Chapter 1: What's Different About Skyward Odyssey and General RP Guide
Skyward Odyssey is a story-driven forum roleplaying experience and community. If you're new to Forum Roleplaying, please read starting from "General Introduction to Forum RP". If you are an RP veteran, we have to inform you that our club is somewhat different from certain other clubs in MAL. It is important that you read about these differences. You may skip to the "What's different about Skyward Odyssey" section of this chapter.
Introduction to Forum RP and General RPing guide
Introduction
Forum RPing is easy. It's basically telling a story about your character by reliving it within the world set up in the RP club. Typically in a MAL-based RP, you create a character, wait for it to get approved, then post with that character. The post will center on that character's experience and interactions. Usually you will post in location threads, threads representing specific locations in the RP world. Different from a real time RP or a chat RP, forum RPs usually require you to post more detailed and comprehensive descriptions and actions for your character due to the slow pace of forum posting. This isn't to say that the longer your post the better, on the contrary, novels containing repeated information is considered boring and would be frowned upon.
The three cardinal sins of RPing
There are three things you must never do while RPing, these include: Godmodding: Essentially making your character overpowered beyond reason in creation, in gaining a skill, or in achieving a feat in a given situation. Powerplaying: Playing another person's character, for example forcing an outcome from them and assume a reaction and force that on them too Metagaming: Using information outside of what your character knows to benefit them. For example, reading an enemy's abilities and use that against them despite your character having no way to know that in character.
Consequences for being guilty of these vary, but they are often grave, so tread lightly.
That's the gist of it. Now continue on to the next section.
What's different about Skyward Odyssey?
Skyward Odyssey is different from other contemporary MAL RPs featuring similar themes because of many things. First and foremost, it's a story-centered RP for those who care more about telling a good overall story than the overall wellbeing of their character. It's also not made in an RPG format where you are pressured to use your character to win and mechanics keep you on a leash from doing anything unfair.
To further elaborate, we'll do it in a Q&A format bellow:
Q: Does this RP involve any conflict, such as battles?
A: Yes.
Q: OK. But I see that there aren't any mechanics, not even a HP bar. Am I missing something?
A: Nope.
Q: What? Then how will you balance everything?
A: We balance everything by making sure characters aren't absurdly OP at the start and preventing any sort of godmoding. In battles taking place in character in the RP world, we expect people to self-regulate by focusing on the story instead of focusing on winning.
Q: Self-regulate? Focusing on story instead of winning? What do you mean?
A: This club promotes the philosophy that even in fights, your interest should be on how to make the story as interesting as possible. This differs to traditional RPGs in video game form where you're motivated to win and fulfil a quest. Here, even if you fail, the world goes on. Sometimes, you losing means that a story can get better. In other words, you should be looking on how to make your character be a prominent and interesting part of the story, instead of making them the main unstoppable hero or focusing on winning every mission and conflict.
Q: So you expect people to just choose to lose?
A: Yes. We want to change people's mindset from thinking that they suck if their characters "lose" to they suck if their character isn't being a good part of the story. Instead of focusing on restricting people with mechanics and promoting a mentality to win, we encourage RPers to engineer plot twists, drama, and novel ways to solve the problems. Posts that attempt to "brute force" a win and ignoring or belittling other people's posts because they're "just flashy without much thought to the logic on how to win" are discouraged. The person whose character fails a mission but becomes an integral part of the plot is better than the person who wins the mission by using monotonous, though logical, boring posts on how they win against something.
Remember, this isn't an RPG where you spam moves to kill the boss, this is an interactive story where you're one of the many creative collaborative writers.
Q: What about consent?
A: We won't allow things such as death, major crippling effects or anything else of the sort to happen without consent, however we also do not condone stubborn refusal to accept admin decisions and what has already been established to happen.
Q: But no stats at all though....?
A: The inclusion of any kind of half-hearted mechanics would only give justification for people with the mentality that they should do anything within the constrains of the mechanics to win without much control. With no mechanics at all, it will be clear which posters are simply "BSing in order to win" or "Making the story more interesting".
Q: Doesn't seem like it's for me. I think characters should be able to win with what means they have. I also don't like how the lack of mechanics means there's no hard character progression.
A: That's a perfectly valid viewpoint, but that's not what this club is about. We recommend other, more hard mechanics-based RPs like Aeternia Story for you. Good Luck and thanks for stopping by! :)
Q: Actually, never mind, I love this idea. Where do I sign up?
A: There's a character creation thread! Welcome to the club!
