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MOD ANNOUNCEMENTS: JUNE
OOC & ADMIN UPDATES
Notable Dates
The new 9:46 Calendar is up if you'd like to add things to it! And please make sure you add war table assignments and any player plots with plot impact/wide relevance from last year to our 9:45 Calendar so everyone knows when things happened.
Application Caps
We've adjusted the cap on rifter elves. While a total ban no longer seems necessary, the goal was and still is to prevent rifter elves from overwhelming the native elf numbers, particularly now that the population of native elf characters is so small. To that end, we're going to tie the two numbers together and require that the population of rifter elves not exceed 50% of the population of native elves.
Leader AC Change
If you don't play an IC leader and don't care about their AC requirements, you can skip this very long section.
We're going to be adjusting the IC Leader AC requirement. Going forward, we're no longer going to require a regular open announcement post. We're also going to detach the war table operations from the mod plot cycle schedule (more on that later), because having all war table ops happen in the same month seems to be overloading people and stagnating activity during the rest of the time. Ideally, we'd prefer to spread things out more organically and give you all more freedom to create division/project assignments on a schedule that works for you and allows you to be more ICly responsive to plot developments.
So instead of the previous AC requirement and war table schedule, each division and project will be responsible for posting one war table assignment per three-month quarter. They'll need to be handled similar to the war table operations you've been submitting, except that instead of just coming up with a premise and then having us write the actual operation, you'll need to fill out and submit the whole player plot form. This means you'll propose and write the whole plot, though we're always happy to talk and brainstorm with you as needed and to answer questions about specific pieces of info or specific outcomes, just like we do for all player plots.
The use of the player plot form doesn't mean we expect your war table operations to suddenly get bigger and more elaborate. They can (and probably should) stay the same size and scale as past war table operations. The difference is just that you're now responsible for writing more than the initial idea. You are not obligated to actively GM the plot or do any NPCing, but you can if you want--just please be realistic about your bandwidth and err on the side of keeping the burden low to ensure things actually move forward.
Some mechanics notes:
Sign-Ups: You'll also be responsible for posting sign-ups to the OOC comm, with a minimum of 3 open slots available. For projects these sign-ups must be open to all PCs, and for divisions they should be open either to all PCs or to all PCs in your division. Participants should be chosen by the same rules as before: RNG, with side characters given lowest priority. Your character (the leader) can participate in the plot like in a traditional player plot or can just delegate it like a war table assignment, whichever you prefer. If you do choose to involve them, they do not count toward the minimum 3 open slots.
We'll be keeping an eye on sign-ups and might let you know if we think things look unbalanced in some way, but we assume that won't happen often.
Timing: The quarters for the remainder of 2020 are June/July/August and September/October/November. (December will be an off month for everyone as usual.) We're doing it by quarters rather than on a rolling every-three-months basis to provide some more flexibility. This way, if you want to do one in August but want to do the next one in September because you know you'll be busier in October and November or because you have an idea that's time sensitive in some way, you can do that without it meaning your next one now has to be done sooner than it would be otherwise. We'll consider the month you close sign-ups and either post a log or give people the information they need to post a log themselves to be the month the plot occurs. So it's fine if most of the RP happens in October, as long as you'd done your part to get it started by the end of September.
When figuring out your schedule, please allow us at least 5 days to respond to the requests with any questions/adjustments/info dumps and at least 3 days for leaving sign-ups open. As long as you propose something more than 8 days before the end of the quarter, if we wind up making you late by taking a long time to write you an info dump or whatever else, we'll make sure it doesn't ding you.
Strikes: If you miss this requirement in a given quarter, for whatever reason, we'll remind you and you'll have to make up for it by doing two in the next quarter. If you don't, we'll ask you to give up the leadership spot. But as usual, we'll work with anyone who needs to give up an IC leadership spot for OOC reasons to come up with an IC explanation that doesn't make your character look bad (unless you'd prefer that).
Hiatusing won't affect the schedule or extend the deadline, so if you know you're going to have to hiatus on the last month of a given quarter, do your plot in the first two months. Not running a plot due to a hiatus will be handled the same way as missing it for any other reason: you'll have to do two the next quarter, if it's your first miss, or give up the leadership spot, if it's your second. (We will of course handle particularly extenuating circumstances on a case-by-case basis.)
Collaboration: Two IC leaders can collaborate on a single plot and have it count for both of them, as long as the plot is reasonably relevant to both divisions/projects. If three or more IC leaders all want to collaborate on something, you'll have to break it into multiple full operations or choose the two who do the most work or for whom the plot is most relevant to get the AC credit, and everyone else will still need to do something else.
