Nevina

Private party, open party, solo party~

PP = You schedule ahead of time who you're going to rp with, and the thread you make is limited to just them.

OP = Anyone can jump in this rp

SP = Personal development for your chara by themselves

Or just add the number to the tag?

[PP1]

[OP9]

Rather than having a subforum for fields, why not let the floors 1-10 topic itself be the field? That way it's one less click and you get to see all the activity. Cities and housing I can see as subforums, so I'm good either way on those.

I dunno, I guess I'm just failing to see the benefits.

Death due to inactivity:

• Makes the one or two people they were mid-rp with "feel better"

• Teaches them for leaving?

Purgatory due to inactivity:

• Their chara awaits their return

• Past relations can be resumed if others are accepting of it

• Don't feel bad about a lame non-death death

• Encourages return because they're not having to start over from square 1

I didn't list "more accurate" under death-inactivity one because I just don't see it as all that accurate to the game. If their player was a real person, they wouldn't just hang out in a danger zone staring at the dirt waiting for someone to come kill them. If they lost the will to "play" they'd retire or suicide, and suicide would need to be a choice they actively make.

Edit: What about as a penalty for leaving, the player has to write up a history explaining their absence? Like detailing their fishing excursions or their mental break down or something?

Do we have the ability to change the backgrounds? 'Cause that'd be pretty cool. SAO has really pretty backgrounds/environments~

The main benefit isn't really the levels themselves so much as the boss fights, which I think we should reward heavily on boss fights. Keep in mind that in SAO, all players were locked in at the same time, so someone "just coming in" and having never played before while everyone is on floor 78 would be a little odd.

Everyone's levels would probably just get wiped clean if we ever hit the Alf stage anyways, so it's not like levels are a competition or matter in the end.

If we reward boss fights with things like, an extra skill slot, a unique skill, a special title, etc, then the benefit is in participating in boss fights rather than level alone. A player who comes in and gets a level boost will have missed all of these boss fights, but won't be left completely in the dust since they can play with the rest who've gotten way up there.

Still posting via phone and break almost over so can't address all points yet.

I guess the issue I'm having is that me disappearing irl doesn't mean I wanted my character portrayed as afk in game. I wasn't looking for full immersion, I was looking for story. If I wanted a survival game I'd go with zombies. My character isn't me here,she is someone who I want to grow and see how she reacts to her life as the game makes it. If I went afk and wanted to return and found out my character was killed, I really don't think I'd rejoin is the thing. I don't want to be punished for real life taking me unexpectedly away. Mind you I'd probably give warning or just not start new rps if I knew something was upcoming but not everything is predictable.

Posting via phone so pardon any quality issues.

I actually don't really like the idea of a thread per floor. 200 floors later..

Having floors grouped into 10s would make it easier to see who is active in that range rather than spreading players out all over it seems

A player can choose who they rp with ahead of time, so they can avoid pkers for the most part. I don't see why people can't plot out what they want to happen for their private rp thread before starting said rp. If I knew I was going to start a PvP, I would plan ahead of time with the other player on who wins and go from there.

Inactivity is usually due to life butting in, not as a way to avoid being killed. I'm sure there'd be a lot of instances where they go inactive even when not in battle at all.

If I was the active player about to kill someone and they went inactive, then I probably would just move on. It happens. If you want to build your character as a PKer, then you could do a solo rp and have your character kill some random person in that solo rp and show the mentality behind it all. Or in the plotting threads, if you want your character to kill someone active rather than a random chara you made up for development, you can ask for a volunteer to be killed even, 'cause maybe someone out there does want a tragic pk death.

I have more points to add, but I'm out of time and gotta run to work x.x And two new posts came up while I was typing this so I haven't addressed them points yet XD;

For each floor section, we should have a two stickies. One for an OP city, and one that lists "notable places" in that area for users to decide what seeing to make their rps in. Then in the handbook OOC it can list all notable places in one spot and what floor its on.

http://swordartonline.wikia.com/wiki/Starting_City

For rp purposes it seems like it'd be easier to have a sticky of a town name for people to congregate to. Guess we can just name the town, give it a random floor number and sticky it in the increment it falls to.

@Mythee: You'd still have to come up with a "how da heck did they survive dat" because if they go inactive during a battle, as suggested, and magically re-appear in a town it's like "Wtf?" Granted I know there were teleporting items and such, but if you're in active right as a monster is about to land a killing blow, you'd still have to explain it. I think having a character in that situation die off is easier.

@Nevina: People are always going to be attached to a character or throw a fit when something happens to them that they don't like. Like I said to Mythee, if a character is about to get hit or be killed by a monster or another player for instance, and go in active, maybe they can avoid the monster, but do you really think that other player would find it fair that their opponent went AFK and didn't come back and was just transported to another town? That argument you two are making works both ways. If you set it up so that the player is automatically transported out of any given situation you're upsetting another set of people entirely. No one's ever going to be pleased.

Whoops, missed reading this post. I don't think death would be so easy as a random monster or player because players have control of monsters and will be talking with players outside of the rp if they end up doing PvP.

Punishing inactive players for the sake of active players seems needlessly strict. If someone goes inactive, then the remaining active person can move on to someone else.

Edit: Also we probably wouldn't just move them to a town by posting it. I mean for when they return and need to start over, we can say they're starting from a town.

If you die in one thread, I don't see why the player can't finish up the rp in another if it was still going. That other thread is a scene in itself that happens at a different time and place and closes when the scene ends.

I agree that deaths should have some kind of meaningful impact. What were their last thoughts? How did they die? What does this mean to others? What did others think when they saw the death? Rather than, "Hey dude you should come play with us again. btw your chara is dead lol."

