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>>{{image url="http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk84/PGMMalchiara/Avatars/IggwilvFull.jpg"}}>>=====__**PGM Velkaiva House Rules**__=====
===__**Stamina Estimates**__===
Once and only once per game session, you can ask me for a Stamina count on your character and I will give you the exact number. Other than that one time, I'm still not giving Stamina estimates unless your character is unconscious, bleeding, or about to go down.
You can also get a Stamina/Power tally when you take over proxy of someone else's character, and that will not count toward the once/night limit (unless it looks like people are deliberately switching off proxies to get their stats, in which case I will not only stop giving them to you but will also smite you with an electrified anvil).
----
===__**SW/CG Contracts**__===
These are the rules for my SW/CG contracts:
1. Only one contract per player at a time. If you have a contract open, you cannot take another contract under any of your PCs until the first one is finished. If the contract requires an RP post, it does not count as being "finished" until the post is up, and I will not accept any emails from you trying to claim a contract until then (so if you're the first person to send me an email but don't have your post up, and somebody else emails me before the post goes up, then that person gets the contract, not you).
1a. If you owe me roleplay posts for something else (such as a tourney-related investigation), you can't take any SW contracts until those are done too. This is to ensure that I don't have too much of my time monopolized by any one player.
2. If your character does not have SW/CG at the appropriate level for a given contract, I will not let you take any action with regard to that contract until I hear from the PC who's relaying the information/job to you. I need to hear from the player providing the information first.
3. All emails for SW/CG contracts should go to PGMVelkaiva-at-gmail-dot-com. I'm still on AOL but I do not want to get any SW/CG emails on that account.
4. I reserve the right to terminate contracts on the grounds of inactivity if more than a week passes between a PC taking the contract and that PC taking some action in relation to the contract (email or post, whichever is appropriate to the situation).
I don't want to have a bunch of these suddenly becoming active a month from now, when I don't have time to spend on them anymore.
5. I'm borrowing a page from BGII and implementing a "reputation point" system for SW/CG contracts. The idea is that PCs will develop a reputation for competence or ineptness based on their track record with solo or small-group contracts, where the performance of an individual PC can be more readily separated from the performance of a tourney group as a whole. Over time, PCs who gain a reputation for competence may find that people are willing to entrust them with more difficult jobs and pay more to enlist them; PCs who are reputed to be inept may be turned down for jobs or have to discount their rates to find work.
A successfully completed contract will net the PC anywhere from 1 to 10 reputation points depending on the degree of success and the difficulty of the job. A failed contract (including one that gets terminated for inactivity) causes the PC to lose 1 to 10 reputation points.
In the future, I will be doing more contracts that have minimum reputation cutoffs and/or which have payment modifiers based on the PC's reputation points. I am not implementing this immediately because there hasn't been enough time for PCs to gain (or lose) enough points to make the system work, but I will be putting it into play as soon as I think the point distribution is reasonable.
In general, your tourney performances will not affect your reputation points, partly because most tourneys take place outside the city (and thus outside the awareness of many NPCs) and partly because, except in the most unusual circumstances, it's hard to attribute a tourney's success or failure to one individual member. However, when those unusual circumstances do arise and, for better or worse, one PC has a standout effect on the game, there may be some impact on that PC's reputation.
I haven't yet decided whether PCs will be aware of one another's reputation ratings (probably yes, at least if they're on the SW/CG board, but I'm still debating this) or whether high-level PCs will start off with some reputation rating independent of their SW/CG performances (probably no, under the "yeah, past record bla bla bla, but what have you done lately?" principle).
For reference, questions/comments on this system should go on the OOC board, since players can't post on this board and I don't want people cluttering my rankings thread in SW/CG. I will delete any posts made there.
Reputation rankings are not yet "active" (that is, NPCs don't yet know about them in IC-reality and won't be taking them into account) because, as noted previously, there hasn't been enough time for the rankings to be remotely accurate yet.
Once they are active, they will apply only to PCs, and only as a comparative measure. The numbers do not have any absolute values in and of themselves. There is no chart for what your number "means." Its value is determined by the job snapshots following your entry and the values of other PCs on the list.
An example to illustrate why this is:
Joe Q. PC has a reputation of 5. He is new to the scene and has undertaken only one job of relatively low difficulty, but has executed it competently. Other than this one job, he has no record.
John Doe PC has a reputation of 5. He's been working in the underworld a long time. He takes some easy jobs and some hard ones, does some competently and totally bombs others. His reputation zigzags all over the place depending on whether he's dug himself out of his latest hole yet or just come down in another crashing failure. Presently, he's about as high as he ever manages to get.