Special style for Skyward odyssey
There are special reccomendations on Rping in this club:
When entering or leaving an area, indicate it by bolding, underlining, or coloring the sentence.
When navigating an interaction that might require consent of the other RPer, be sure to communicate with them first
Be sure to write at least 3 sentences every post, except when it doesn't make sense.
Avoid repetitive, long, overly detailed posts. Be efficient yet interesting. Avoid restating what someone else has already posted.
This chapter will explain how characters and roles work.
First of all, characters in Skyward Odyssey are all from the species of homo sapiens magus. In other words, everyone is a human, except they can harness magic. This means unfortunately, there can't be any other sentient species except in special circumstances. Don't worry though, as you can basically make these humans just as interesting.
Skills and power levels
Usually, many RPs on MAL will allow your character to have "special powers", basically superpowers, based on magic or otherwise. Here, because magic is a normality in the world, we don't refer to them as powers so much as they are skills. You can write skills in a multitude of ways, but you must always specify exactly what's the scope of that skill. For example "being profficient in ice magic" isn't a very good description. A better description would be stating the kinds of ice magic you would be able to wield, and at what scope can you wield it. For example, you can freeze anything upto 100 degrees celcius, or freeze air to create ice shards. This is to avoid an exploit that would allow you to, for example, sell yourself as Mr. Freeze, a street level character, but in actuality be Iceman, an omega level mutant, because he can alter heat from a fundamental level.
Typically, we expect to have everyone in a pseudo-street level of power level. You can do things like summon a large fireball, but you'd have to do a big ritual for it. In short, just think of your character as someone from the modern world or the world in the exploration age, but with access to magic instead of conventional technology. Usually, the much more powerful characters will be NPCs and villains. Don't worry though, you still have magic. It's not like you can't be flashy or anything.
Don't forget to always give your characters appropriate strengths and weaknesses. Final note: remember that fighting isn't the only or even the main focus of this club, so don't think of skills as only battle skills. Non-combat skills are also very useful skills!
Roles
Every character in Skyward Odyssey has a field role and a standby role. These roles define how your character will be treated and what they will be expected to do in the S.S. Skystrider. Pick your roles wisely, you can't change them willy nilly.
List of Field Roles
Field Tactician: Specializes in analyzing the battlefield and relaying suggestions to superiors and instructions to subordinates. Just because you have this role doesn't mean you're high ranked, it just means that you're the person that lays back and thinks of what to do instead of fighting in the front lines. Characters in this role will rarely be sent out to fight directly. In a way, this is the field role that's closest to a standby role.
Field Medic: Specializes in helping the wounded and damaged in combat. Very similar role to the Medical standby role.
Black Ops: Specializes in stealth. Can be utilized in sabotage, assassinations, and covert operations.
Field Technician: Specializes in handling technology and magic available in the field, providing a more support role.
Ground Officer: Specializes in direct combat, ranged or otherwise, on the ground.
Sky Officer: Specializes in sky combat, either by operating a skyship, a sky mount, or merely using flight paraphenelia
Sea Officer: Specializes in naval combat, be that underwater or otherwise. Similar to the sky officer, except in water.
Auxiliary Officer: Specializes in transport and support, mainly deals with logistics, medical crafts and other non-specialized support roles.
Scout: Specializes in monitoring the situation, scouting ahead, and relaying information to other roles. Unlike the Black Ops, focuses more on wide range souting rather than specific covert espionage.
List of Standby Roles
Consultant: Consultants may be diplomats, economic advisers, or other experts trained to bring input and figure out the more paperwork-y aspects of adventuring and meeting new nations. These will usually be sent to negotiate with new people groups and advise the leaderhip.
Researcher: Experts much like consultants, researchers are more interested in researching the various new things they will discover while travelling, be that novel social groups, new species of animals and plants, or new magical discoveries.
Engineer: Engineers maintain ships and equipment, as well as test new equipment.
Medic: As a more general medical officer, people in this role tend to pay more attention to the long term well being of other crew members rather than focusing on how to keep dying officers in combat alive.
Trainer: Focuses on training other members and new recruits, either physically or mentally.
Caretaker: Cooks, those who tend to animals, as well as those who focus on hygienic maintenance are given this role.
Entertainer: Those who work to entertain other members
Policing: Policing force that enforces local code of conduct and code. More like community policing more than anything.
After you've chosen your roles, you can choose your specialization below it in the form. This can be anything justifiable, so feel free to be creative (e.g. One on one skycraft dogfight specialist, water rescue specialist, etc.)
