Tips for the New(-ish) Player: Personal Forum

[Cearnach]

Playing by post can be a messy experience! The idea of an entire day happening simultaneously can throw the new player. Fortunately, there is a way to keep track of things: your Personal Forum.

When your character submission has been approved by the gm team (that's Fukurokujin and me), you will be assigned to your proper clan. When that happens, you're going to notice immediately that the color of your name on the forum changes to signal you are part of that group.

But the other, far more radical, thing will be that a forum will appear at the very bottom of the list of forums bearing the name of your clan. That is the Clan Private Forum, where you can speak out of character with your clanmates. You will find nice things there from the gm team like your clan goals, your commodities to trade, your slate of marriage candidates, and your clan mailbox.

You will also find the link to the third nested forum: your personal forum. It will contain your character sheet, your background, and your house business (what you submit to us, we return to you!). But that is not the limit of its utility. You can use that space to:

* Keep track of your daily schedule. That is, what threads your are in, with whom, and where. It can even be a good idea to write down your intention for that thread so's you don't forget!

* Ask questions of the gm team. We check personal fora regularly, so if you need to ask a question that ought not be in the public OOC questions area, you can do so here and we'll get back to you.

* Keep track of your relationships with other characters, including favors done and information accrued.

* Keep track of your equipment.

* Spend your experience points.

* And plot and scheme to your heart's content.

[Cearnach]

An important Personal Forum activity: Ghosting Instructions.

Because of people playing in different timezones and pesky time-sucking things like work and sleep, a person can sometimes find their character in a combat while they themselves are unable to roll for them. That could lead to a long delay as each player comes to their initiative, sometimes bending the delicate relationship that the game has with time.

In order to make sure that that does not happen, players are asked to place in their personal forums a post called "Ghosting Instructions." It could live with your combat reminders and the like or be its own thing, but it should include the following:

Your attack rolls (ranged, melee, and grapple)
Your go-to spells and their associated rolls, if throwing spells around is what you do.
Your Wound Counts
Your Armor TN
Your instructions about your default behavior in combat.

We will then "ghost" you, that is roll for you while you are away, if it has been your turn for a goodly while and you are not around.

You may, if you know that you are going to away from your keyboard and your character is in combat, choose to give more tailored ghosting instructions for that combat. If you do so (it's usually a good idea!), please label those instructions with the name of the combat thread so that we can identify them.