Table of Contents
Thick as Thieves RP : Rules
Frankly, these are not some sort of dry in-game rules, but more like general guidelines for this RP. Stick to them and the general flow of the game should stay pretty dynamic and interesting, even when nothing overly exciting is going on.
1. There is a Narrator. He is an unseen, omniscient narrator. Whatever you believe in, your mantra shall be: “The Narrator is Always Watching.” “The Narrator is Mother, the Narrator is Father.” “The Narrator is Always Right and Always Means Well” (unless he does the occassional mistake or brainfart). The Narrator is your oft-snarky, but ultimately compassionate guide, advisor and helper. Even when he's railroading you, he means well and just doesn't want your character(s) to get bogged down in pointless actions/attempts that will just cost you time and enjoyment of the RP. (Also, he looks like me in a cloak, for some unfathomable reason. And if you look hard enough in some locations in the RP, you might run into him, as a minor easter egg.)
2. If you want to speak out of character, please always notify others by writing down “OOC:” in front of the out of character paragraph you want to include in your post. OOC arguing about the game or a specific mission without notifying the other players is bad conduct and will be penalised if repeated.
3. Don't play to win, play to have fun and to explore the surrounding world and what it offers. Use your imagination, be patient, feel free to explore and ponder things. Also, don't hurry, don't rush things. Patience is the virtue of kings - and that saying counts for professional thieves and thief guild bosses even more ! Rather to be slower and methodical, than hasty and sorry. If you fail a mission or have to abandon it prematurely for whatever reason, don't worry. You can retry it again later in the future. Not indefinitely, though, as you only have three retries available. But ultimately, you can revisit a mission or quest that you didn't finish and had to put on hold.
4. If you are under the temptation of adopting a "munchkin"-like approach to the RP or your character, DON'T. You're playing to have fun together with others and to experience stuff, not to win at all costs or hoard the most loot/skills/income/knowledge/equipment/whathaveyou. Hoarding for hoarding's sake is discouraged in this game. Furthermore, you can often pull off any mission even with inferior equipment. The one thing you truly need for most missions is common sense, dry wit, thinking outside the box, as well as the will to not give up easily when you run into trouble. Trust me, you don't need a “steampunk chainsword” the size of a minivan (that you just made up ) to defend yourself from the occassional attacker.
5. Some RPs are heavy on head-on confrontational fighting, monster-slaying and the like, this RP is predominantly focused on exploration, skulking and negotiating with others. If you're hoping that your characters will be overt, military-style figures, running around and slaughtering everyone en masse, tough luck. Most of the weaponry available to you as a member of the thieving community is also more on the mundane and subtle side: Instead of enchanted warhammers, oversized bastard swords or repeater rifles, you can do well enough with just a club, falchion or shortbow/flintlock pistol. Same with armour. Why would you use bulky and loud plate armour when you need to move around lightly, swiftly and often unnoticed (or blended into a crowd) ?
6. Choose whether you want to play as a Freelancer or Fellowship/Guild member. Just as your career is constantly evolving throughout the game, so might your career plans as well. Thus, if you ever decide that being a lone wolf isn't fun anymore, you can apply to join a guild or even choose to start your own. And similarly, if you're fed up with being a guild member, you can go back to basics and become a solo thief again. Both career paths have their advantages and disadvantages, obviously, but the even more important thing to remember is that neither a freelancer, nor a guild, could survive without cooperating with each other from time to time.
7. What race and sex you choose for your character isn't that drastically important and will only affect your character in certain minor ways. You might have problems with certain individuals and groups having prejudices towards your character due to your superficial appearance, but the game is set up in a way that allows you to circumvent these problems. There is no possibility of you ever running into an NPC who'll tell you “I am never speaking to you, because you are a member of species XY.”
8. Your profession is not a rigid class, it's more of a “school of specialisation” and will be among those things that will evolve the most during a game (even moreso than your decision of whether you want to partake in a guild or do your job alone). As already mentioned earlier, professions are rather flexible in this RP. You can take as many as three professions for your own character, and he or she will specialise along those lines. However, the best numerical choice is just one or two professions at any given time. You can go for whatever professions combos you want, but certain combinations offer certain advantages (not endless ones, but they are still advantages). Just as with your general career path choice, you can decide to alter the course of your professions at any time during the game. Just don't forget that it's not an instantaneous process. If you've played the entire RP up to that point as a bureaucrat of your thieves' guild, you won't change into a skilled cat burglar over night because you decided to. And one final thing: Do not underestimate the less flashy seeming professions. Every single profession has its place in this RP's world, and in the more teamwork-focused segments, the “badass field agent” thieves will often be crippled without the “mission command” ones who do all the brainy and planning stuff.
