In some sort of introduction, I believe I should mention that this isn't my roleplay. It belongs to our glorious leader, @Gowi. I just sorta make tea and tell Gowi the ideas look pretty but for now, I'm doing some intense interest checking! Without further ado, a word from our leader:

"Pariah (or Pariah Online) is a semi-linear collaborative story based around the concepts of anime serials like Log Horizon, Sword Art Online, Overlord, Familia Myth, and the grandfather of the “trapped in a game” framework, .hack//SIGN. You’ll notice there is only one real outlier in these influences in that of my mention of Familia Myth, which I’ll admit has more to do with me liking how that particular serial looks at things like guilds, dungeons, and progression in an interestingly designed way. Anyway, as you can imagine the central idea of this roleplay is the whole “trapped in a game” plot device and the hurdles that comes with it. But as with inspired settings, this is wholly original— this is not set in any fandom and is not an amalgamation of them.

But with that said, I definitely still have ideas for Pariah— and I hope for those who are newly interested and those who have put up with me are interested enough to invest their time and energy into writing collaborative stories in this setting."

Pariah is not like conventional virtual reality modules and as such does not use traditional levelling systems. Instead, Pariah holds a framework that is designed to allocate things with a state of the art progression system that revolves around benchmarks, achievements, and attributes. With this it can be simplified generally in an easy context— if you want to be skilled with a knowledge, item, or weapon then you need to put forward effort into experiencing the world with that aspect. With this system, level becomes simply a number used to mark progression and not an extent of a character's power. A character's power is entirely defined by the actions they took to reach a higher level. If the character spent most of their time using a sword and killing monsters then they will become proficient in using swords and killing monsters. Alternatively, if the character chooses to spend all their time baking bread then they'll make the best damn bread around.

The character will initially start with a basic level in all skills which will remain hidden. When the character begins to specialize into these skills by using them (i.e. swinging a sword, baking bread) the skill will become visible. Much like in real life, proficiency stems from practice and abilities are learned through experiment. With abilities, pressing a button simply does not work. The character must independently swing the sword or cast the spell and if the system registers their attempts correctly, it will perform the act.

This system heavily favors independence and allows characters to be specialized how the user wishes to specialize them. It might not be efficient or even good but it is possible. Want to be a plate armour-wearing mage? Go for it. Want to be a rogue that drags aggro, sure! Point is, the player is free to build their character how they wish to.

In terms of threat assessment given the nature of the augmented reality that is Pariah, there are no visual statistic boxes of the people or the icons within the world. But Pariah’s creator sees it more as another reality than a video game and as such doesn’t expect people to assess threat beyond their own common sense, research, and observational skills. Essentially the lesson is be wary of your environment, monsters, and hostile icons or players.

A pathos represents one of the several virtue-oriented fraternities in the world of Pariah and serve as factions that the player affiliates with to not only serve as the central sanctum that provides shelter as well as esoteric information regarding the path the pathos represents. These pathos are conventionally defended and led by their followers.

There you have it - that was awful fancy! Anyways, if your interest has stayed fairly constant through all of this then just pop over to our OOC and say hello! Thanks for reading!

_{Guess I'll go make some tea now...}