Isla Aukate
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Wriggle room / Level of liberty
#1
I'm starting this thread here since this is for discussion about the RP on a meta-level.

I would like to ask Fox what level of liberty we would have in the RP?

Besides intercharacter relationships, which are obviously dependent on the whims on the players involved, would our characters be able to have any influence on the events going on, and at what level? And could we create our own events?

Obviously, major events would have to be cleared with you; like an invasion of the island or the local population at risk of being discovered or a major natural catastrophe like a tsunami; stuff that would significantly change the setting. But what about a smaller, local scale?

I've been roleplaying online and IRL for more than a decade, and seen many different variations. Some game masters will force you to follow the script, so to speak, like in a video game where you have to follow the story and cannot deviate from it, others just tell you 'here's my world, do what you want' with the main rule being 'no godmodding'. And many variations in between those two extremes.

I currently play on a Star Trek RP group who leaves a lot of liberty to players to come up with their own stories, as long as the effects do not significantly alter the setting. An invasion of the planet would need to be okayed by the Command Crew, discovering ancients ruins and artifacts during a scientific expedition would not. (As long as said artifacts do not contain the dormant minds of an ancient civilization, bent on claiming physical bodies to then go conquering the galaxy, like happens often in Trek! Tongue )

So, I would like to know where Fox stands on this spectrum, between almost complete lack of autonomy and almost complete autonomy, and if you could give some examples of what would be allowed and what would not be allowed. Thank you.
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#2
Pardon me for stepping in, but since Fox is following a lot of ideas and guidelines I set for this kind of thing, I thought I might be the best person to provide an answer.

The short answer is: You get as much autonomy as you earn.

We don't want to cripple creative people on account of having to hobble folks who want to pull deux ex machinas out of their backsides whenever they feel like it. We don't want to permanently punish people who start to show improvement and start having genuinely good ideas. But we also don't want to leave the door wide open for Percy McSparkledog and his laser ninja assassin team to stroll in.

When you start out, you'll probably feel restricted. That's because we want to see how well you play with what's established and with what we have. But if your character does something creative, we'll notice. If they give us something fun to work and play with, we'll notice. And if we have to watch them for every post because they have something in there that we are going to have to ask them to change or delete… oh yeah we'll notice that too.

The more you show you can be trusted and not need to be babysat or watched like a hawk, the more wiggle room you'll find that you have. The more fun you are, the more we'll probably throw unique opportunities and random fun things at you.

So, yeah. The answer is that you get as much as you earn.
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#3
That's one of the goals of Bootcamp, if I'm not mistaken: to see who would fit and who wouldn't.

So, would someone who graduated from Bootcamp and allowed to get to the Citadel and join the RP proper be allowed to create their own minor events/threads from the start or not?
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#4
It's a goal of Bootcamp, yes. But it doesn't end at Bootcamp. If you show you can come up with creative plots and things that don't push a personal agenda or are destructive to the roleplay environment for everyone, sure. You just have to prove we can trust you to in and out of bootcamp.

It's all going to be a matter of how you present yourself in roleplay. If you show us it's worth giving you a free hand, you'll be granted it. If you show you can't be trusted with it, you won't. Bootcamp isn't a gulag so much as a litmus test for how you'll be handled if/when you come out.
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#5
Seeing as Gen is my co-creator and has done this RP admin dance far FAR longer than I could ever have hoped to, I have deferred to her far better judgement on matters such as this and this is no different. I stand by her methods 100%.
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#6
By my understanding, most people fresh out of Bootcamp definitely won't have as much freedom as those who have already proven themselves (in these early days, there are only a handful of people that staff feel they don't need to keep an eye on by pure virtue of there just not having been enough time to judge). And no, there isn't going to be a clearly defined "you are now allowed to do XYZ" line, as each person has their own quirks that makes it difficult to lay down one set of guidelines.

I don't have any executive say in how the RP is run, but I'd be willing to say that those fresh out of Bootcamp can create minor day-to-day-workings type threads, but bigger things would have to be either OKed by Fox or left up to the veterans.

