Logged in vs unavailable (my perspective)

[artus]

Some things just can't be roleplayed over to fix when it's brought up constantly when it's not even supposed to in the first place, like the whole why are you awake now thing. It's not like many of us can select when to be on at will and it's exhausting to have to deal with why aren't you sleeping all the time.

This brings back the memory of Artus since Clok time until recently before Rias made idling in public log people out. I did have a bad tendency to multitask and be anywhere and ended up having to come up with 5000 rp reasons why. +I'm a fast sleeper and can fall asleep anywhere anytime so it added to the problem back there too, and it eventually ended up with me going arty had some kind of sleep disorder because I ran out of reasons.

How can you roleplay past something that's not even on the scope of rp? It's ooc timezone difference. It's not about you wanting to be a nightowl because your char wants to.

[Gorth]

I think the TL:DR here is pretty simple. Not everything has to be ultra realistic. Sometimes in real life, we're just awake for a while longer. Maybe our characters shouldn't be going into combat and doing well on an hour of sleep, but they are. Deal with it.

[Taliaferro]

I'm not seeing the issue with characters calling attention to the hours that others keep. Just say you're a bit of a night owl and move on, right? Unless someone's somehow being an OOC jerk about it, which -- I can't imagine how that could happen, unless they harp on it after they've been asked to knock it off. I don't mean to be dismissive! Just, personally, I almost exclusively play in the wee hours, and I've never found it to be a problem, aside from missing people who play at different times.

Other than that -- I mean, we live in a world where shops and businesses and offices are open 24/7. Shop clerks don't even get shift changes. (That might be a neat flavor addition to think about putting in in the far future!) It's just a completely unrealistic but wholly necessary convention that we all agree not to think about.

The thing about referring to a player's downtime as their character invariably being "asleep," IC, now? That's a lazy MUD-ism that should have died decades ago, in RP-focused games. It's as bad as calling Eastern Time "Elven Time" or trying to refer to your PC's numerical skill ranks IC. I think almost everyone here understands that. If it happens here I think it's liable to be a slip-up based on old habits learned in less rigorous RP settings.

I play the game two or three times a week, which I imagine is more often than most of our players get to log in, but less frequently that a lot of people do. I sometimes struggle to come up with IC explanations for why my dude wasn't around last night, or what have you. "A horde of monsters sacked Shadgard and nearly razed it to the ground? Wow! I didn't know that. You're telling me this for the first time! You'd think I'd have heard the alarm bells and the lamentations of the women and smelled the smoke and all, but I was REALLY engaged with an especially tricky crossword puzzle." But even that's almost never necessary. My experience has almost uniformly been that people who play here just understand this stuff, and work with me to further RP as best we can in this best of all possible worlds.

[ThresherAle]

calling Eastern Time "Elven Time"

Man, that brings me back.

I think RIlulth's idea of having your character be of the Naeturgondur so you have an IC reason to be up at night instead of during the day is pretty cool. After telling them they're not your dad (or mom).

Whether you do that or not though, won't hurt to just tell them to knock it off if it's bugging you. Send a tell if you need to.