As you all know, communication is key to get the most out of a lot of things in life - including your daily (or weekly) dose of roleplay. In Limore, I often observe people that have trouble figuring out if a certain means of obtaining information or contacting a player is regarded proper behavior or deemed meta and thus to be avoided. We already have a few nice entries on metagaming on our forum, but let me add this to the general topic of "Communications & You":
I. The use of IM and third-party-apps for direct communicationYou are always encouraged to chat up your fellow players in order to ask them if they are looking for someone to RP with, if you are welcome to join an ongoing scene (or to invite them along to one of your scenes) and even to make plans as for who to play or where to meet. While we like to play out many things IC, it wouldn't be fun to simulate every single detail (anyone in the mood for laying their char on a bed and watching them toss and turn for eight hours of good night sleep with no further interaction?), so it is perfectly valid to agree on a starting point for whatever you have in mind.
If you need a certain player to be around for what you want to play, maybe because he or she has a special role or function in town (guard captain, doctor, merchant etc.) or simply because someone told you to approach them for some reason ('Ask Old Man Jenkins about this, he knows everything there is to know about them killer rabbits!'), don't wait until you run into him or her IC by pure luck. Drop the player a line, poke them in our forums - most of them will be quite happy to get back to you as soon as they can.
If you want to, you can often dress up this communication as an IC thing, too. Just pretend the message in the forum or the IM is a letter you wrote to someone in SL, or - if your char can't write - that it is a messenger boy you paid some coin to fetch the doctor or let Mr. Valiant know that the baby is due. That way you can get your info across and have some fun playing at the same time.
II. NPCs and what information they can communicate to youWhile we have few actual NPCs present in person on sim (the lion guards of the palace and the gryphons being good examples for those), you are encouraged to act as if the streets are filled with a normal number of people depending on the time of day. They don't really serve a purpose for a meaningful conversation with you, but you can refer to them as a source for some basic knowledge your character has. Like for example you could pretend that you had asked someone on the streets for the location of any official structure (library, temple, academy etc.), as well as for the residences of well known people (for example the estates of families like the Harems, Vances or Hoggards). So if you want to show up at someone's door, most of the time it is fine to claim that you got directions from
someone on the streets.
Another thing they probably can do is to give you names of people in certain professions. So if your char is looking for a doctor, assume that a person on the street pointed out a doctor at random and gave you a basic description of what he looks like. Keep in mind that we have a 'Character lookup' on the forum - all information within usually is fair game and knowledge you have access to IC.
III. Events & related communication Unless specified otherwise, all events that are communicated through our forum and the Lismore Lands Group Messages in SL are supposed to be open to all interested players. You are encouraged to handle events as things that the population in Lismore at large would talk about. So your character could have learned about an event simply by overhearing the word on the streets or what another fellow at the bar might have told him. Also you can refer to blackboards (like the one at the marketplace or the paper posted at the palace tower) or town criers as source of information.
Please don't miss out on events you would like to participate in simply because nobody yet asked your character IC to join in. Let the rest of us know that you are interested. And then either walk up to us or arrange with us to stop by and pick your character up. The RP can be a lot more simple and fulfilling if we all keep the communication going.