9. The first player character to start spouting tired Monty Python references and “arrow to the knee” memes will have a terrible, mysterious curse inflicted upon them. One which hurts horribly and is hard or impossible to cure, and gives you a constant physical penalty for every single one of your actions. Kapeesh ?
10. Please, don't be rude to anyone. If you have any qualms about how the RP is currently going, use the other, separate thread, set up for discussing the state and progression of the RP. There shouldn't (and hopefully won't be) any arguments in the main RP thread. It doesn't need to get cluttered with pointless stuff. To quote LordVetinari in one of his newer RPs, “Be polite and courteous to others out-of-game. No bringing in feuds or grudges from other games. If you feel another player is not respecting your or your characters properly, please leave it to the mod. Don't go chasing that particular type of waterfall, okay ?”.
11. To prevent the RP from becoming tiring and overbearing, we will always play it in sessions. What does this mean ? Well, whenever the players decide to take a break and generally agree in front of the referee (in OOC text, of course) that they need some rest for now and will return to the adventure later, the current session (be it a meeting, mission, quest, whathaveyou…) will be “paused” and will be played from that point onward some time later. Also, every single completed mission or quest will be automatically counted as a finished session for the characters or group of characters that took part in it. This makes it easy to be a “jumping off” point, one where you similarly “pause” the current RP, before returning to it later (in a few hours, in a day, in a week, etc.).
12. The RP is set up in a way as to be modular for the characters that partake in it, and allow for “cast changes later on”. This means that we don't create a rigid set of characters at the start that will stay in the RP forever. Instead, new characters can join the RP later on, while old characters can exit (and if they wish to exit permanently, their characters will die in an accident or some such). Also, once the storyline peters out or draws more-or-less to an accepted close, it won't actually end forever. Instead, if the game has success, once a current group of players decides to “end the season”, the game eventually returns slightly later with a “new season”. New characters are introduced into a new round of the RP, which constitutes this new season. However, the slate is not wiped clean - the world exists as it did before, with the added characters, events and ramifications from the first season, even if those characters are now just NPCs and not active characters anymore. This makes the RP's world persistent, and the newcomer characters can occassionally meet up or compete with the veteran characters that populated the RP in the previous session.
13. An important character creation thing related to the tone of the setting and the RP is the tone of your player character, and his/her backstory. Please, pretty please, don't try to create a gratuitously edgy character just because you can. Think about it this way: Do you think any self-respecting thieves' guild would want a member who does things like poisoning people for the lulz, engaging in brutal gory disembowlements, raping women/whoever, dressing up like an EMO, being domineering to ohers, doing nothing but backstabbing pals, etc., etc. ? Yeah, I think they wouldn't tolerate such a figure in their ranks for more than a minute, if at all. So, use common sense, and create as flawed an antihero as you like, but please not someone who is basically a Dark Age of Comics-style caricature of a human being. To quote LordVetinari and the foreword to his RP again: “I don't want any psychotic, disturbing, uber-violent, mentally spooky, etc, characters. You may be tough, you may be mean, you can even be threatening at times…but full on psycho or whatever is right out. No serial killers, or anything like that. (…) Anyone who ignores this rule when creating a character will be asked to redo it again.”
14. Good character interaction in this RP is key, is paramount. Teamwork is always welcomed, and is actually crucial for pulling off some of the more complex missions or even quests. However, teamwork is not the be-all-and-end-all of the game, as certain missions are better dealt with on a more “lone wolf” basis. Still, you will be doing a lot of talking, eavesdropping and haggling in this RP, even in your own circle of in-game allies and pals, so you'll have to flex those little grey cells on a regular basis. Hopefully, the ultimate outcome of some better teamwork cases can result in a feeling of being outright family with your thievy mates and partners in crime. In-game, forming bonds and friendships between characters is not forbidden, even if it is between PCs and NPCs (in truth, you will sometimes need to befriend certain NPCs better before they really start cooperating with you on a desirable level, instead of begrudgingly). Romance also isn't out of the question in this RP, but the two characters involved in it need to forge a really close and good friendship together, whether just personal or professional as well.
15. Hm, out of guideline ideas for now… But I might add more later. I think these are genuinely pretty exhaustive already and cover the main possible pitfalls that could occur during the RP.
Source
The Rules (Preliminary Version, September 2014)
(Last modified on September 17th, 2014 at 10:29 AM.)