RP glossary
The terms you will meet in any roleplay community. Without them it is impossible to understand server rules or pass an interview.
Basics
- RP (roleplay)
- Acting out a character inside the game world.
- IC (in character)
- Everything that happens as your character, inside the fiction.
- OOC (out of character)
- Everything that concerns the player rather than the character: discussions, questions, technical matters.
- NonRP
- Behaviour that does not fit the role: actions impossible for a real person in that situation.
Disallowed practices
- DM (deathmatching)
- Killing or attacking without an in-character reason or prior conflict.
- MG (metagaming)
- Using out-of-game information: hints from Discord, a stream, someone else's messages.
- PG (powergaming)
- Forcing your actions on another player so that they have no chance to react.
- RK (revenge killing)
- Retaliating for a death immediately after respawning — a breach of the New Life Rule.
Conduct rules
- Fear RP
- Your character must fear for their life: when threatened at gunpoint they comply instead of drawing a weapon.
- NLR (New Life Rule)
- After death the character does not remember the circumstances and does not take revenge for them.
Server structure
- Faction
- An organisation inside the server: police, EMS, courts, mafia, gangs, businesses.
- Backstory (quenta)
- The character biography a player writes during registration.
- CAD/MDT
- Service panels for police and medics: calls, citizen records, reports, warrants.
- Staff (admins)
- Players who enforce the rules and handle reports.
Economy and property
- Dirty money
- Income from illegal work, which usually has to be laundered before it can be spent openly.
- Laundering
- Turning illegal income into a legitimate-looking balance through a business, usually at a loss.
- Grind
- Repetitive work done mainly for payment. Not an insult on a roleplay server — a legal job is a legitimate way to fund a character.
- RMT
- Selling in-game money or items for real currency. Prohibited on almost every server, and often illegal under the game's own terms.
- Impound
- A yard holding seized vehicles, released on payment. Fees usually rise the longer the car sits there.
- Insurance claim
- The server's process for writing off a destroyed vehicle. Most servers limit how often this can be used.
- Permadeath
- An agreement that a character dies permanently after a specific event. Optional on most servers, mandatory on some.
Communication and combat
- /me
- An action performed in text, describing what your character does rather than says.
- /do
- A text command describing a situation or environment — often used to ask or state what another character can see.
- Initiation
- The roleplay that justifies a hostile act. Without it, the act is deathmatching.
- Value of life
- The general principle behind Fear RP: your character behaves as though dying matters.
- Roleplay over ruleplay
- The idea that a scene should serve the story rather than be won by citing rules. Used by staff as a standard, and occasionally abused as an excuse.
How to use this glossary
Learn the basics first, then the disallowed practices, because that is the order in which a whitelist interview usually tests them. When two servers use the same term differently — and they do, constantly — the server's own rulebook wins. See the rules digest for how these terms are applied in practice.