Pluviosa Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pluviosamods) wrote2024-10-12 03:51 pm
pluviosamods) wrote2024-10-12 03:51 pm
FAQ
FAQ
BEFORE YOU JOIN
Is this an open or private game?
Pluviosa is an open game; anyone can apply and there is no invitation system.
The game is starting with a cap of 40 players (not including mod team). This cap will be adjusted over time based on game needs and mod energy. Applications over the player limit go into a queue system and will be accepted as spaces open up.
Based upon the response of the community, game comms are unlocked and available for people outside of the game to view. Dropped characters are not automatically removed from the game's communities, because the mod team believes in the right of dropped players to reread their own threads as they desire. The game's Discord is open, but has some channels that are limited to people with a "Player" role, including the NSFW chat.
How many characters can I app?
Players are limited to two characters upon initially joining the game. Two months after joining, they will be able to app up to four characters if they so choose.
What are the requirements for players to join the game?
Players must be over the age of 18 and be willing to agree to the terms of the game as described on the Session Zero page. Additionally, having a Discord and being a member of the game's server is a requirement, due to this being a primary method of communication from the game mods. If you have not already joined the game Discord when your application is accepted, a link will be provided in your acceptance notice.
What does "Discord hybridization" mean?
Pluviosa is only partially a traditional Dreamwidth game. In an effort to be able to respond to players more fluidly, we have chosen to make heavy use of the game's Discord server as an additional platform for the game, both ICly and OOCly. As such, a per playerDiscord point of contact and membership in the game's server are mandatory.
The following are examples of why we chose to incorporate a game Discord so heavily:
-> Easier responsiveness for both players and mods who are out and about or otherwise on mobile devices
-> Easier responsiveness to player questions from mods, generally
-> Ability to directly @ specific other players for plotting purposes
-> Ability to easily search mod question channels and etc for answers to questions
-> Ability for mods to directly contact players for the results of sign-up events and other "secret" information
-> The perception of Discord as a lower-pressure space than formally posting to journal communities
As a result, we are using Discord as a primary platform for any mod-player communications related to events, and this is also where most extended NPC and mod-led explorations occur. The majority of other threads, however, still occur on Dreamwidth, and pastebins of explorations are made available on the Dreamwidth communities when explorations are finished.
CHARACTERS & APPS
What kinds of characters are appable to this game?
Canon characters (including malleable protagonists) and original world OCs are currently appable to Pluviosa. Alternate routes for games with multiple are considered to be under the umbrella of canon (ie all routes are equally canon); games where the only major difference is multiple endings will be handled on a case-by-case basis as far as the determination of what is the primary 'canon,' but are otherwise unrestricted.
Fan-created AUs and CRAUs (characters imported from previous RPs with their memories intact) are open to applications, beginning February 1st 2025. Fan-created OCs for existing canons will be handled on a case-by-case basis. In addition, Pluviosa allows up to two doubles of a character (for a total of three versions); generalkly at most one of these versions can be the straight-from-canon version (unless it's a case of multiple significantly diverging canonical routes or similar).
Due to the potential content of this game, we ask that players not app characters below the age of 13 or equivalent maturity, unless they have sought an exception by talking with the mods beforehand. Note that this is based on character maturity level, not literal age.
What is the game's spoiler policy for new canons/canon updates?
In most cases, we ask players to withhold spoilers for one month from date of release. This is somewhat flexible; the mods won't jump down your throat if you voice test a three-and-a-half-week old canon's characters on a Test Drive intending to app them after the month is up, for example.
We encourage the use of spoiler warnings in comment headers, especially for recently released canons and canons of significant length, but do not mandate them.
How are character powers handled? Is there power nerfing?
Unless specifically noted in response to an application or FAQ question, character powers are not nerfed unless they are potentially gamebreaking or unfeasible to play. However, characters are within a relatively small, exclosed space, and so use of powers that affect a large area may be restricted to prevent collateral damage and destruction of the setting.
Characters may also discover that the use of their own supernatural abilities changes due to contact with the settings' Powers, or that use of them attracts attention they would prefer to not receive. Players should keep this information in mind when it comes to use of character powers.
