple computer : stupid.