Hello everyone.

I'm making this post as a place for people to safely discuss difficulties that they may have experienced during their time as HPD Officers in CD. The intent is for us to present situations where we weren't sure how to proceed, be it in general RP or on-duty RP. We can then either explain how we handled the situation in hopes of guiding one another, or we can ask for help understanding how to maturely and respectfully handle such situations in the future.

Some example topics:
*On-boarding (getting up to speed as a rookie)
*Handling situations when a group doesn't want police intervention for one reason or another
*Handling power gaming respectfully
*How to RP with someone you have difficulty understanding the posts of
*Appropriate times to use various weapons
*Likely many that I'm not thinking of

Some ground rules (just a couple for now, these may grow with time):

In these posts, please be respectful of everyone, even if you have had difficulties with them
*If you've had a difficulty with someone specific, please refrain from naming them
*Please refrain from directly quoting RP or IMs, as that can effectively name someone

Please attempt to make any criticism of the way someone handled a situation constructive. The hope through these discussions is that we can help one another improve our RP ability and experience.

Alright, with all of that out of the way, I'll get the ball rolling.

I was a scene recently with an individual who I had quite a bit of trouble understanding some of the posts from. They were very nice, descriptive posts, but sometimes the poetic nature of them and an oddly or improperly used word made it extremely difficult for me to understand what their character was doing.

I was able to politely inform them in IMs something along the lines of (paraphrased), "I'm afraid that I'm having trouble understanding what <charactername> is doing in some of your posts. I don't want to offend you, ignore you, or fail to react to something properly. Would you mind if, when I find I'm having trouble, I ask you for a simplified explanation of your post?"

They understood the difficulty and apparently have run into that situation before. They were more than happy to provide me with help understanding what they were doing from post to post when I had difficulties, and in the end we ended up having a great scene for everyone involved. If I hadn't taken the time to approach them in IMs, respectfully, it is possible that the situation could have become adversarial in an OOC way, and people could have left with hurt feelings.

So, that's my brief story of a problem, and how I resolved it. I have several others, some I will be asking for help with in the future. I look forward to seeing what difficulties other people have experienced, and what help people can provide one another.