[Nogrod]

Just a quckish comment here on Pio's question about the rules.


I'd like to see the "formal rules" stay eg. no smilies, no signatures, no OOC -stuff, no highlighting...

I just can't imagine an RP with smilies, signatures or OOC discussions. They are nice to have around in many contexts but not in the RP's.


The question of dialogue, or using other people's characters is a more challenging one - and I know it has not been just once or twice when it has been an issue.

I have both good and bad experiences on it. In Scarburg Mead Hall the active players know each others characters well enough so they can oftentimes write some dialogue between two characters - and it is quite smooth to just ask in the discussion thread whether it was okay for the other player (and everyone expects that any changes the other player wishes will be addressed). And we have all these ways of co-writing a post via PM's, MSN, what have you.

But if the players are not confident of each other, or if for any other reason there is no feeling of mutual trust, then it becomes more problematic. For those occasions there should be rules more or less like the ones we have now. I've seen these things go soo wrong as well when people think they can fulfill their personal ambitions totally disregarding other players' characters - and in the worst instance misrepresenting them badly and not willing to change what they have written after the others complain about it.

I'm not sure how any exceptions to the quite strict rules should be spelled out though, but I know how it goes in practise... When two people have written a long time enough in a game (or just feel they trust each other's judgement) they start to add comments of the other player's character into their posts - immediately checking whether it was okay (in the discussion thread), but with time even these questions become scarcer as they know what they're doing.

So how about we still kept the rule of not doing things with other player's characters but made it clear it was okay when you had the mutual ageement with someone - so only when both sides agreed? How to write that in a rules -section beats me though.


Also (and partly merged into what I said earlier) the rules about bunnying and not trying to drive the story by yourself should be kept in force - at least on any basic level of game rules.


So?

I can see a lot of these rules have been made in eye of people hoarding in not having an idea what RP'ing in the 'Downs is about (the LotR movies). At the moment the situation is a bit different and many rules feel a bit redundant. But who knows if the Hobbit-films will again create a great influx of new people who need to be told what we want from the RP's in this forum? Thus I wouldn't call for doing away with all the rules we have.

But to recognize what we all more experienced RP'rs know - should we say the strict rules can be overlooked when we have a mutual consent and trust between writers... that could be just one paraphrase in the end of one sentence?