Required Reading for Joining the Game





The GMs of this game have been at this for a long, long time and we've seen a lot of self-sabotage and bad behavior, so we came up with this page to list a few things that people might want to think about avoiding in the hopes of saving everyone some frustration and awkward talks.



To start out: We strongly advise asking us to allow you to lurk for a while before making a character!  You can't see how the game is played until you're in it, and seeing how the game is played will help make a character that fits into the game.  Come get inspired by fellow players!

GM NOTE: We get a ton of applications that are demons, demon adjacent or evil adjacent in some way.  This kind of character has never worked out in one of our games and it's become clear that if we allow it, people will walk right up as close to the line of "evil" as we will allow.  We don't want villains.  We don't want evil characters.  It's very challenging play in a game with GMs who consider the ethics of the characters' actions at all, which we sometimes do.  So since we can't seem to draw a line without someone finding a way to get as close to evil without crossing that line as possible, if we think your character is going to be too morally challenging to be considered a "good guy" in the game, it's not likely to be approved.



Less Required, But Probably Useful to Read



Things to think about when making a character:



General things to think about: Really think about the kind of character you want to play. Sometimes making characters starts to become an arms race with everyone trying to make the "most powerful" character.  The Droplet system is more about narrative importance than power levels and will prevent characters who are "more powerful" on paper from taking advantage of other characters.  So, if you're worried, use the system!  But making a character you like whose story you want to tell is the most important thing.

But the best characters to make are characters that other people want to play with!  When in doubt, make them charming, interesting, open-minded, willing to go along with other people without too much persuasion, and have a few story hooks that are likely to be of interest to other people.

Avoid characters that are touchy, mean, cruel, close-minded, dull, demanding, or require people to behave in a particular way.  If the other players have to think of reasons for their character to interact with your character, the odds of them doing it go down.  The more barriers in play, the greater the odds that the play stalls or stops.  (For instance, "redemption arcs."  This means that the character is probably awful, and to get the character into the game requires people to like the character well enough to put up with them being a jerk until the player decides that the character is now "saved."  What if that never happens?  What if all people do is see an unpleasant character?  The whole character hinges on someone acting in a particular way that might contradict their needs and desires in the game.)

We Won't Approve Difficult-to-Manage Powers: While we'll say "no" to any power that threatens the game, the ones most normally asked for that break the game are reality control (magical, technological, or psychic,) time control and time travel, precognition and long-distance clairvoyance, phasing,  superintelligence, accurate long-distance teleportation (with leeway given for teleportation as a method of interstellar travel in sci-fi games,) and a few others.



Superlatives: A particular kind of character likely to face rejection is a character with excessive superlatives.  One of the more subtle forms of powergaming is to say your character is the best at whatever is important to the game world, with the insinuation that anything more powerful is de facto powergaming, since your character is the best.  This is backing into powergaming by creating a character at the acceptable edges of what is permitted, and we're likely to see it.

Make characters open to different interpretations: One of the stealthier ways characters can fail is when players build characters in ways that require other people to react to them in highly specific ways in order for play to continue.  An example might be a player who makes a character who is a god.  There is a decent chance that the player wants to play up, well, the godly aspects of their character - their power and glory.  But here's the thing.  You can't control the way other players will react to your character, and they will also want acknowledgment of their character's ability.  So, if you play your pseudo-Zeus but everyone is, like, "Eh, just another guy with superpowers," what will the player do?

Often, what the player does is become unhappy with the response their character gets, which robs them of the pleasure of playing the character.  Then they quit the game.

Making characters who don't need to be regarded as too special - that don't require other players to react to them in highly specific and limiting ways - is a good idea.  Make a character you want to play with players with a wide range of interpretations.  Likewise, be sensitive to the clues about how they want their character interpreted.

(And the example is a bit over-the-top, but it shows up in other ways.  Often players will put elements into their characters expecting people to feel a certain way about them.  Perhaps they think that everyone should defer to a character's military rank while several charaters - or their players - are critical of the military.  Or perhaps the character's background is angelic and some of the characteres - or their players - have a different interpretation of angels than the player's interpretation.  It can come up in different ways than the obvious.)

