[quote=@NuttsnBolts]
This is a little thing I notice, but it's not really a major issue, more like an annoyed concern...

So I've come to notice how some RPs are created with an American feel to them, some more than others. This can be from the freedom of gun weapons in RPs, to the way cities and vehicles are described, and even references to historic events like the declaration of independence, presidential leaders or even the seasonal school structure and school design layout.

Its nothing "wrong" with these choices as each rp caters to a different audience but as someone who is not from the US, God damn it can be hard to participate in some of these RPs.

For instance, I tried to participate into a school rp once. Now Australian schools go from year 1-6 primary, 7-12 secondary. We start school in Feb and end in Dec. So each year matches up with each year on the calendar. The idea of starting school mid year and finishing, mid year the next year, while having different schools for lower high schools and upper high schools and all that stuff is so foreign to me, that I cannot physically understand why.

The other part with weapons is that I've never grown up around guns. I know about guns through movies and games, so I have yet to see a role play where having a gun is actually a criminal offense and people have to watch their ammo usage because you cannot walk down to your local shop and restock supplies. 

This isn't a rip on Americans as I do have a lot of American friends, but so many modern RPs seem to be set or influenced by the American culture that as an Australian I do notice, and it can sometimes break immersion as even if I try to create an American character, it can sometimes feel like the foreigner. 
[/quote]

This is a really interesting post. I have a related, but not [i]quite[/i] the same, topic.

Whether I'm playing on a forum, in a video game, or at a table in real life, one thing that bugs me when I sit down to roleplay with people that consider themselves experienced - not people who are new to roleplaying, mind you - is when they completely misinterpret what something in a given setting is designed to represent or else just shove what they want into a setting that wasn't designed with that in mind.

For instance, I played this game called [i]Neverwinter Nights 2[/i] a lot back in the day. There were some decent persistent worlds. One day I saw a server which had a culture that I was pretty sure was a mish-mash of Mongolian and Plains Indians cultures, and of course that really interested me. Its religion resembled the Tengri religion, the clans that made up the culture had totem animals and were named "Bear Clan" or "Deer Clan," and I think they were even described as swarthy. Despite this, someone decided this was [i]obviously[/i] a Viking culture, and they turned it into that. Then I saw someone do [i]the exact same thing[/i] on another server, this time to a culture that was pretty obviously based on India. Yeah. How does THAT translate into "Vikings" in someone's head? They even had castes!

But let's go back to the topic you introduced. Sorry for the diversion. I just had to get that off my chest.

So, as an American, I catch myself doing what you say a lot. Frankly, a lot of roleplays are very much built with assumptions from a western cultural view in mind, especially that of Great Britain and the U.S. This is the case both on this website and others. But as someone that likes to roleplay characters that aren't carbon copies of me, I've found a pretty good way of dealing with this:

I roleplay someone who doesn't get it. I roleplay someone who isn't from the big culture, and I roleplay out their confusion, frustration, and NPCs likewise being confused and frustrated with them. And if I can, I have them explain their confusion either in their heads or aloud, the better to sort of explain WHY this is so annoying, WHY this is so... bad.

To use a real-life example, I was playing a character in a fantasy setting akin to a medieval Wild West. He was a dwarf from a culture that had [i]certain unbreakable rules.[/i] The trouble is that nobody in that part of the world adhered to those rules. So, I roleplayed out his frustration at how nobody actually followed similar rules, and he came to expect disappointment.

I also played a spellcaster from halfling clans based around the Romani people. He lived by a different set of ideas of what right and wrong were than the other characters in his group. Really, this brought mutual confusion to both sides, even though they usually got along swimmingly. What might seem like a great insult to them would be a great joke to him, and vice versa as well. It was an intriguing thing to play out.

You can also turn this around on people if you build the right character and make [i]them[/i] be confused and frustrated in a way that's conducive to roleplay. In Neverwinter Nights 2 I played a Half-Orc paladin of Ilmater. I played on a server that took realism seriously... which included, well, racism. He was beaten, had people try to get him thrown in jail, and otherwise horribly mistreated. He was known for being a goodie-two-shoes, selfless protector of the weak, giving all his money away to the poor, blah blah blah. So, it upset people enough that some of them wanted him to fight back, either by trying to take the problem up with the law or by getting some SWEET VENGEANCE in with his huge honkin' greatsword. But he refused to, and he made people promise not to, because [i]he[/i] wanted to show, by example, that you didn't need violence or a loud voice to make changes. (I was going for a Gandhi or Jesus style of martyrdom here.) This drove people nuts, but in the end it made people really intrigued, and it reintroduced them to a style of protest and preaching that society sometimes forgets about.

Yeah. In general, I just think the best way to counter people who insist on playing characters based around traditional American / Western ideals and beliefs is to introduce them to a separate belief system. Hell, if you want to [i]really[/i] provoke some thought, take apart the western ideal of "progress" in a roleplay.