CHARACTERS IN THE WORLD:

All new characters will start in a "bubble", with their initial play to be handled in a private thread, until they survive long enough to reach a place where they may join a public thread. While in the bubble a character is effectively invisible to other players, and they cannot interact with that character.

The hardest part of the game will be those moments immediately after character creation, and I expect that many characters will die very soon after being created. While regrettable, you should not let this discourage you. If your character manages to survive long enough to enter the public threads, things will probably start to become slightly easier.

Once you join the game, you will be given a 'profile' which you will keep for as long as you play here. This profile contains information that relates to your actions in the game-world and is tied to you as a player, not to your character.

If your character dies, then you may create a new one and start a new game with the information from your profile persisting across characters. This makes the game a lot more easy and enjoyable for both players and the GM, since the character mortality rate is likely to be high. Elements of your exploration and interactions with others in the world will therefore not be entirely erased when your character dies.

If you need a break from the game (especially after, say, losing a favourite character), let me know. Your profile can be frozen until you are ready to return.

Do not pour too much time or effort into a character concept or backstory, at least not at first. Your first character will almost certainly die, and probably your second and third, too. The game-world is a deadly, lonely place, almost devoid of intelligent life and designed to weed out those characters who cannot contend with the vast odds stacked against their survival. Those who survive their first weeks will be among the best - and they will need to be, for the challenges only ramp up from there.

The wilderness parts of the game are driven by random encounter checks. No punches will be pulled here. You are very likely to encounter things that are significantly more powerful than you and that can kill you before you can blink. Planning, more often than muscle, is the key to survival.

Note that I will avoid "auto-death" scenarios, in which you are simply informed of your character's demise without having taken any immediate actions of your own that have caused this unhappy occasion. At worst, you may discover that your survival suddenly hinges on success on a single roll.

In such circumstances, even with a successful roll, how long that survival lasts is another matter. There are some places in the world that you should really not go to alone and unprepared, and sometimes the only way to learn that lesson is to lose a character.

You will almost always have a chance to escape, but survival is not guaranteed even if you flee from a deadly situation. Some character types simply will not have the abilities needed to survive or escape certain scenarios, and that is just bad luck. Try another class and see how they get on.

This is not to suggest that any one class is better suited to survival here than any other. There are a great variety of challenges within the game-world, and every class will triumph in some and be doomed to failure in others.

Until you are used to the intense challenges of the game-world, I do not suggest getting too attached to your character.

GAME TIME

This game will be played "out of time", meaning that your character's actions will almost certainly not fit the flow of time of the game-world. Each individual character or group will have their own time, accounting for their actions in a single post. The game-world also has its own time, but this is not tied to any character, nor does its flow prevent anyone from spending weeks of posts on a single game-day, nor from marching for five days in one post. Time is relative to your character, so you don't have to wait for other characters or for the world itself to keep up with what you want to do in game.

Game-time will be used to determine current season and weather conditions, as well as timing for certain in-game events that may affect all players equally.

Game-time flows at the rate 1 day real-time = 6 hours game-time. This means that for every four days that pass in the real world, one full day will pass in the game-world.

What this means is that, if it is, say, raining in your part of the world in game-time, it will continue to rain around your character until it stops in game-time. This may mean that the rain lasts many days for your character, or it may last a matter of seconds. You can usually wait out game-time events by simply not posting until they have concluded.

The purpose of this system is to create a dynamic multiplayer world in which you are not held up by posting rates from other players, nor do you have to feel like you have to hurry about a specific task that takes up many posts (say, a few hands of cards in an evening) because there are others waiting on you. Everyone can go at their own pace and play the game when and how they like.

I will try to update the current game time every time I log in, but from the date the game starts, every 24 hours that passes will advance the game-clock by 6 hours, whether I update it or not (barring some event that prevents me from answering posts etc. - if that occurs, I will of course let everyone know, and the game-clock may be put on hold).

Replies to player-posts will be determined by the order of posting. I will try to reply as soon as possible to each player-post, but if I can't get to you on a given day, it may be because of the order of priorities. If, say, four players reply to me with in-game actions between updates from me, I will deal with each of them in turn, starting with the oldest post. In this way the speed of your own game is partly governed by how quickly you reply, but is also dependent on what else I have to take care of. So if I reply to Player 1 and they immediately get back to me, ready to move on, they will still have to wait for me to update Players 2, 3, and 4 before I will return to Player 1.

If you are wanting to get to one of the in-game events that are tied to game-time, but are concerned about making it in time, then place a private line in your post letting me know that you have somewhere to be! Some form of priority will usually be given to those players if my workload in the game is high, but don't be the boy who cried wolf, as I will start ignoring your requests for speed if you say you need to be somewhere that you don't! If you're being held up by me (ie., I haven't responded to your last post, and it's been more than a real-time day) and you are in a hurry to get somewhere before a certain game-time, PM me and I'll see what I can do.

Everyone in the game-world will be able to see everyone else in the same region. So all posts will be public relative to other players (though not to RPoL users more generally). Certain things can be handled in PMs if you would prefer, though most actions will still be posted publicly, unless there is a good reason why they should not be.

PVP

Player-versus-player actions are permitted (combat, theft, etc.), but don't forget that everyone can see what you do to another player, and that player may make a new character if you kill them (whose identity you won't know at first), and will have the chance to gather a posse of other players, who are equally unhappy with your banditry, to track you down and exact vengeance! The GM may also step in if you are getting a little big for your boots, perhaps with a "random" encounter that you have little hope of surviving. So be careful when interacting with other players, or be ready to defend yourself.
This message was last edited by the GM at 02:17, Wed 27 Sept 2023.