Of course, you could always also fill it in with Other:__________, but you must provide good description and justifications for that role.
This chapter will explain about how story works in this RP as well as the role of NPCs.
Missions, Storylines and Sagas
Skyward Odyssey does not incorporate a solid mission system, the missions in the RP are solely missions given to the characters within the world. Missions can have plots, but that doesn't mean all story comes in missions. Admins, officers, and storytellers will also be able to dictate stories in any environment or setting a character is in within the RP. In addition to that, there will be sagas; longer stories fleshed out inidiffevent.missions and storylines that culminate inan event.
Also, we do not believe in an extremely solid status quo. What you do, or rather, what your character does, would not only alter the course of that story, but also the unfolding of Skyward Odyssey as a whole.
NPCs
In this RP, NPCs can be classified into 3 groups:
Minor NPCs : Not even NPCs in the normal sense, just people you integrate into your posts, such as "...and she walked up to the blacksmith, who gave her a sword." the blacksmith is a minor NPC here
Story NPCs: NPCs only used mostly for plot and missions, can be used by whoever is running the story at that time
Major NPCs: NPCs that can be used by only admins and sometimes officers, are central supporting cast in the RP and will be used for both plot purposes and OOC needs.
Lore
Lore in this RP is mostly done by core storytelling, with the results from these stories impacting the world at large. However, further wider lore is available to be written in specific lore threads. This lore can be used for further stories, but it is sometimes mandatory for certain aspects of making a character, as well as giving you SkyPoints.
This section will explain how SkyPoints work and about OOC stuff in general.
SkyPoints are used to grant users permission to do certain things in this club. The more SkyPoints you have, the more things you can do. SkyPoints can be acquired in various ways, for instance:
Actively RPing for one month (1 SP)
Voting in the Character of the Month competition (1 SP)
Winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the Character of the Month competition (2 SP, 1 SP, 1 SP)
Voting for the Lore of the Month competition (1 SP)
Winning 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place in the Lore of the Month competition (2 SP, 1 SP, 1 SP)
Writing a piece of lore and having it approved (1 SP, max 4 SP/month(rest carries over to next month))
Doing something exceptional, such as solving conflicts or helping solve a difficult problem or something (Variable)
Here's a list of what you can get by having many SkyPoints:
Lord (10+): Can make 4 characters, can create Sagas, can create Major NPCs.
Knight (7-9): Can make 3 characters, no deletion penalty, can propose and create missions and storylines.
Knave (4-6): Can make 3 characters. Minimum SkyPoints level for admins and officer applicants
Citizen (0-3): Can make 2 characters, have character deletion penalty.
Shamed (-1 to -5) Will only be able to make 1 character in the club, admins will be demoted to officers automatically, officers will be demoted to members automatically.
Fugitive (-1 to -10): Will only be able to make 1 character in the club and will be treated as if they were warned 1 extra time.
Banished (-11 or less): Will be banned from the club.
You may notice that there are negative numbers. This is because Skypoints can be taken away from you. This can be because of various things, but is usually because you broke a rule that doesn't warrant an outright warning or ban. If you have less than -10 SkyPoints, you are banned from the club, so be careful. For other OOC things, you can request character deletion or character storage/standby among various other things in the request thread, and give suggestions in the suggestion thread. Please do this in a civil manner.
The administration in this club has many duties, including the following:
Maintaining the peace and civility in the club
Helping enforcing MAL and Club rules
Reviewing and Approving characters, lore, and requests
Creating Sagas and stories
Maintaining and creating threads and graphics for the club
RPing NPCs
etc.
To join the administration, please apply in the administration thread. Sometimes admins are recruited.
There are a few rules to uphold in this club, including:
Standard MAL rules apply
No bullying, and no improper conduct
No godmoding, powerplaying, or metagaming
Be respectful to everyone regardless of their level of writing
Respect admin decisions
Please write intelligently, acknowledge other RPer's characters, don't just write one liners when you could have done more, and don't meaninglessly prolong your posts by repeating too much information.
Severe repercussions, such as death, impairment, and other things will need consent from the involved RPer.
Admins are not allowed to use NPCs for personal RPing
Punishments for violating these rules include warnings, SkyPoints deductions, or straight bans depending on severity. If you have been warned 2 times, you will be handed a ban. How long this ban will be depends on the verdict of the admins. You may or may not be returned to the club. For admins and officers, demotion is also an option for punishment.