ESP Q&A

[Rias]

I've had this written up for a while, but never got around to posting it.

ESP Q&A:

Q: Why isn't there more activity by NPCs on ESP? Can't everyone use ESP via the ESP artifacts (crystal pendants)?
A: No. All PCs can, of course, but they're assumed to have the knack for it. The ESP artifacts hone a person's ability to tune into and broadcast on the ESP waves, but if an individual doesn't have the basic knack to sense/tap into these "waves", even an ESP artifact won't grant them the ability. The majority of the NPC world cannot make use of ESP artifacts. Nevertheless, the NPC world is made up of a huge amount of people, so there are still a lot of individuals that -can- use ESP artifacts. This does, however, explain why many organizations and NPCs don't use ESP for communications. Don't assume that just because an NPC is visible/controlled by a GM, that means they can use ESP. Even handing them an ESP artifact won't likely give them the ability to do it.

Q: Can I send mental images via ESP? Like a mental picture of a tree I'm looking at?
A: No, just strings of concepts and thoughts that resolve into words or feelings. You could transmit the description of an image, as if you were speaking it aloud and describing it to someone, but you can't just plant a mental image of that potted plant you're looking at into the minds of others. (So no ESP video-conferencing.)

Q: Can I communicate emotions via ESP?
A: Yes, basic ones. You could do so by putting something like *anger* or *sorrow* into your transmitted ESP message. There may be specific commands to do this at some point to make it a little more elegant.

Q: Can I use emotes via ESP?
A: No. Emotes tend to be visual in order to portray a range of feelings, like a smile or a frown or a glare, or some kind of physical action. To portray the feelings associated with these common physical actions, just send the emotion.

Q: Why do people use accents or odd speech patterns on ESP? Isn't it communicating purely by thought?
A: You're not broadcasting everything you think - if you were, it'd be nothing but indecipherable noise on the ESP net. When you communicate via ESP, you're forming a specific chain of thoughts and ideas that you wish to communicate with the intent of being understood by others. Therefore, most people form these communications just like they form their spoken sentences, so ESP tends to "sound" the same as when people speak. Regarding accents, people could be basing their communication on how they hear themselves (or how they believe others hear themselves) speak, and so the accent gets translated into thought. Ultimately, we're not going to demand that people use perfect, flawless Common(/English) on ESP - that'd be a little silly. Just take it as a person's personal touch on their thoughts that is translated by the ESP process to be a mental equivalent of their spoken accent. This isn't to say someone couldn't intentionally communicate differently via ESP than their spoken speech, if they wanted. If someone has some speech impediment that they really want to overcome via ESP, it's okay for them to say, speak with a lisp, but to communicate via ESP without it. If their lisp doesn't bother them, it could well be translated to their ESP thoughts. They might even do it intentionally, to help maintain their identity.

Q: People accuse my character of ignoring people or things on ESP, but I just missed it in scroll, or I wasn't even logged in to the game at the time. Is there an IC excuse I can use?
A: Yes. ESP could easily be muffled by other important tasks at hand, spacing out, thinking strongly about something else, or any other distracting thing. Even if you technically should be hearing everything all the time because you wear a pendant all day, that doesn't mean your character actually will. There are myriad reasons why a character could intentionally or unintentionally "tune out" of ESP despite having a pendant on.

Q: What's with the ESP colors? Are we actually "seeing" the thoughts in that color somehow?
A: The thoughts generally need some kind of focus or identifier to help them stand out and be noticed by others, as well as to separate them from each other and prevent everything from running together into a cacophany of mental noise. The mind translates this focus into different colors, the default being gray. Tuning crystals take the concept of focusing on a "color" further by making only those tuned to that color able to sense thoughts broadcasted on a color-associated channel. Think of it like broadcasting radio waves on a specific frequency. But are the thoughts themselves actually "colored", as in a wavelength of light on the physically visible spectrum? No - thoughts aren't made of or carried by light. It's just the mind's interpretation of that thought's unique focuser that makes it individual from all the other thoughts out there (and it was the easiest and smoothest way to easily distinguish and present that kind of differentiation in a text-based medium).

Q: Are we able to distinguish homophones, such as "blue" vs "blew"?
A: Others would determine it as how it's communicated. If you're intentionally wanting to communicate that a word is spelled differently, others could be aware of that. So if a person was projecting their thoughts more based on spelled words, others would notice. If they were projecting their thoughts more as meaning or sound and not worrying about the spelling, then people wouldn't notice it. A good rule of thumb would be: if it's clear someone's intentionally misspelling things (like for a pun/joke), assume your character notices. If it seems like someone just accidentally misspelled a word via ESP or is just unaware of the proper spelling, your character probably wouldn't notice.

