In this week's The Darker Side of Life, we're going to be going into a topic that many RPers struggle with and argue over. Just how much of the time can you be in-character? In the article on roleplaying BioWare's story, we touched on using the class stories in-character. This time we're going to dig deeper and include the rest of the game too. There is more to the game than just the stories. If you happen to be standing around the Galactc Trade Network on your faction's fleet base, are you still in-character? Some players refuse to use voice chat, not because it might give away that your busty Twi'lek waitress as some hairy guy, but because once you know what a player sounds like, their characters might start sounding like that in your head too, instead of whatever accent they may be trying to portray.

For those of us that have been around RP communities a long time, there are also the people we've run into that refuse to communicate OOCly with other players as well. All they do is roleplay; everything else is shunned. Is that the apex of heavy roleplay, or a dangerous lack of communication that will lead to unnecessary drama? The question at the heart of this week's column really might be how much of our community is OOC.

Read on as we break down different activites and review community responses from The Darker Side of Life thread on how people feel about doing those activities in-character. Through this we'll attempt to find a line that can be used to guide people about what is IC and what is OOC. After all, once you've finished levelling, many players will find that their time is spent doing different activites like PvP warzones that don't lend themselves as well to roleplay as a Flashpoint might. How do we deal with it? Read on and we'll try to figure it out together.