There are a few abilities that the mods do need to know about for various setting-specific or potentially game-breaking reasons. These include but are not limited to: Supernatural perceptions (visions, seeing spirits, sensing magical energy, etc); necromancy, death powers, and/or the ability to revive the dead; hammerspace/dimensional pockets and storage; weather manipulation and similar large-scale effects; time-related powers (time travel, prophecy, sundry powers that let you see past events in a particular place); dream-viewing and manipulation; plant communication and/or manipulation; telepathy and empathy-as-in-emotion-sensing; and teleportation and dimension-hopping abilities.
How are oversized and non-human characters handled?
Generally speaking, characters will not be modified by the arrival to the setting, except in the case of characters who are too large for the ship's hallways. The interior areas of the ship have approximately 8 foot/2.4m standard doorways and 9 foot/2.7m ceilings, and the semi-exterior areas (such as restaurants and overlooks) usually have 10 foot/3m ceilings. Certain work areas of the ship have ceilings that are significantly lower.
Players are allowed to choose their own height range with respect to these values, with a hard maximum of 12 foot/3.6m vertical height. (It is up to the player how frequently they want their oversized character's head to hit the ceiling.)
Severely undersized characters (1 foot or smaller, such as fairies etc) may be sized up to a more "normal" size at player discretion.
My character needs medication/a special diet/etcetc!
You can assume that your character has discovered something that will meet their needs unless you very specifically want to play them having trouble with that. Day-to-day bookkeeping about survival issues such as food and water is not the point of this game, and mods love handwaving to grease this particular gear.
However, if your character consumes souls specifically, please let a mod know.
What kinds of items does my character bring with them? Do you allow pets?
Characters bring with them the physical items that they are carrying at their canonpoint of arrival. Generally, this does not include regular pets, but may include a magical companion creature/etc that isn't appable in their own right (such as a familiar/etc).
Rather than putting a hard cap on the Pokemon Trainer question, we'd prefer to discuss characters with large numbers of potential companions individually with the player.
Oversized items (larger than a small motorcycle) do not come with the character, unless they are a mobility device or the character routinely carries the object under their own power (example: Trigun's Nicholas D Wolfwood and his oversize 'cross').
Extradimensional inventories (eg Homestuck sylladexes) will be handled on a case by case basis. Note that small/limited cases (such as Genshin Impact/Honkai Star Rail characters who summon only their weapons and 1-2 small items in idle animations) do not need special discussion with a moderator.
My character is dead and/or dying at their canonpoint!
Well... Now they aren't. Specifically, dead characters come back as their most recent 'healthy' state of being (unless they're a type of character that is playable while dead, such as a vampire or a Bleach shinigami, in which case they continue as normal for them). Characters who are mortally injured find that their wounds have healed; in place of whatever blood was soaking through their clothes/dripping from their bodies/in their mouth from a Cough of Death, they instead find pure water.
I have some kind of question about the application itself, the application queue, or the rest of the process!
Please see the extended app-specific information on the Applications page before asking your question here.
GAMEPLAY
What is the time scale of this game?
There is not a specific time scale for Pluviosa - instead, time progresses "at the speed of plot" via specific events. Event posts are "hard" points in the timeline, meaning that an event post that is x days or even x hours after the last one nails down what happens in between, and you cannot forward-date beyond an event. During non-event downtime, however, players are welcome to forward-date and be flexible with time. Game update posts - which usually include the aftermath of events or information building up to the next event - contain timeframe information such that players can place events within their character's perception of time, but these are not linked to the real-world calendar.
This is to combat two pain points for players: The first is feeling of "missing" events if you aren't there in the first two days. Events that are longer OOC for the same amount of time IC provide more flexibility to players who might not be able to respond immediately due to IRL obligations or any other reason. In particular, this choice allows the moderators to run events that are very short ICly, or in which circumstances change quickly, with more flexibility than traditional RP time scales.
The second is to decrease the feeling of "empty time" ICly. When there are large gaps between events and other occurrences in IC time, it can be difficult for players to "fill the gap" with what their characters are doing offscreen. This is fine for a game that is intended to feel like a low pressure situation (eg slice of life), but it can feel out of place in games with more IC pressure to do things (such as horror games).
How frequent are game events?
The current schedule usually results in major, game-wide events roughly every three months, depending on mod energy levels. Rather than the current standard in DWRP of events that run for between a week and ten days at regular intervals, Pluviosa's events will be of a variety of lengths and intensities ranging from "one VERY INTENSE IC day" to several weeks.