But people might be rather attached to their character, I just don't feel comfortable killing off someone they may have put a lot of thought, emotional attachment, and time into without their say in it. I think if someone disappears irl, regardless of their afk position, their in-game the character wouldn't be stupid enough to sit around waiting for death. So automatically moving them to a town seems more logical.

How about a town after the main boss fight? So it'd be floor 1, 11, 21, 31 that have towns.

Well, I'm good either way, don't mind if there is or isn't a specific thread XD Easy enough to rp with either method.

I don't want to force people to die due to inactivity. Just say they decided to live in a town and go fishing all day long or something, like what Crim mentioned. That way if the person ever feels like returning, they won't feel hurt that their character up and died without their control or say in the matter, and it'd encourage them to return.

And here I thought you were against this yesterday players playing by themselves when I brought up multiple accounts :P

Wut, no, I was fine with solo play XD But in terms of a single character developing. If they used a second account to rp with their first account that'd be kinda sad that they're not interacting with others and a bit lonely, so I don't see people really doing that much. My issue on the multiple accounts thing is the hassle of switching between accounts and memorizing names and who is who, I don't mind the idea of it in the rp itself.

I'm all for solo rps that are acting like diary entries into the mind of the player >D

And I wouldn't mind a message board.

What would you guys think of the idea of not taking post count into consideration at all? Rather it would be the amount of RPs completed. Levels aren't even that important in SAO, it's more about skill.

For example, for the boss floor 10 fight, we could have a sign-up period where people are agreeing to join in the big event, but to sign up they must have, say:

5 PP

2 OP

1 SP

And these have to be complete (and at least reach pg 2? 3?), not in-progress. These would be kept track of in the character's journal and link to their rp so it's easy to check that they meet the requirements. If the user hasn't kept up on linking their RPs to their journal, then they wouldn't be approved until they do link it so that it's not the mod's responsibility to go fish around to find it themselves. And to beat the boss on floor 20, maybe you need another set of 5/2/1, or more.

Floors aren't restricted by a user's level, so a newbie can go up to floor 20 if that's where everyone else is RPing, they just wouldn't be able to join in the boss events.

This brings me to another point of discussion.

In a year when everyone is on floor 78, and someone else just joins the site at lvl 1, to prevent the gap between 1 and 78 from being so big, maybe a user can be considered to be at the previous 10 increments rather than playing catch up through all 70? (This would be a problem we encounter with any kind of leveling system, post count for oldies vs newbies, time to gather higher word counts, etc.)

For example, we'd consider them weak newbies until they met requirements of floor 60 boss, after which they can start working on floor 70 boss requirements with everyone else.

Thoughts?

You can be in more than one rp at once. You could rp with 10 people at the same time if that's what you felt you could handle (though I'd recommend only up to 2~3). If one of your rp buddies goes inactive, you won't be stuck waiting for them since you can start up another rp until yee olden buddy returns. Though I do think adding some kind of 'closed' tag at the end is a good idea.

Limiting it to one rp only is a bit too much like Integral's style. Since in SAO you can do solo things and whatnot, these scenarios don't have to fit on a continuous timeline. You could do a solo play to show some personal psychological character development as a sort of back-dating to explain why your chara is the way they are or something. Each of the show's early episodes were fairly contained, like saving a pet in one episode or getting a sword in another episode - if you mix these up on the timeline, changing their order doesn't have a huge effect. I imagine that most players, in cooperating with one another, will have a general idea of a personal timeline that they want their characters to go through, so letting them have multiple RPs at once will let them be more active and pursue what goals they want.

Defeated floors would still be monster-filled for the newcomers to traverse through, but having houses would be fine. Maybe houses can go on the same 'channel' as the guild thread, and maybe a player must have x amount of PP, OP, and SP completed before they can apply for a house.

I think we should have a Journal thread under OOC SAO. That'd be a spot for people to keep track of their characters (one journal per chara I mean, not all charas crammed in one spot), write notes on who they talked to and their relations between others, etc.

In terms of character profiles, I was actually thinking about that being a requirement, maybe like a character approval system so people don't randomly make overpowered dudes. Thoughts?

Wouldn't I still have to switch between accounts though to post between OOC and RP?

Edit: And I thought my post idea of allowing both options was a compromise too XD

Just to add a bit to the discussion, I'm one that voted for one account can have multiple characters. I prefer using one account for OOC purposes. If someone changes their name upon death, that means OOC their account name is different and it'd be harder to keep track of conversations. If I'm scheduling future plots with someone, have a death, then mid-plot-thread suddenly a new name is going to be jumping into the conversation. I'd rather use my one name for all OOC purposes and it's just easier for me to have all my characters under one belt rather than switching between accounts every time I want to make a post.

When roleplaying, most people mention their character name at least once, if not more, in an rp post. If you change character name but not account name, you're still plastering the character name over every rp post, so readers will already know who you're playing as.

I like the idea of allowing users to create a second account if they want to have a more mysterious approach like Edan's version, where a dead player can have a new account to have a completely new identiy. But I'd also like to allow users to have a character name that isn't the same as their account name. If my character dies, I still want people OOC to know me as Nevina. Newcomers who've never seen me as Nevina wouldn't know to call me this.

tl;dr - I think players should have the option for both methods to fit their individual needs.

Think it'd help to specify them a little more, say General OOC and SAO OOC. So that anything SAO-rp related would go in the latter one (ie: plot thread to recruit rpers to join you for a bit, events, handbook, whatever else).If you wanted to talk about the anime of SAO, that'd go in general ooc because it's not rp specific.