Q: Can I use texting/Internet acronyms?
A: No. If I catch anyone ESPing something like LOL or BBL or G2G, they shouldn't be surprised to find themselves Mind Blasted into next week. If it's an acronym that would be commonly used in CLOK's IC spoken language, that's okay. "ESP", for instance, is perfectly acceptable.

Q: What about smilies?
A: Absolutely not.

[Zoiya]

Q: What about smilies?
A: Absolutely not.

Damn.

[Lavi]

But but but I want to write little hearts, like I <3 killing canim

[Karasi]

I think I missed this in the Q and A, so please nobody think me dense or stupid--I honestly want to know.

You spoke of things like emotion--anger, sorrow, etc. What about laughing, chuckling, grumbling? These might be heard in one's mind, and I've seen quite a few people use them. I would like to have this cleared up once and for all, please.

[xavier]

an emotion can be transmitted, amused, cheerful, angry, morose.
an emote cannot be transmitted, laugh, chuckle, growl, sigh.
hope this helps

[jilliana]

I've been meaning to ask this for the longest time:

How do GMs want us to handle blatant out of character behavior on ESP and elsewhere? Usually I tend to ignore it on the IC front and try to tell them privately to stay in character. Do we send a report or e-mail?

Apologies if this strays a bit from the main subject of the thread.

[Jirato]

Usually when I see OOC ESPs, it's just a minor slip up, the person gets told "Hey, that's OOC", we all forgive and forget and move on. The majority of the time, this can be resolved by the players. All it takes is a friendly tell (assuming you don't have the no_ooc toggle on).

If you see someone doing it consistently and very obviously, and they're not responding to any tells/whatever asking them to stop, feel free to report it or shoot us an email at so we can address it. I would prefer folks try to resolve it themselves if possible, since chances are if it goes on and on and they haven't stopped, it's because we're not online to warn them about it, so we probably wouldn't see the report either. If you honestly think it's bad enough that it warrants an email though, go ahead.

This goes with pretty much IC interactions, not just ESP.

[Shou]

This'll be rather a bump, I know, but I most certainly have a question.

As I understand it, the ESP network is a sense on the edge of your mind, like you might have something in the corner of your eye. I have a mute character, who I'd like to communicate over the mesh in more abstract concepts, but am not entirely sure how to do it. Can the feeling of welcome be something you can broadcast over the ESP? Can the feeling of being chilly, damp be? And trying to work out a concept like "I'm in Mistral" is a headache too, if the rules forbid, and it seems they do, a image of the place over ESP. In essence, since emotes are visual, and ESP is more about emotional feelings, do I have to "speak" over ESP for such concepts as "I'm on my way" when a sense of hurrying and a flash of colour would do the same?

[Rias]

If your character can understand speech, I see no reason why they can't "speak" on ESP. The idea is that the communication is automatically done in the most natural communicative way possible, and unless your character has been out of spoken communication entirely and not used it until now, I'd think they'd be familiar enough with the flow of conversational communication to do it naturally via ESP. Again, if they can understand speech, they've already got that concept down.

I'd rather not have people communicating solely by basic conceptualizations or feelings on ESP, to be frank. It was conceptualized and implemented to be a universal communication medium between humans using their most natural communication method, that of a conversation. If you don't want to "cheat" with ESP to communicate and be real thorough about the whole "difficulty communicating" thing with your character, you can claim to be one of the people in the world who can't tune into the ESP waves, refrain from wearing an ESP pendant, and do your best to communicate to others in person and have them relay it on ESP if you need it, or something.

When it comes to conveying emotions over ESP, think of it like picking up how someone's feeling by the tone in which they speak. You wouldn't be able to tell someone was damp or cold just by the sound of their voice. I don't have all the meta details, but I'd like to draw the line somewhere around there, just so we have some lines in place.

And correct: no images can be conveyed via ESP. The deathknell tuners are a special exception, and the ability for them to convey the images they do is tied to and triggered by something that the creators of the tuners don't really understand; they're just picking up on it. They don't know how the images are generated or initially conveyed, or really how exactly their tuners are picking up on them. It was achieved by a lot of trial and error trying to tap into things they don't have any solid understanding of - they just discovered it was out there already.

[Shou]

Thank you for your input. I'll do some thinking then.

[Jirato]

This was mentioned in chat earlier, so just wanted to bump it and say, yes, everything here is still applicable and relevant in 2019 CLOK.

[Vaelin]

A question...

Any good ideas how people have their pendants connecting to the esp when they first made? I stil imagine a shady trenchcoated mummer giving it to them and try that crap for the best trip in their heads...

