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Old 03-11-2010, 09:15 PM   #168
prof1515
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Re: RPI, RPE, and Roleplay

Being involved in the MUD community doesn't necessarily give one knowledge of terminology or the history of a term. Plus, disagreement over classifications are common in plenty of fields. Just ask an astronomer if Pluto is a planet or not. ;-)

For people within the RPI community, it served as a way to find similar games. I myself found Armageddon and Southlands many, many years ago by searching for the term after being introduced to it while playing Harshlands. Since then, I've been able to find several other RPIs over the years by using the term but only after sorting through twice as many games that weren't RPI but were using the term.

The acronym RPI has been around for about 16-18 years. The exact date of its first use is hard to determine since Armageddon's and Harshlands' old forums from that period are no longer around (at least not relevant postings in regard to the term).

Role-Playing Intensive or RPI is really more of a combination of code and policy philosophies. Use-based skill advancement is an example of a code characteristic while IC/OOC separation is an example of a policy philosophy of RPIs.

It's actually highly inaccurate to describe most RPIs since they don't all share the exact features of Armageddon. Armageddon, for example, does not show any generalized skill aptitude while RPIs using the HL/SoI code lineage (with the exception of Black Sands which modified the RPI Engine to resemble Arm's) show a very generalized (novice, familiar, adroit/adept, master) aptitude. "Armageddon Feature Set" or "Armageddon Type RPI" is good to futher delineate the type of RPI a game is but as a term to describe them all, it's not as good (some RPI players prefer the HL/SoI code approach while others prefer the Arm).

Not all RPIs are very diligent about advertising. If you check through these forums you'll see that some do attempt to advertise and recruit players while others don't make any effort whatsoever. When the term was coined back in the early to mid 90s, word of mouth was a far more effective means of finding a new game and the term RPI helped convey that information fairly effectively (as I said, it's how I found two of them when I went about searching for others).

It presently applies to 5-6 open games and another 3-4 in development. Additionally, there are approximately 18 (I might be forgetting one but I think that's all of them) other RPIs that are either no longer open or never did open before shutting down permanently.

However, there are at least 6-7 other games using the term (as many as over a dozen) which don't share any set of characteristics that would separate them from the approximately 350 other Role-Playing Enforced (RPE) games out there which don't use the term.

Nowadays you get varying use of the term without any real standardized extended definition. In other words, it's inappropriate use is really dependant upon the user's interests (ie, some say permadeath required, others it's not; some say no global OOC channels are prohibited, others don't). The only real standardized use, that is to say a clearly-defined mutual sense of what they're looking for, continues to be the original definition.

Of course, just to make things more difficult, the meaning of the term never formally defined until recently out other than by comparison to the original RPIs. The definition that was derived a few years ago was made by examining the games to which the term first applied and determining the list of similarities which were not uniformly shared by other RPEs.
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