Both of these hypothetical PCs have the same numerical ranking, but their descriptive entries look totally different. NPCs are likely to view Joe as a potentially promising but untested rookie. They're likely to view John as a dubious bumbler who'd be worth hiring only if the job wasn't very important or if they need a sucker to take the fall. Both are iffy propositions for a tough or high-priced job, but for different reasons.
The number isn't the whole story; it also matters how you got there and where you stand relative to the other PCs on the list.
Also, why NPCs aren't covered:
1. Because it's already enough work keeping track of the PCs.
2. Because I have to put in job snapshots for all the entries and I'd rather use my job ideas for playable SW contracts than background color for NPCs.
3. Because the rankings are by comparison and therefore will evolve and shift to reflect PCs' successes and failures, so it's impossible to assign static numbers to NPCs. The meaning of their numbers would constantly change and need updating to keep a reasonable relationship to PC activity.
4. Because other GMs also have NPCs whose backgrounds should realistically be listed as well, but that further complicates the problems listed above. Additionally, as GMs come and go, their NPCs will come and go, and a new GM may want to establish an NPC who should have been active in the underworld for years but whose reputation rankings wouldn't reflect that since the GM hadn't been on staff/created that NPC earlier. Rather than retcon the list continuously to reflect GMs creating new NPCs and killing off or retiring old ones, I'm just going to limit my list to PCs.
Clarification, since the question's been asked:
PCs who do SW/CG contracts are not earning any XP apart from whatever they earn through the associated boardplay. As far as your XP take is concerned, it doesn't matter whether your contract requires in-room rolls or is handled entirely via email, or whether it takes 30 emails or 3 to complete. The only thing that affects your XP is how much and how well you write, and since I'm not handling boardplay (at present Cas is doing that job), I don't determine that.
Part of my goal in doing these contracts is to give PCs something purposeful to write about. Another part of the goal is to enable players who don't have big chunks of time for tourneys to advance their characters' reputations, wealth and levels via boardplay. To de-emphasize the importance of room rolls, and also to reward people who put in the effort to write more, I'm not awarding any XP for the contracts themselves. So, again, the only way that anybody is getting any XP from doing these things is through their boardplay posts.
As time goes by I might change this, but at present I have no plans to do so. If it turns out that people aren't earning enough XP to accurately reflect what they would have gotten for performing the same actions and taking the same risks in-room, it's more likely that this problem will be resolved by increasing the boardplay XP awards.
More clarifications:
-- PCs who refer contracts to other PCs are not thereby barred from accepting contracts of their own, unless they continue to take an active part in the referral.
In other words: if you refer a contract to Joe Bob PC, and you have nothing more to do with that contract and Joe Bob is thereafter left to sink or swim on his own, then you are free to take another contract if you want. However, if you're working in partnership with Joe Bob, then you cannot take a new contract until both of you are finished with that one.
-- If you're working in partnership with another PC, and that PC is supposed to do a post and doesn't so gets timed out, both of you fail the contract and take reputation hits plus whatever other effects may be appropriate in that situation.
-- Generally, there are no effects on reputation from referring another PC. If you refer Joe Bob as above, your reputation stays the same regardless of whether he does a superb job or completely botches his contract. The exceptions would be if you're working in partnership with the other PC or if you've made some guarantee to the NPC that "this guy's really good" or "you said you wanted someone who'd be terrible and fail, and boy! did I ever find a guy for you!", in which case you may get dinged if it turns out that you're wrong. Since in most situations there's no benefit to making such a guarantee and a potential downside if your referred PC doesn't perform as claimed, I assume most PCs making referrals don't offer any guarantees unless they've specifically stated otherwise.
Amendment/Tweak:
Boardplay posts that are related to SW contracts will be earning XP at a higher rate than other boardplay posts. This is a temporary system for now. If it works well, I'll keep it; if it doesn't, I'll find a different way of doing this.
Because SW contracts involve much more risk to the characters than standard boardplay (where nothing bad happens to the PC unless the writer wants it to), the XP should be higher than the usual. Because I want to keep the emphasis on the quality of the writing rather than room events or emails, the posts will remain the sole measure by which PCs are rewarded XP. As a compromise between these two goals, for the next few weeks I'll be sending Cas a series of modifiers based on my estimation of how much ingenuity the character had to show, or how much risk had to be run, in order for that contract to succeed. This will then increase the character's base XP by some multiplier (1.5x to 3x the base XP), but that base number will still be determined solely by the quality of the writing.