[glare]

that entirely depends under what pretext their in the lost lands. Given the incredible utility of instant telepathic communication. i can't imagine that there is a country or organisation that is not immediately interested in having some standardized testing for ESP usage ability and the temporary ones may be cheaper to produce for this testing than the full ones.

[Vaelin]

It's a technology only available in the lost lands though.

[glare]

Countries and orgs still exist in the lost lands, they're just on a diet. Thats why they look so skinny and weak.

Might this be an opportunity for a mummer focused event by the gMs?

[Alila]

Hi,

It is mentioned elsewhere, but I believe the esp network specifically only works within the quarantine. The phrasing seems to suggest it is more than simply having a pendant; even owning a pendant without being in the appropriate regions will not grant access to the network.

"I feel like at some point in the past when I was still hammering out the lore behind it I may have tentatively alluded to use of ESP outside the Lost Lands, but asking now I'd definitely say no: it only works in the Lost Lands, mostly around areas that were once Aetgard. If the latter conflicts with some kind of lore or event that has happened, disregard."

Sorry :(

[glare]

..., who were you apologizing to?

[Jirato]

To add to the list of information in the original post.

ESP is NOT short for esper. There is nothing called esper, there's no esper network. It grates on our nerves when we hear people refer to it as such.

[glare]

So to be sure, ESP is not an acronym? Why is it capitalized like that?

[Bryce]

ESP is an acronym, which is why calling the ESP network or a pendant an "esper" (not capitalized, not an acronym) doesn't make a lot of sense. It's also not a verb, which I think is how people are treating it when they use it as "esper"? I've never been quite sure.

Might just be some form of intentionally made-up slang for the game but I agree, seeing "esper" used this way seems wrong and I've never liked it. I don't call sticks of RAM "ramers", I don't call EMP generators "empers", I don't call citizens if the US "users". It'd be confusing to see capitalized acronyms turned into lowercased words this way in just about any case I can think of.

[gralkik]

ESP is an acronym, which is why calling the ESP network or a pendant an "esper" (not capitalized, not an acronym) doesn't make a lot of sense. It's also not a verb, which I think is how people are treating it when they use it as "esper"? I've never been quite sure.

Might just be some form of intentionally made-up slang for the game but I agree, seeing "esper" used this way seems wrong and I've never liked it. I don't call sticks of RAM "ramers", I don't call EMP generators "empers", I don't call citizens if the US "users". It'd be confusing to see capitalized acronyms turned into lowercased words this way in just about any case I can think of.

Just to add, ESP stands for Extra Sensory Perception.

[glare]

I see, personally i don't see the problem, Acronyms become words in rl all the time. Its actually the natural progression for them due to..., human laziness? Some good examples are
Laser =
"Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation."
GIF, and the many many political groups and terms that end up becoming words for easy news time sound bites.

I personally don't plan to use it as my character has never heard it IC yet but I'm a fan of a dynamic word environment and localized slang terms.

[Bryce]

"Laser" as you explained it is itself an acronym. It's not being further used as "laserer" or "lasering" that I've seen.

GIF is also an acronym. I don't see people saying things like "I found a funny animation on the gifer", but maybe that's because I'm old.

Whatever the case, I don't think anyone's claiming any hard ruling here. Language is constantly evolving and changing. Just some people pointing out nitpicks and things that cause annoyance or confusion. My main issues with "esper" are:
1. It's taking an all-uppercase acronym and making it lowercase, which is confusing
2. It's taking an acronym and turning it an existing word, "esper", which is confusing

Someone saying "get ahold of me on the pendants" or "get ahold of me on ESP" are fairly clear, even if someone isn't familiar with the game's ESP system. At the least people can infer there's some kind of pendant that allows communication, or that ESP - a fairly common acronym - is a thing they should inquire further about. But someone says "get ahold of me on the esper" and people are more likely wonder what exactly an "esper" even is (is it one of those weird creatures from Final Fantasy VI?), and it's not obvious that it has to do with ESP because the acronym has been changed to all lowercase and turned into another existing word.

[glare]

I see what you mean and perhaps its because english isn't my first language but there are many instances in which what you're describing happens already tbh and the slight variance here between ESP and esper regardless that it is already an existing word will just come down to personal preference so I suppose its all good in the end.

[Bryce]

The game's owner and developer did go out of his way to point out that he didn't like it, so maybe not quite "all good."

Out of sheer curiosity, can you share some of these instances of turning acronyms into non-acronym (so lowercase) verbs? I tried for a good while this morning to think of some before I posted, but I couldn't come up with any that I'd seen. I'm sure there are some out there that I'm just not familiar with.