Additionally, there may be minor events in between or concurrent with major, game-wide events. Rather than being full interactable events, these may be limited to only a certain group of characters (those who participated in a particular investigation, have affinity with a certain power, etc), or they may be occurrences in the setting that mods do not feel are worthy of a full event post (such as weather abnormalities or changes on the ship). These can usually be found in Game Update posts.
Does this game have a network?
Not presently! This may change in the future as the ship is able and willing to make repairs and improvements to the living facilities.
What is the technology/magic/supernatural level of this game?
The technology level of Pluviosa is "formerly high." Specifically, the ship's tech seems to be about a hundred years or so ahead of ours in Earth - not into the space-opera/cyberpunk range, but still with enough of a jump that a modern character will find things they don't understand in it. However, that technology hasn't been maintained in quite some time, so much of it is nonfunctional, and the parts that are functional - mostly the things that are strictly necessary for the ship to function - are often patched and repaired with parts fished out of other things.
As for magic and supernatural occurrences... Well, there's certainly a great deal of the latter. Whether or not ghosts and the other happenings on board the ship count as magical for a specific character's definition of magic is left as an exercise for the players; the mods do not find the distinction important at this time.
Are there NPCs available for our characters to contact?
Currently, the only NPC readily available to the characters is the Ship, who can be contacted through terminals on the Residential Floors Lounge. (More detail can be found on the Housing Page.) However, the Ship only responds to contact it deems worthy of its time, and characters do not have any idea what that metric is. (A separate page for IC messages to the Ship can be found here.)
How do our characters communicate? Is there a language barrier?
Characters will find, upon arriving in game, that they seem to have picked up a second language (or third or whatever) that they can now speak with native fluency. They'll often find themselves reaching for this DLC lingua franca when approaching a stranger, though they can choose to speak to anyone in whatever language they so choose. They are literate in it if they are literate in at least one of their canon languages; there is a sign language counterpart that signing characters will similarly know instinctively. Although they can speak, use their own devices, and write by hand in their existing languages, the keyboards and displays aboard the ship are only in this language (which uses a script that is not recognizable to any character, although it is formatted and shaped similarly to Latin and Cyrillic characters.)
Where does my character live? Is there assigned housing?
Characters will be assigned rooms by the Ship near the end of the first of the month of the game; characters who arrive after that point will automatically be assigned housing. There is nothing compelling them to sleep in these rooms, but as other secure and clean places in the ship are a rarity, it might be a good idea.
You can find more information on the Housing page.
What happens to characters on hiatus?
There are several options for characters on hiatus:
- If the character dies around the time of hiatus, or the player wishes to kill them off for hiatus reasons, their revival can simply take longer than usual, as needed for the duration of hiatus. (As with all deaths, characters who die will have no awareness of what happened while they were gone.)
- Characters who go wandering in the ship can get lost and come stumbling back to the safe and solid areas of the ship days later. Players can arrange with mods to have a specific reason for getting lost if they so desire, and mods may contact 'getting lost' players with things their character finds. Characters who get lost will have awareness of certain ship-wide events that also affect wherever they have gotten lost, but not anything that occurred between other characters.
- The character falls into a strange coma that hovers between life and death. Generally, characters who choose this option will wake at the end of hiatus with no perception that time has passed and no awareness of events they have missed.
- Auto-pilot option. Characters continue to go through their daily routines, but in a zoned out sort of way where their responses aren't especially meaningful most of the time. This is the best "semi-hiatus" option, because characters can still have conversations and observe events, but won't be playing any major roles. If you want your character to know what happened while they were gone, this is your only option.
Please note that there is no "go home" or "disappeared" type of hiatus option. Characters on hiatus remain on the ship in some way, even if out of sight and out of play. For more information on Hiatuses, please see the Hiatus page.
What happens to characters who are dropped?
Good question! As far as anyone can tell, dropped characters do disappear, though they may leave possessions behind. There is no warning or chance to give possessions to specific CR, and no one ever actually sees the character vanish; it might take time for other characters in the game to fully realize that they've disappeared.
If you would like to re-app a dropped character with their memories intact, please let a mod know so we can figure out any special effects of their vanishing and re-appearing.
How do canon updates work?
While canon updates are allowed, characters can only be canon-updated if they die. Their canon update takes affect while they are "out" for revival purposes. Their memories are updated to their new canon point; changes to their body and special abilities are at player discretion. (Please note that mods must still be informed of these changes on the death form.)
