Whew! I am back for a bit. Let me see what I can do about catching up to all of this. I'm sorry if I have mentioned some of this before. And I apologize if it seems I have missed or overlooked something.
UPDATES:
1. Real-life has become a little more temporarily complicated than I had foreseen. And this game is already past five hundred posts and climbing. So it will take me a little time to catch up. If you are frustrated by this lag, beyond posting IC, you can probably wait until Sunday to read closely. I will try and keep updates here in the Bullpen.
2. I'm going to dispense with the formal, structured and defined means of rewarding players for Extra Credit contributions. I think y'all are internally motivated and I am grateful for it. I will be asking for help in the Extra Credit thread. There's no real reward except maybe a No-Prize (hey, it worked for Marvel), the gratitude of your fellow players and a chance to have a greater influence on the game at large.
3. If I am guessing right, there will be two more freeform prequel IC 'rounds' and then we will start actual playing with complete characters. To that end, if you do know how to make a Masks characters, you can start making them now. Any standard Masks character you can make should be legal. There are Playbooks that are in the Private Thread you can use. I will try to get better character sheet formats for the game in a few days.
But I really don't mind how you format your characters as long as they are comprehensible. If any old hands at Masks want to help the new players with their characters, you have my sincere thanks. Your characters get a free Advance, grandfathered in by the game's short-lived and promised formal reward structure. I recommend a move from a another Playbook but that is completely up to you. And, yes, you can have the same Playbook as another character, because...
4. The players will be split into separate but related teams. I don't know how many yet but at least two. The number of team mates on a particular team will probably be around five or six. According to research I don't have the time to link to, five is the ideal number for a given group (odd numbers can stop stalemated votes) but seven is still within range (so Captain America was probably right when he limited the Avengers to seven members. This has also been done by the 'classic' Justice League and the quite literal Seven from The Boys. But perhaps the latter is not the best role model).
As much as possible, duplicate Playbooks will be put into separate teams. Then generally groups into posting frequency (lots of short posts often vs. long post more slowly). It could be they are roughly divided by ages with a Senior, Sophomore and Junior team as possible examples. Some teams might then have 'niches', the muscle team, the stealth team, the 'face' team, etc.).
5. I would love to have had a long 'coffee klatch' conversation about the world, school and teams we are making but I don't have the time. So (sigh) I am just going to post my first blush and then encourage you to 'change my mind' when you think it a good idea.
Your school is run the by Illuminati, a group of so-called 'heroes' secretly trying to make the world a better place. Most of the Illuminati member factions and member are truly sincere in their goal. But it is a slippery slope when you begin to think that you, and only you, should have secrets from other people.
The heroic members of the Illuminati may have had to make alliances with less-than-savory allies. These wouldn't be outright villains, mind you, but perhaps a little grey, compromised and compromising.
Your school is one publicly-known open super-campus in New York City that you attend for a few classes in costume. This open campus is secretly connected to a series of other covert schools and related locations by dimensional doors. These doors allow for instant travel between fixed and predefined locations (possibly via the now-wonky Infinite Avengers Mansion). This means that students could attend a class in each continent on a long day but avoids the deus ex machina of Star Trek-style teleportation. It also allows for a international flavor (or is that 'flavour') to the game that can really play to the international complement of players that we have.
Each student may have a different sponsor and citizenship status. The schooling arrangements vary from student to student. It could be home schooling, attending a normal school in a secret ID for the most part, or even boarding school.
6. You will notice a goofy bar at the end of this post. You will start to see a bar like that at the end of my posts. Ignore it for now. It will evolve and mutate (very Marvel) as time goes by.
I've got to go. I will try to catch up more tomorrow. As always, I appreciate your patience...
P.S. My goodness, we are now at six hundred posts! :-)
This message was last edited by the GM at 08:17, Thu 20 May 2021.