And (this isn't aimed at anyone in particular) before anyone goes off and creates a dozen threads, keep in mind Fox does have a rule where you have to post at least 3 times a week in any RP thread you start. I'm sure violating this rule repeatedly will have consequences.

Edit: Yeah I wrote this hours ago and just forgot to post it. Totally got ninja-posted X3
I am an administrator from a technical viewpoint only. I just keep the forums up to date and free from spam, and have no authority regarding the roleplay universe; please contact Foxenawolf for RP issues :3
However, if you're having technical troubles, feel free to shoot me a PM!
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#7
Can I ask what you mean exactly by 'things that don't push a personal agenda'?

The way I see roleplaying, and have been doing it for quite some years now, is that every character does have a personal agenda, or a personal story, that weaves in and around of the main story run by the GMs, maybe even sometimes sending the character on a personal quest away from the main storyline before they rejoin it. But I have a feeling that this is not what you mean.
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#8
I think it's the general "I'm the best and want everyone to see that I'm the best and won't let anyone else have a chance to be anywhere near as awesome as me" thing that they're trying to discourage.
I am an administrator from a technical viewpoint only. I just keep the forums up to date and free from spam, and have no authority regarding the roleplay universe; please contact Foxenawolf for RP issues :3
However, if you're having technical troubles, feel free to shoot me a PM!
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#9
I put that with in the godmodding/Mary Sue category. The kind of character who needs to be cast out of the reality...
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#10
By personal agenda I mean godmodding and mary sue-ish behavior, yes. But I also mean running a plot just so you can get a shiny you want, so you can punish a PC you don't like, and generally running something involving multiple characters strictly for your own benefit with little regard to the other people involved. Here's some examples. They are extreme examples and thankfully I had far more good incidents instead of bad, but this should make it plain what I mean...

I once had someone who ran a plot on a site I GMd on back in 1996 set up something for a PC that he knew was quiet, and because of circumstances at the time was downright sulking. Knowing this, he ran the plot so that the character might as well have not been there and all of his characters got the accolades. He bragged about how his characters all blew the PC off during the plot and how it had been the character's decision to be a useless lump during the plot so he had full justification to. When I asked him why he did it knowing the character was going to act that way he blew me off and we decided not to let him run plots by himself anymore.

We had another plot where we learned too late that the GM had bias towards thieves and roguish types. During interrogation when the PC was caught for a minor offense the law suddenly decided to throw the book at him and he actually invented an interrogator who played on each and every one of the PCs weaknesses. The PC claimed to be a potter and when asked about his job answered admirably in my opinion, but the interrogation continued and every creative and clever reply he made was dismissed and later he was forced to confess or stay in that plot limbo forever. We managed to have him rescued and didn't let the GM run plots with roguish characters anymore.

I had someone who was an otherwise good player suddenly start showing me pictures of 'just something random they drew' of a weird chimera type critter. She'd tell me about the character little by little until eventually she confessed that it was a character that she wanted to play on the roleplay site that broke all of the rules. This person was a great roleplayer, but when given things that were overpowered they would get snobbish, bullying, and lord their little shinything over everyone. So, from past experience, I knew that if I had given them this character it would have been like setting godzilla loose on the playerbase. They quit over not being allowed to play the character despite it not even being one that the setting allowed (This was like someone wanted to play a purple horse that somehow happened to have cat claws, a scorpion tail, and variable venom glands in its jaw along with tons of secret magic powers on Aukate, as comparison.)

I could spin examples over and over and over, but it all boils down to the philosophy I'm explaining. We give you as much as you're trusted with. If the trust is abused, things will adjust accordingly. If we get a return for our investment in trust, we will give a little more. I find it more fair than having a strict line of 'EVERYONE WILL DO THINGS THIS WAY' rule which punishes the people who genuinely want to involve folks in fun plots and have creative ideas.

Tamara will have opportunities to interact with other characters in bootcamp. When she does, we'll read and watch like we do with everyone. If she does something that strikes us as 'Wow, that was clever/creative/nice' and/or 'that was nice of her to try and encourage X-minion to work with her' we will notice, remember, and give her more opportunities to and potentially opportunities that make doing so easier and more fun. But if it ends up like the examples I cited above, we'll adjust accordingly.
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