Guidelines and Pointers for New Comers

Welcome to the Roleplay Hearth. For those who are new to Forum Roleplaying, I hope this short guide to posting will be of assistance.

Golden Rules

In this style of adventuring, each player will have a primary character (avatar) whom they control exclusively. The first and most important guideline is to be certain not to control other players' primary characters within your post. This is commonly referred to as God-moding and is frowned upon. I'll try to step in and point out if you happen to do this. It can be tricky sometimes since the basis of Forum Roleplay is to constantly act and interact in ways that affect the other players involved.

A big part of RP (Role Play) is description and character development. You don't have to be the best writer, but adding a little flair to your post never hurts. As long as your actions are clear and your character has conflict in his/her life, you are probably doing fine.

Being perfect is frankly uninteresting. Don't be afraid to let your avatar fail. Failure is interesting and leads to development and your character's victories will be all the sweeter and more interesting when tempered by some failings and shortcomings.

If you create a conflict in your posting, (Example: the Chief of Engineering discovers an asteroid field dead ahead that was shrouded in an anomalous sensor disturbance. Or perhaps the Ensign on the communications station hears strange noises coming from an upper deck and advises that she thinks we have unexpected visitors on board.) It is common courtesy for the others in the roleplay to allow you to dictate the conclusion of the event. They will all contribute what their characters see, hear, suspect, and even what their characters do to respond to the event. In this way, the other players may change the outcome of the event by intriguing you with their own ideas based on the information you provided them. Or not, it's your party, do what you want to. Just try to give us all a glimmer of hope once it goes to hell.

What it's all about: Be interesting, be creative, be open to new ideas. This is all about acting and reacting in a universe we create together. We docked on a planet? Maybe you meet an alien merchant that has an interesting new system you think we should install on our ship. Maybe you get abducted and we, as your crew, have a moral obligation to bail you out. Or not if you pissed us off too much hehe. We can always discuss it Out of Character, too. Anyway, you get the idea.

When should I post?

The beauty of this is, we don't all have to have matching schedules or oodles of free time. Posting once or twice a week is acceptable. If you happen to be on more, maybe consider interacting with secondary NPCs (Non Player Characters), or maybe creating a second primary avatar.

Discussing future conflicts OOC (Out of Character) with other players is also a helpful activity. Maybe personal message with a few people to get on the same page with an event. Surprise people with bold new worlds and brave conflicts. Or don't. Maybe you just want to play your role on the ship and react to other people's events.

Whatever the case may be, that's pretty much it for the guide. Feel free to ask me or any others in the group if you have any questions or concerns. See you out there!

First thing's first, Register to the site. There is a button for that somewhere (probably up top).

Welcome to the Roleplay Hearth!

I won't lie (often anyway). Getting started is actually probably the hardest part. It can be tough to decide what race you want to play, what kind of person your character should be, where they're from, etc. But don't panic! We are in this together and we're here to help!

Creating a Character

Now you can be as lazy with this as you want. Honestly, if you hate what you make, we can work your character's demise or departure into the story and you can make another. Now that the pressure is off, start with something simple. Like maybe what your character's world is like, or what kinds of foods they'll like to eat. Maybe start with a prominent character flaw that you'd like to play with. Once you get something like that down, think of something else small. Maybe a physical feature you think will be neat or some ability you'd like your character to have. Maybe it would help to choose how you'd like to contribute to the ship.

Once you've got a few things down that you like, it will likely come pretty easily as you go through the Crew Registry File and just fill in the blanks. You can always look through characters already made for some ideas, or look through the Racial Database where I have put together a few races for anyone that wants to use them. You can even take one of the races and change it (provided anyone else with that race as a character approves).

Once you've got that filled out, submit it as a Reply in the Crew Registry and you're pretty much done. If you made a new race, submit a Racial Data Form to the Racial Database at your leisure. Remember, you can always edit your posts later, so don't stress too much over it.


This seems like a lot of reading tedious data....

Nope. Unnecessary. These character profiles are simply for quick reference and collecting our thoughts. That way, if you're trying to explain something to another player that is relative to something you wrote in your character file, you can just say, "Yo, check my racial traits, friend," instead tediously explaining every detail.

Yes, reading them can help you roleplay with others more effectively, but it falls to we players to show our character traits through actions and descriptions in the actual storyline and everything can change. You are only expected to know what your character would know and since you made him/her, that is entirely up to you. If you need to know something about someone else's character or world or whatever, Personal Message (PM) them or talk about it in the Out of Character (OOC) thread.

I have my character done. Now what?

Welcome to the crew! I'll look things over to see if I have any suggestions or questions. Visit the Infinite Discovery (Roleplay) thread to access the story and jump in once we are started. This is where the reading can come in handy. In play by post, you write your new post based on what you know about previous posts and act or react accordingly.

However, if you're jumping in late and need a rundown on what's happening, just ask. I will be reading every word and would be happy to catch you up on pertinent information and important plot events.

Need a quick "who's who?" rundown? The second message in the Character Registry is a current crew roster listed by ship rank and/or responsibilities.

(Think of something I should add here? Let me know in a PM!)