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>>{{image url="http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk84/PGMMalchiara/Avatars/IggwilvFull.jpg"}}>>=====__**PGM Velkaiva House Rules**__=====
===__**Stamina Estimates**__===
Once and only once per game session, you can ask me for a Stamina count on your character and I will give you the exact number. Other than that one time, I'm still not giving Stamina estimates unless your character is unconscious, bleeding, or about to go down.
You can also get a Stamina/Power tally when you take over proxy of someone else's character, and that will not count toward the once/night limit (unless it looks like people are deliberately switching off proxies to get their stats, in which case I will not only stop giving them to you but will also smite you with an electrified anvil).
----
===__**SW/CG Contracts**__===
These are the rules for my SW/CG contracts:
1. Only one contract per player at a time. If you have a contract open, you cannot take another contract under any of your PCs until the first one is finished. If the contract requires an RP post, it does not count as being "finished" until the post is up, and I will not accept any emails from you trying to claim a contract until then (so if you're the first person to send me an email but don't have your post up, and somebody else emails me before the post goes up, then that person gets the contract, not you).
1a. If you owe me roleplay posts for something else (such as a tourney-related investigation), you can't take any SW contracts until those are done too. This is to ensure that I don't have too much of my time monopolized by any one player.
2. If your character does not have SW/CG at the appropriate level for a given contract, I will not let you take any action with regard to that contract until I hear from the PC who's relaying the information/job to you. I need to hear from the player providing the information first.
3. All emails for SW/CG contracts should go to PGMVelkaiva-at-gmail-dot-com. I'm still on AOL but I do not want to get any SW/CG emails on that account.
4. I reserve the right to terminate contracts on the grounds of inactivity if more than a week passes between a PC taking the contract and that PC taking some action in relation to the contract (email or post, whichever is appropriate to the situation).
I don't want to have a bunch of these suddenly becoming active a month from now, when I don't have time to spend on them anymore.
5. I'm borrowing a page from BGII and implementing a "reputation point" system for SW/CG contracts. The idea is that PCs will develop a reputation for competence or ineptness based on their track record with solo or small-group contracts, where the performance of an individual PC can be more readily separated from the performance of a tourney group as a whole. Over time, PCs who gain a reputation for competence may find that people are willing to entrust them with more difficult jobs and pay more to enlist them; PCs who are reputed to be inept may be turned down for jobs or have to discount their rates to find work.
A successfully completed contract will net the PC anywhere from 1 to 10 reputation points depending on the degree of success and the difficulty of the job. A failed contract (including one that gets terminated for inactivity) causes the PC to lose 1 to 10 reputation points.
In the future, I will be doing more contracts that have minimum reputation cutoffs and/or which have payment modifiers based on the PC's reputation points. I am not implementing this immediately because there hasn't been enough time for PCs to gain (or lose) enough points to make the system work, but I will be putting it into play as soon as I think the point distribution is reasonable.
In general, your tourney performances will not affect your reputation points, partly because most tourneys take place outside the city (and thus outside the awareness of many NPCs) and partly because, except in the most unusual circumstances, it's hard to attribute a tourney's success or failure to one individual member. However, when those unusual circumstances do arise and, for better or worse, one PC has a standout effect on the game, there may be some impact on that PC's reputation.
I haven't yet decided whether PCs will be aware of one another's reputation ratings (probably yes, at least if they're on the SW/CG board, but I'm still debating this) or whether high-level PCs will start off with some reputation rating independent of their SW/CG performances (probably no, under the "yeah, past record bla bla bla, but what have you done lately?" principle).
For reference, questions/comments on this system should go on the OOC board, since players can't post on this board and I don't want people cluttering my rankings thread in SW/CG. I will delete any posts made there.
Reputation rankings are not yet "active" (that is, NPCs don't yet know about them in IC-reality and won't be taking them into account) because, as noted previously, there hasn't been enough time for the rankings to be remotely accurate yet.
Once they are active, they will apply only to PCs, and only as a comparative measure. The numbers do not have any absolute values in and of themselves. There is no chart for what your number "means." Its value is determined by the job snapshots following your entry and the values of other PCs on the list.
An example to illustrate why this is:
Joe Q. PC has a reputation of 5. He is new to the scene and has undertaken only one job of relatively low difficulty, but has executed it competently. Other than this one job, he has no record.
John Doe PC has a reputation of 5. He's been working in the underworld a long time. He takes some easy jobs and some hard ones, does some competently and totally bombs others. His reputation zigzags all over the place depending on whether he's dug himself out of his latest hole yet or just come down in another crashing failure. Presently, he's about as high as he ever manages to get.