Etc.: We still strongly encourage players of IC leaders to do open posts of some sort (whether network or log) on a regular basis, to make sure that your characters are easily accessible to members of their division/project and that information about division/project work and priorities gets shared and discussed with some frequency. The purpose of the original requirement was to ensure broad interaction because it's important to us and to the game that IC leader characters be public figures that facilitate and encourage plot involvement for everyone, not just their close personal CR. We think this shift in the rules will be beneficial, but if we see it being abused we will revisit and/or take up with individuals.
IC Leader Slots
Given the current size of the game vs. available slots, we're going to do away with official assistant project leader positions for the time being. We'll revisit this in the future if we experience a spike in size or project activity. In the meantime, project leaders can delegate tasks to other characters as needed, without OOC applications or an official role.
IC & PLOT UPDATES
Plot Cycle Shifts
As you've probably noticed by now, we're way off the three month cycle schedule we used last year and had planned to use again this year. For obvious reasons! Given the way things have been going and for all we know will probably continue to go, we're going to keep the schedule fairly loose for the foreseeable future. We're going to keep following the pattern of non-main plotline event > breathing room > mod plot > breathing room for mod-run plots/events, but it will happen on a more flexible time scale to let us adjust as needed to the actual pace of RP, e.g. how we've let the jungle event linger because people were still rolling in gradually.
This does not mean that all plot progress will be allowed to grind to an indefinite halt! There are actually a number of important plot threads seeded in the jungle that we plan to follow up on in various ways, and encourage you to follow up on through the relevant divisions/projects. We're also working on a list of some outstanding plot threads/elements that we think could be a good basis for war table operations, division/project work, or player plots. We should have that posted in the next day or two.
The very next steps on our schedule are:
- Wrap up the jungle plot event:
- We're going to give you guys a bit more time to try to figure out where you are before we tell you, because the network post is still being tagged, so we encourage anyone with info to share to do so and those with research knowledge to keep an eye out and jump in. On a related note, if we gave you clues but you're no longer able or intending to participate, please let us know so that we can redistribute them.
- In the next week or so we'll reveal the location OOC if necessary and provide some more info about how everyone manages to get home. Obviously backtagging can continue indefinitely as always.
- We're going to give you guys a bit more time to try to figure out where you are before we tell you, because the network post is still being tagged, so we encourage anyone with info to share to do so and those with research knowledge to keep an eye out and jump in. On a related note, if we gave you clues but you're no longer able or intending to participate, please let us know so that we can redistribute them.
Tevinter Nights Lore Notes
A little late: some notes on the new lore from Tevinter Nights and how we plan to incorporate it. First, pertaining mostly to magic/abilities/etc:
- POSSESSED/SPIRIT CHARACTERS: We don't want to completely prohibit apping abominations and so on, but we do need to keep hold of the reins to keep Riftwatch from becoming unrealistically bizarre and threatening to the locals. So spirits or possessed characters, including the cute possessed skeletons from Nevarra, can only be apped as side characters. Anyone who apps one will need to be aware that these types of characters will have limited roles and plot involvement (like our dear Skull), up to and including not being able to leave the Gallows, if they stick around permanently. Alternatively, you can app one for a time-limited arc that ends with them leaving/dying/being destroyed, or, in the case of possessed living people, becoming unpossessed prior to being apped as a permanent character.
- NEW MAGIC: Our general rule on this remains in place: spells taken from the books/comics/tabletop game, rather than the video games, can only be used if they're incorporated into custom specializations so we can clearly work out their limits and so on with players. Two exceptions:
- Characters with the blood mage specialization can learn how to do the blood-magic based tracking from "Half Up Front" as part of their existing spec. We figure the specialization is already relatively limited in power, especially considering all of the drawbacks that come from its use, so this will even it out a little and let them contribute to plots sometimes in ways that aren't all excruciating pain and blood puppets.
- Major magic that we didn't clearly see a mage in the short stories casting as a single-use spell—particularly persistent magic such as the butterfly illusion in the garden in Minrathous, permanently hovering chandeliers, etc.—for FR's purposes will be either reliant on lyrium-based enchantments or on horrific past blood expenditures, rather than being something in-game mages (PC or NPC) can just cast on the fly, even with a specialization.
- Characters with the blood mage specialization can learn how to do the blood-magic based tracking from "Half Up Front" as part of their existing spec. We figure the specialization is already relatively limited in power, especially considering all of the drawbacks that come from its use, so this will even it out a little and let them contribute to plots sometimes in ways that aren't all excruciating pain and blood puppets.
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