takamagahara | February Activity Check

Welcome to another Activity Check + HMD!

The AC will run from Feburary 22th through March 1st ending at MIDNIGHT EST. If that's confusing for you, just look here.

In order to pass AC, you will have to provide TWO proofs of your activity. What counts as a proof of activity? Simple! Any one or more network threads consisting of ten (10) or more comments from your character OR one or more log threads consisting of five (5) or more comments from your character. To make AC easier for you, we've created a nice little flowchart for you to follow. Remember, comments must be from February in order to count. That means anything from February 1st through February 28th will count towards AC.

There is now an additional requirement to passing AC!

Everyone is sent an approval email when their application is approved! We now require you do ALL of the following items from your approval email as part of your first month's AC with a new character.

1) Reply to the mod approval e-mail with the username that you will be using

2) Request to join these communities: thenearshore, thefarshore, takamagahara

New characters will not be granted access to the comms without having completed step #1

3) Fill out these forms and post them on your journal: permissions, god/shinki info

4) Make an inbox for your character and post it to your journal

5) Your application is posted on your journal as well

6) Reply to the Taken Character and God/Shinki Info pages, as well as the Tag Request post

Please copy the appropriate code, fill out the necessary information, and paste it in a reply to this post.

○ For Characters Accepted In February:

○ For All Other Characters:

This month will also have our mandatory bi-monthly HMD.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'll be piggybacking here over some of the Dragon points (hope you don't mind Dragon) regarding NPC!

First, I want to say that I understand this is a very tough period of change for the mods, and I respect and admire your work greatly. But since the points about this has been raised, I wanted to add my own two cents, and maybe a suggestion if that's an option.

It looks to me that the two NPCs that garnered the biggest CR (Sotero and Votelli), who are the most involved with the player characters, are also the hardest to get ahold of. They're kind of at a point that they have enough CR to be played like a normal player character, which is obviously a not feasible option.

Because of that a lot of the plotting I noticed goes simply on plurk or through private messages, and while it makes sense to handwave a lot of things, the fact that they are hidden from the view of other players becomes a problem. Because there are developments that it would make sense other characters would learn too, but since players are not friended- or are, but are not stalking all the plurks on their timeline, it's very easy to miss stuff.

So what I would suggest, would be a sort of "OOC inbox" for those NPCs, maybe even on their own journals, and linked from NPC contact pages. They would function essentially as handwaving/and plotting ground, that would be visible for everyone.

To show what could be done with such inbox, I'll allow myself to use Nia as an example. (I'm making all those examples, on the top of my head, apologize if it's not IC for either character)

"Nia would tell Votelli that she wants to help her with prayers at least once a week."

to which the NPC player could respond with

"Votelli would be very happy to hear that. She would show Nia around her shrines, and explain that they are to her, but under the different name - Torimoto. They would help the children in the nearby village, but if an ayakashi ever showed up, Votelli would prefer to run away instead of facing it. If you'd like to play out the two killing their first ayakashi one day, please request it as a custom mission"

And this way both player and character can learn about those big new developments for NPC [name change and shrines], and also have a possibility of a mission, related to that. Of course, sometimes there might happen developments that are too big to be handwaved, and NPC player might suggest going through it with a mission. But if the player has already all slots taken, the discussion how everything could happen can- well- happen in said inbox.

I know my character has already three big developments with Votelli. One (finding her and letting her stay) being handled in a mission, second after the council with other temples, where he went to tell her the advice (to use her other name for safety, to change something about hair and clothing to throw Heaven's off her trail), I submitted an official description that was sent privately to the mods, but I never really received reply if she would follow the advice, ignore it, how she would react etc- so I'm kind of in the dark how they dealt with it. And of course now after attack of the compound it would be something he would one day want to tell her. I can't obviously request a mission for each and every one of those, because there is not enough mission slots (and it could overload the NPC player). But having one place where this stuff could be discussed and also visible for everyone else involved with this NPC could be a good thing.

Just popping in to second this suggestion! The NPCs having individual plotting posts that make them more accessible to the playerbase as a whole would be a great idea. Simply being able to handwave and summarize interactions would go a long way toward keeping plots involving them moving forward.

NPCs having their own posts in order to OOCly plot with the player base is a great idea, and while we have top-levels in place for the older NPCs, we don't have anything quite the same set up for the newer ones.

We think we have an idea of how to implement a way to facilitate easier OOC communication for the newer NPCs and will be working on getting it set up ASAP.

February Activity Check

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