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Member Expectations
All members of Astraeus are required to meet the following expectations:
1. Communicate
The staff of your group understands this is a game, and other things can and will take priority. That said, unless it's an emergency, since the game we play is email based, communicating with the group is of the utmost importance. It lets the group know if there is a problem, if we should continue to post without you, and if we have other reasons to be concerned. A short single sentence or two to the OOC group, the CO, or the FO is all it takes to let us know.
- One of the considerations for promotion and other activities (writing for secondary characters, MSNPCs, etc) will depend on how well a player adheres to this expectation.
- A simple email along the lines of Hey, folks the next couple of days will be busy, but I should be able to sim Tuesday will typically suffice.
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2. Sim Regularly
The Astraeus adheres to the fleet standard of an average of 3 sims a week/12 sims a month to be considered a full-time player. You are of course welcome to sim more than twelve times a month, but a minimum of twelve sims should be for your primary character (PC), a missions-specific NPC (MSNPC), and/or a mission-relevant personal NPC (PNPC). Simming for PNPCs or NPCs that aren't directly related to the mission or its subplots (i.e., not involving other players) may not count toward your full-time status if you find yourself relying upon them.
If you have difficulty simming at that pace, please contact the captain to be placed as a part-time simmer.
Part time simming is intended to be a way for our writers to continue playing the game if their life has become too busy to hit the normal full time targets, but not so busy that players are going very long stretches without posting. Therefor, it is important to remember that this isn't meant to be a permanent status or a crutch for writers who have not yet learned the best ways for them to keep our full time schedule.
The requirement for part-time simmers is an average of 2 sims a week/8 sims a month. Being a part-time simmer results in the following:
- Ineligibility for promotion or a Department Head position.
- A reduced level of importance in the plot of a mission, as players who are posting at a full time level are the primary drivers of our story.
- A general time limit of three months on the part-time roster. As previously mentioned, this is intended to allow busy players to continue to participate.
The Captain will decide when a part-time player has shown enough consistency to be placed back on the full time roster.
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Some common scenarios:
- What if I'm in a scene and everyone has already answered very fast, can I go ahead and reply again?
- Yes. Keep in mind, you shouldn't feel rushed to post over and over, but don't feel as if there is an imposed 'pause' in your writing if everyone involved is getting along and having a good time.
- What if I've written a scene and there are others who haven't responded in 2 days? What should I do?
- After 48 hours, feel free to respond. After 72 hours you are expected to continue regardless so that your own writing does not suffer.
- I don't feel like the scene has progressed very far since the last time I've written, what should I do?
- Feel free to progress it! While we do have a mission plan, there is nothing set in stone! Captains, Ensigns, and everyone in between can advance the plot!
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Unfortunately, we have found from experience on the Astraeus and other ships in the fleet that those who cannot sim at least twice a week are unable to keep up with the story in an enjoyable fashion for either them or their fellow players. People tag them less, and then they feel they have less to contribute to, and it becomes a vicious cycle. If your real life circumstances have changed, please let us know, and we can try to find a solution, which may include taking a leave of absence.
3. Sim Appropriately
There are three main points to 'simming appropriately': correct content, correct knowledge, and correct actions.
- Correct Content
- When you sim, take extra care to remove characterizations, descriptions, thoughts, dialogs, anything your character would not be privy to. For instance, remove the way the previous player described the scene along with dialogs you might not have heard and similar things. After you do that, move on to fill in your own descriptions based on what your own character experience. When this is done well it can really give readers a great insight into your character, and how they perceive things.
- Correct Knowledge
- Starfleet Officers are the tops in their field, and can be assumed to possess basic proficiency in all fields. Any officer would know how to operate a transporter or a dermal regenerator, for example, even if they are not experts. That said, they are not omniscient and they are not all-knowing in all fields. We would not want a great Engineer to perform open-heart surgery, and there are going to be lots of areas where officers are going to have gaps in knowledge and talents. Along with this natural lack of talent and knowledge, there will be times when a character might not know something due to rank, position, or other factors. Trying our best to write to our characters' limits as well as their strengths can make our game even better.
- Correct Actions
- We try to allow all writers to play and have fun. The best way to do that is to give them control over their own characters, in writing terms, their agency. In practical terms we let writers write their own characters' actions, thoughts and voices - including moving them, assuming they say certain things and then acting on it.
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There is a slight possible exception to this. Sometimes a set of characters might assume if orders are given a character follows them. For instance, a Department Chief orders Ensign Jones to Engineering. Unless Jones' writer specifically indicates he's not going to follow orders it's probably safe to assume he's going to make his way to engineering.
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- Another, non-obvious way of controlling a character's way is by advancing the plot in a single sim to the point other characters have little to nothing to do. This commonly occurs when a player both introduces and solves a problem in a single sim, not allowing other players any sort of input into the story. One way to guard against this is to read your sim and ask 'if I was writing for the other players, could they change the outcome, or did they just observe the entire time?'. If the other players just get to observe, that's a problem.
- Example
- A character is a security officer and before they write their scene an enemy ship decloaks. They start their sim and write that a boarding party of three materializes on the bridge. Their character springs into action, doing flips, taking cover, and killing all three members of the boarding party. In the end, there are tags for the other players, but the boarding party is dead and ultimately nothing they do will change the outcome.
- The above is a classic example of a powersim and should be avoided at all costs.
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