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Characters and Board Presence:

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Characters and Board Presence: Empty Characters and Board Presence:

Post by MagicRob Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:47 pm

Good afternoon loyal readers!

Recently we've had some discussions among the Staff and Narrator's side of things and we've come to the conclusion that characters that are created for this board will be used for this board.

That might sound overly harsh. Allow me to explain!

Storytellers have a certain investment in new characters. We've read your background, we've counted your dots, and more times than you might believe, we write you into the meta or side plots of the board. This creates an infrastructure and it's pretty important to continuity. The forum community is fairly small and tight knit these days so we usually know what to expect from our peers, but it still happens where someone will come onto the boards all gun-hoe and ready to roll, they'll build a character in their mind, submit something to staff, and much like this run-on sentence from hell, we take the ball and head towards that goal marker thing that everyone gets so excited about.

Most of the time these characters stick around and are freakin' great. We read their stories, we RP with em, they're a delight. Sometimes they disappear never to be heard from again. For characters that vanish without a trace, we're left in limbo wondering what happened with their actual character in our world. It takes awhile to go inactive here (usually a month+). During this time, we generally reach out with PMs and emails to see what the deal is. Sometimes we get a reply that real-life has turned horrid on them and they'll be back soon. If that's the case, we reset the clock. We've had some characters exist like that into perpetuity. More often than not, we don't hear back at all. In that case we're left with a page of inactive characters and plot holes that need plugging.

Our solution is an elegant one.

For these random characters that have left, I have narrators and storytellers that I trust with my plots. They will be representing these characters moving forward. From a story perspective, they won't be Luciferians anymore (the joy of Luciferians is that they tend to have another faction that works almost as well). They'll have left the organization. They won't necessarily be hunted on sight or whatever, but relations may or may not be cordial. What this means is if you had a close relationship with a character that just disappears, you can foster that moving forward. They will be like any other NPC. Maybe you buy them as a Mentor, or maybe you trade them something to learn something that they were inclined to teach you before. We'll be keeping the RP representation on these characters as close to the scenes we have, and as close to the background material presented. And, in the event that a player returns, they can resume play on this character with some minor tweeks.

This way I don't have holes in my plots, and you aren't left wondering a nebulous 'where the hell did so and so go?'. That's the answer. They're still around, they just aren't necessarily on the same team anymore.

Characters that die, are retired with noticed, or leave the city as a part of their character resolution won't have to worry about this (though they might still be able to be purchased as allies or mentors if we feel the RP supported it for things like NPC related support).

Make sense? Game on!

-Rob.
MagicRob
MagicRob
Admin

Posts : 1186
Join date : 2016-09-23
Age : 43
Location : Seattle, WA

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Characters and Board Presence: Empty Re: Characters and Board Presence:

Post by MagicRob Mon May 01, 2017 10:15 am

As an addition to this policy:

Going through inactive characters is somewhat demoralizing and sending back and forth emails trying to get players that have left to return is doing a number on my 'game is fun' well-being. Therefore, if you go inactive, we're just putting you inactive. If you return and go 'WTF man, I wanna play some more!' we'll gladly work something out, but the begging people to play emails aren't gonna be a thing for me anymore.

-Rob.
MagicRob
MagicRob
Admin

Posts : 1186
Join date : 2016-09-23
Age : 43
Location : Seattle, WA

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