Are Test Drives game canon?
Test Drive threads are assumed to be game canon if both characters are in the game, unless the players involved want to play otherwise. Pluviosa does not do large "arrival logs" (it wouldn't make sense with the rolling application system) and Test Drives are intentionally set up to be similar to recent events that occur in the game proper. The goal of this is to give an IC smooth transition from the test drive phase to the "in the game" phase, as well as to give prospective players a more effective taste of the actual game.
How does Activity Check work?
Activity Check in Pluviosa is handled only through irregular check-ins (every couple months). Given the pace of the playerbase, strict Activity requirements have proven to be of low use and thus low priority to the game, and therefore Activity Check-ins mostly serve to confirm when a player has abandoned the game so that their information can be removed from the Taken List etc.
What are Explorations?
Explorations are mod-driven activities in which characters explore the Ship for clues regarding the Ship's mysteries, to search for particular supplies, and so on. They are conducted in specific channels in the game Discord (rather than on Dreamwidth) and upon completion (or an agreement between mods and players that there's nothing more to say/do with them), they are pastebinned and posted to the Explorations page for later reference. For more information, please see the section on the Setting page.
How do our characters arrive?
Unless otherwise noted in your acceptance notice, characters feel a brief sensation of blood dripping somewhere on their bodies - on their hands, over their shoulders, from their head, etc - which is the first thing they're aware of other than an extremely groggy waking-up sort of feeling. As their heads clear, they will realize that they are somewhere else - specifically, in the dim, jungle-y rooms of Fern Deck, where there's still enough light to see by during the day. If they look, whatever location they felt the blood dripping is wet with clean rainwater. They will be inexplicably aware that they aren't alone in this place, but beyond that, they are given no information, and what they do is up to them.
Pluviosa does not do large mingle arrival logs, due to the fact that our applications are not on a specific cycle. Once your application has been accepted, you can intro your character with an individual intro/arrival post whenever you're ready!
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Character specific questions
1.) How magical is the world of Pluviosa? Sirius's magic feeds off of the residual magical energy in the air. He can survive with just a little magic but the amount of magic he can absorb will determine how powerful his magic is.
2.) His magic is unnatural and slowly damages the fabric of his world. The damage is extremely slow, over the course of hundreds of years, but it could still be considered game breaking. I can easily nerf this aspect by saying the world accepts his magic instead of rejecting it like his world did. Or could I keep the tension his magic causes, and would there be any fun consequences for it?
3.) Sirius has a few powers that fit the ones the mods need to know about. Does that mean that those powers would need to be nerfed? Or just that the mods need to be aware of them. He has the ability to magically sense his surroundings when he leans into his magic side, can vaguely sense other magic, although it doesn't feel as strong as his own, and he can travel to people's dreams. Would any of these be a problem?
General questions
4.) How do characters gain an affinity for one of powers on the ship? Is death the only way to become affiliated with one of them?
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2. It wouldn't damage the world, but he likely would not be able to tell for sure if it's doing so or not, given the time scale involved. I think it's a bit unlikely that the game will go on for hundreds of years. (That would be a wild concept for a game, but not this one.)
3. Just stuff mods need to know, not nerfs! I try to include extra information for characters with relevant abilities on event posts. Nothing here that would pose a problem.
4. Affiliation with the powers is mostly gained through events! Death is one of the ways that affiliation has outcomes, but for example, characters who were possessed in the last event have a stronger tie to the Whispering.
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Would it be possible to play two characters from the same canon? Sirius and Eclipse both have the same soul. Eclipse is a magical doppelganger who was born out of Sirius's heartbreak and regret when he couldn't save his friends. They are both separate characters with distinct personalities even though they share the same soul and memories.
The first emotions Eclipse ever felt were Sirius's heartbreak and regret so he's driven by an obsession for power so he never has to feel like that again. He's ruthless and cold while Sirius tends to be more withdrawn but kind. They are two sides of the same coin and playing both of them together lets me delve into both of their characters more than if I chose just one of them.
They probably won't interact with each other directly very much. Eclipse resents Sirius for burdening him with his heartbreak and regret and being weak and Sirius wishes for Eclipse to be able to be his own person, not a copy of himself. The fun part is how others interact with both Sirius and Eclipse.
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