Be easy to interact with: Think about the kind of play you want to do with your character.  One of the most common things we see is people who make characters that give them a low probability for the kind of play they desire.  Everyone has to give their partners a reason to post, hopefully, in a way that makes you want to post back to them. But we advise being very careful if you play a character who is difficult to interact with, particularly if those interactions are critical to your goals and plans in game.

Romantic play: The area that trips people up the most is romantic play.  If you want to get romantic play, create characters that attract the kind of characters you wish to engage in romantic role-play.  In your head, you might believe that playing a mean, gruff character to "allow" the other person to piece the character's armor is a good storyline (and it is well-represented in fiction, certainly,) but it is our experience that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar and placing the burden of finding a reason for the other party to be romantically attracted to your character is likely to result in frustration.

Don't Expect to Get the Same Kind of Play as Established Players Immediately.  One of the "issues" we've had in the game is a body of players who come into the game and see some scenes that are very good.  They then build characters who try to take advantage of the pre-existing play.  While the players in those scenes are likely to be friendly people, if a scene is really rocking, it's probably because they've been playing with each other for years.  They have established a high degree of trust with each other.  Their play with you is likely to be far more cautious.

This enthusiasm backfires in another way.  A new player will often try to impress or "match" the established players, only to find the burden of it is more work than they want to do.  They burn out quickly and leave the game.  I know that no one wants to hear that it could take months or years to get really good scenes, but for most players, that is the case.




On PvP Style Play and Aggressive Styles



PvP Play: This isn't a rule, but we've been at this long enough to see that players who arrive on the board with highly aggressive characters seem to hit a wall almost immediately.  We know that on many boards, the player characters serve as antagonists to other player characters.  And everyone is free to play that way here if everyone involved is cool with it.  But we're seeing that some new players will (usually in their first scene, sometimes in their first post) frame another person's character as their character's antagonist.  They will attack, insult, or berate the character without clearing it first with the other player(s).  They will attempt to "show up" the other character and dismiss the other character's abilities to "win" the scene.  So far, every time this has happened - and it has happened in most games we have run - the new player ends up leaving after a few posts when it grows clear that the more established player is unwilling to have their character serve whatever role the new player tries to force them into.

My advice for all players is to refrain from starting play in that fashion.  PvP is notoriously tricky to play between trusted friends, much less strangers.  Taking a character and attempting to force them into that position is not a winning strategy and should be avoided unless the boundaries of the play have been clearly and overtly established beforehand.  But, overall, I'd suggest waiting a while before getting into that play with anyone.  It's challenging to pull off under ideal conditions, and new play and new players take finesse and patience that runs contrary to aggressive, PvP-style play.

Aggressive play: One of the issues that also seems to trip up many players is their desire to play an active and forceful character, but when doing so, they will often ignore everything in their rush to enact their plan to make their character "forceful."

They'll want to come in and defeat the toughest guy in the game immediately, missing that the villain is central to the long-term plans of other players, for instance.  It can even be a character rushing in to save another character.  The big mistake is that they don't CHECK WITH ANYONE.  The character with the big gun decides that they can take down the big bad and the rest of the players are, like, "Okay, what do we do now?"

If a player says to the GMs, "I would like my character to beat the big guy in this scene so my character looks cool," we can figure something out that makes the character look cool AND preserves the longer-term storytelling with a villain critical to the story.  If a player wants to save someone else's character, asking them first is a solid plan because what is "saving" to the player might be "stealing someone else's thunder."

What tends to happen if you don't gain permission is... well, people stop playing with you and you might get thrown out of the game.  Aggressively pushing your character in a game almost always jumps into "godmoding" (declaring the results of your action on another player's character without prior permission) territory, too, which means you're going to get PMs from the game staff that are awkward and frustrating for all parties.

But if we don't manage overly aggressive players, the game ends.  Lots of games on RPOL and other places end when the game staff feels they have to allow an aggressive player to run roughshod over the game, causing a general slowdown in play, which then leads to people leaving.  The game staff here have seen it dozens of times, in games we've run, in games we've played in, and in games run by our friends or people we know.  We feel it is better to cut overly aggressive players than have to constantly manage the consequences of their aggression.

We absolutely want to work with players to give them a good experience, but online RP is highly cooperative.  Any player who thinks only of making their character look good is unlikely to last very long.