General Rules & Guidelines

Sat Aug 05, 2023 6:00 am

General Rules

Registration Rules

To roleplay on this site, a player must have an approved character;
To register a character, visit our Character Registration forum and complete the Character Registration Sheet, and then post it as a new topic in that forum;
Once a character is approved a player is free to roleplay as they see fit, so long as they are pursuant to the rules;
Once you have an approved character, you are qualified to approve or deny character applications, bloodline applications, jutsu and item applications, and character updates for your fellow players based on general site rules and guidelines;
Any three players may override the approval of denial of another member.

Common Rules

Descriptions of death, gore, and blood as well as descriptions of sexual content are allowed on this forum;
If a player is going to be absent for a period of time longer than seventy-two (72) hours, they ought to inform the rest of the forum via a thread on the Absence Board and remember to exit any topics their character(s) are currently in;
Members who hold important positions (i.e. political figures, organization leaders, management of NPCs, etc.) and who take extended leaves of absence without prior warning us may have their positions revoked and transferred to another player;
Players who wish to have an alternative character (or "alt") must obtain permission from one of the members of the moderator team;
When given an alternative character, a player must control this character from their own account (separate from that of the player's first character);
Players are not allowed to approve or deny registries with which they are personally involved, or from which they stand to either benefit or lose;
In the event of a moderator team ruling on something that is not explicitly stated in the rules, a post on the forums is required to validate the ruling, and chatbox screenshots, private messages, Discord conversations, etc. are not to be considered valid;
As there exists a spirit of the rules, there may be instances wherein a player is acting pursuant to the letter of the rules, but might still infringe upon the instance that the rules were designed to prevent;
In the event that a player infringes upon the rules as they were intended, but not necessarily as they were written, a member of the moderator team has the authority to correct the rules as they are written to include the instance of unintentional infringement.

Roleplaying Rules

Characters should be as in-theme as possible, and characters that are too far into parody or caricature may be denied, though some exaggeration may be allowed;
Characters should act in the way that their personality was described upon registration (i.e. changes in personality should be properly roleplayed out);
Characters cannot be killed, maimed, restrained, etc., without the express consent of that character's player;
Players cannot dictate the actions of characters other than their own (this is called, in some instances, "godmodding", "powerplay", or "bunnying");
Players may not use information obtained out-of-character (or "OOC") to benefit their characters, and all players should seek to avoid allowing any information or feelings that they have received OOC to influence the decisions or direction of their character(s);
Characters cannot perform hundreds of actions in a single post, and posts may vary in length of time (i.e. number of seconds, minutes, hours, etc.) covered, so players be realistic and write according to their situation;
No character is not allowed to be in multiple real-time locations at the same time;
A character may participate in flashback topics, taking place prior to their real-time topics;
Flashback topics must not alter the timeline in any way that would invalidate or create paradoxes of real-time topics, lest those flashbacks be voided;
Players are, as a general rule, expected to always respect the timeline of events, as mentioned above. There is no OOC waiting period for traveling between countries; however, one must always make sure their actions are consistent with the flow of time. While the timeline of events is relatively lax, the abuse or disregarding of the timeline will not be tolerated;
When entering or exiting a ward, a character must post at that ward's train station topic;
If a player makes a post and it is written in such a way that another player has difficulties in properly understanding it, they are allowed to ask that person to clarify the events of their post;
If a player asked to clarify a post refuses to do so, the post in question will be voided (i.e. will be made invalid, and treated as if nonexistent);
The above two rules are not requirements that posts must be simple or reductive, but rather that scouring a thesaurus for the most obscure terms possible in order to describe something simple (e.g how one character has sliced off the head of another character) will not be tolerated;
Players are encouraged that, as a cooperative writing medium, they ought to remember that when one engages in roleplay that the practice is not solely about the enjoyment that they themselves derive from writing, but about the enjoyment that others receive from reading their posts as well;
Threads labelled as "private topics" are provided protection from outside players involving themselves with your character or the events of the thread;
If this protection is deemed exploitative, or used too frequently to deprive or disenfranchise the abilities of others to interact with certain events in a meaningful way, the moderator team may deem a topic as non-private.

Posting Rules

Posts made in-character must generally be at least five (5) sentences long, except when posting an exit;
Players may write from the third or first person points of view, but must not use asterisks or similar methods of describing actions (e.g. *eats an apple* is not acceptable and will be deleted from the thread);
Instances where the above is done as satire may be exempt from this rule;
All players' posts in-character should contain (in some combination) the actions, thoughts, and speech of their character;
Players should separate these using appropriate, intuitive formats (e.g. speech written in bold, actions written roman, and thoughts written in italics);
If a character exits a thread, the character's player ought to make certain that action is clearly denoted at the end of their post;
Editing an in-character post can only be done before another player makes a post in the same thread, after which point the editing of said post requires the permission of all others in the topic;
Once any action has been taken, forty-eight (48) hours must elapse before a player may post and complete the action without intervention or response by other parties;
Absences may extend the time interval of the above rule, provided that a member of Staff is alerted to the absence;
Posting twice in a row (or "double-posting") is forbidden, unless forty-eight (48) hours have passed since the post and the player posting twice is calling a hit (pursuant to the seventh rule in this section, or "the 48-hour rule");

Activity Rules

Characters for whom their players fail to make any in-character post for more than two (2) weeks are considered inactive;
Characters determined to be inactive are not accessible (if there is any confusion as to the extent of what "accessible" means, in this sense, ask a member of the community or moderator team) by any other characters until such time as that character becomes active once more, unless in the case that permission is granted by a member of the moderator team uninvolved with the situation;
A posted absence extends the forty-eight (48) hour limit provided by the 48-hour rule to seventy-two (72) hours in order for other subsequent characters in the posting order to exit the topic (this extension also affects the other time limits contingent upon the 48-hour rule);
Characters with a posted absence are thus treated as inactive in that they are not accessible by other characters;
Any character that has been determined inactive but has not been killed is permitted to return to activity;
The moderator team has the discretion to remove any social status, or other qualities of a character return from inactivity.

The rules are subject to change as the moderator team deem necessary, most often with community review and input.