Both of these hypothetical PCs have the same numerical ranking, but their descriptive entries look totally different. NPCs are likely to view Joe as a potentially promising but untested rookie. They're likely to view John as a dubious bumbler who'd be worth hiring only if the job wasn't very important or if they need a sucker to take the fall. Both are iffy propositions for a tough or high-priced job, but for different reasons.
The number isn't the whole story; it also matters how you got there and where you stand relative to the other PCs on the list.
Also, why NPCs aren't covered:
1. Because it's already enough work keeping track of the PCs.
2. Because I have to put in job snapshots for all the entries and I'd rather use my job ideas for playable SW contracts than background color for NPCs.
3. Because the rankings are by comparison and therefore will evolve and shift to reflect PCs' successes and failures, so it's impossible to assign static numbers to NPCs. The meaning of their numbers would constantly change and need updating to keep a reasonable relationship to PC activity.
4. Because other GMs also have NPCs whose backgrounds should realistically be listed as well, but that further complicates the problems listed above. Additionally, as GMs come and go, their NPCs will come and go, and a new GM may want to establish an NPC who should have been active in the underworld for years but whose reputation rankings wouldn't reflect that since the GM hadn't been on staff/created that NPC earlier. Rather than retcon the list continuously to reflect GMs creating new NPCs and killing off or retiring old ones, I'm just going to limit my list to PCs.
Clarification, since the question's been asked:
PCs who do SW/CG contracts are not earning any XP apart from whatever they earn through the associated boardplay. As far as your XP take is concerned, it doesn't matter whether your contract requires in-room rolls or is handled entirely via email, or whether it takes 30 emails or 3 to complete. The only thing that affects your XP is how much and how well you write, and since I'm not handling boardplay (at present Cas is doing that job), I don't determine that.
Part of my goal in doing these contracts is to give PCs something purposeful to write about. Another part of the goal is to enable players who don't have big chunks of time for tourneys to advance their characters' reputations, wealth and levels via boardplay. To de-emphasize the importance of room rolls, and also to reward people who put in the effort to write more, I'm not awarding any XP for the contracts themselves. So, again, the only way that anybody is getting any XP from doing these things is through their boardplay posts.
As time goes by I might change this, but at present I have no plans to do so. If it turns out that people aren't earning enough XP to accurately reflect what they would have gotten for performing the same actions and taking the same risks in-room, it's more likely that this problem will be resolved by increasing the boardplay XP awards.
More clarifications:
-- PCs who refer contracts to other PCs are not thereby barred from accepting contracts of their own, unless they continue to take an active part in the referral.
In other words: if you refer a contract to Joe Bob PC, and you have nothing more to do with that contract and Joe Bob is thereafter left to sink or swim on his own, then you are free to take another contract if you want. However, if you're working in partnership with Joe Bob, then you cannot take a new contract until both of you are finished with that one.
-- If you're working in partnership with another PC, and that PC is supposed to do a post and doesn't so gets timed out, both of you fail the contract and take reputation hits plus whatever other effects may be appropriate in that situation.
-- Generally, there are no effects on reputation from referring another PC. If you refer Joe Bob as above, your reputation stays the same regardless of whether he does a superb job or completely botches his contract. The exceptions would be if you're working in partnership with the other PC or if you've made some guarantee to the NPC that "this guy's really good" or "you said you wanted someone who'd be terrible and fail, and boy! did I ever find a guy for you!", in which case you may get dinged if it turns out that you're wrong. Since in most situations there's no benefit to making such a guarantee and a potential downside if your referred PC doesn't perform as claimed, I assume most PCs making referrals don't offer any guarantees unless they've specifically stated otherwise.
Amendment/Tweak:
Boardplay posts that are related to SW contracts will be earning XP at a higher rate than other boardplay posts. This is a temporary system for now. If it works well, I'll keep it; if it doesn't, I'll find a different way of doing this.
Because SW contracts involve much more risk to the characters than standard boardplay (where nothing bad happens to the PC unless the writer wants it to), the XP should be higher than the usual. Because I want to keep the emphasis on the quality of the writing rather than room events or emails, the posts will remain the sole measure by which PCs are rewarded XP. As a compromise between these two goals, for the next few weeks I'll be sending Cas a series of modifiers based on my estimation of how much ingenuity the character had to show, or how much risk had to be run, in order for that contract to succeed. This will then increase the character's base XP by some multiplier (1.5x to 3x the base XP), but that base number will still be determined solely by the quality of the writing.
