Well. Woah. I wasn't expecting that. Hooooo boy. Okay. Hah.

I should have eight lives, then, I suppose. Seven labours cleared, one standard life. Damn it, I couldn't quite become a cat. OH, WELL! XD

I was considering that it would be something that went through the previous labours, though not quite like this. If so, I was considering that perhaps I should use the main characters of my entries to reprise their positions in the labours. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut... Due to the "escalating craziness in characters result in escalating craziness in danger" perhaps I won't, haha.



I'll... I'll consider what the heck I'll do. Gosh. I'm intimidated. Haha.

And I am going to theorize that isn't a mistake. If so, what does that signify? Hm... Yeah, I have no idea right now. That's intentional, maybe. Hahahahaha. Anyways. I'm here.

Ingenious. I'll have to start attempting some Labours, then.

... Wait a... something's... the heck is...

O.o

You haven't hidden something in here, have you? "First Iteration" became fairly ironic to read after a couple of... XD

@Terminal I'm in. I have one win, so two lives, though I'll gladly accept donations.

ANYHOW~! I actually have...a rather interesting idea. First off, everyone that has won labors but doesn't want to participate should choose /someone/ participating to give their lives to. Perhaps multiple people, so as to avoid the penalty for transferring multiple lives. Then they should enter the first iteration with the specific goal of dying, so the rest of the lives belong to their recipients. <3

The next part of this is that, perhaps, we who wish to play should team up. I see nothing in the rules that disallows working together to overcome this challenge. If people team up and write one character together, theoretically that would allow more lives (from all players on the team!) It'd also mean that there's more minds working together. To further that idea, I believe we should make characters who will assist each other, or at least end up doing so if not starting that way initially. While perhaps meeting the posting deadline with multiple writers is difficult, teams could nominate one "writer" and the rest as contributors/brainpower. <3 I encourage people to work together. It's us against Mr. Termite the DM, it seems. <3 Should be fun~

However, it seems more participants is better in terms of health of the thread, so it's a balance, I guess. I highly encourage people to have their posts proofread by others -- and perhaps we could set up a gdoc for this purpose -- so as to avoid silly mistakes.

I also wish to ask if there are considerations made for those of us who are typing on something where proofing and editing are more difficult, and where autocorrect is a serious issue. I know that for me personally, my Kindle makes an accurate, neat, and grammatical post a nigh-unreachable dream, and that while I can make a reasonable effort to be comprehensible, thorough editing is pretty much impossible. Accurate typing is difficult, and the time required to fix the errors generated by use of an onscreen keyboard makes writing nightmarish. Also my Kindle seems to have issues and can think it has received input when in fact it has not. Indeed, sometimes it enjoys closing tabs all on its own. *sigh*

You mention that minor errors might be useful to adjust your manner of writing. I find this interesting. I also wonder if consideration will be given for narrative style and the voice of the character whose perspective is being used. I do hope it will. Additionally, I wonder how strict you are going to be in terms of what constitutes an error. For example: there are stylistic rules that different people handle with varying degrees of attentiveness, like placement of certain commas (the most obvious example, of course, is the Oxford comma, but there are other instances where one might or might not use a comma and it's a matter of how one wishes the sentence to flow), the use of a conjunction to start a sentence or a preposition to end it, and how one deals with pronouns for a single entity of indeterminate gender. If there are to be consequences that pertain to what in the end is a personal choice even if perhaps not technically correct (and there are debates over what are claimed to be the "official" rules for these and other issues), I would like to know. More serious transgressions, such as the egregiously erroneous use of "like" in places where it might be put conversationally but not in formal writing, or deliberate technical violations done for effect, are also a concern.

And...what the heck, Term. You know, I'm sure, that you've got *counts* ten nested posts there, right? And that all of them are not the same, though I only noticed the difference between the first and the rest.



All in all this looks very interesting. I'm debating who I wanna use. Someone clever, and probably brave...but not very powerful. But in the end, a character being broken is determined entirely by how they are played. So a literal god might not be broken if played well, and an ordinary Walmart cashier might be broken if played poorly. Is this judged by abilities or by how the character is played and the intent of the writer? I'm hoping the latter. ^.^

Think I covered everything. For now, at least. WOO!

Oh! Right. Since a character's believability and their suitability for the setting and so forth are dependent upon the setting itself, are we submitting characters before or after the reveal of the setting?

When you say we must use our own characters, ones we created, I wish to make sure I understand the intent here. I have characters I've created that other people played and then returned to me. I have ones that I didn't technically conceptualize, but which I turned from concept to character, and which are entirely mine. I have characters that I was given permission to adopt for use from others, and ones I was given and then reworked a great deal (these I'm guessing are out). I also have characters that are entirely mine but were designed for use in a fandom, or in a world that was not entirely original. Which of these are and are not permitted.

Additionally, given that we have 48 hours to reply, and that at times one person may be dependent upon another person's post before they may post themselves, and that will cut down the time from the full 48 to potentially far less, how do you plan to handle this so as to be fair to all participants? I have no problem with the 48 hour limit, but I do wish to have a full 48 or at least very close to post, and not merely a couple (and I've had this happen to me in other places for assorted reasons).

I also wish to ask if there are considerations made for those of us who are typing on something where proofing and editing are more difficult, and where autocorrect is a serious issue.

Given the nature of the roleplay, no. It is intended as a merciless sudden-death bonus round, and I already stated I am not making exceptions for scheduling - why would I for other issues? Make do and plan accordingly.

You mention that minor errors might be useful to adjust your manner of writing. I find this interesting. I also wonder if consideration will be given for narrative style and the voice of the character whose perspective is being used. I do hope it will. Additionally, I wonder how strict you are going to be in terms of what constitutes an error. For example: there are stylistic rules that different people handle with varying degrees of attentiveness, like placement of certain commas (the most obvious example, of course, is the Oxford comma, but there are other instances where one might or might not use a comma and it's a matter of how one wishes the sentence to flow), the use of a conjunction to start a sentence or a preposition to end it, and how one deals with pronouns for a single entity of indeterminate gender. If there are to be consequences that pertain to what in the end is a personal choice even if perhaps not technically correct (and there are debates over what are claimed to be the "official" rules for these and other issues), I would like to know. More serious transgressions, such as the egregiously erroneous use of "like" in places where it might be put conversationally but not in formal writing, or deliberate technical violations done for effect, are also a concern.

There can be stylistic differences in writing that remain technically flawless in composition - as demonstrated by @mdk, the showoff. As you noted though, people may make specific stylistic or aesthetic decisions in writing a passage that substantially alter its flow - and for those of you who have been paying attention to my reviews, you will know I am a stickler for passage structure that reads awkwardly. Such stylistic decisions might affect what I report to you, but have no practically meaningful effect on the information being presented. In effect, there is no 'error' too small for me to ignore, but some are so small or limited that any changes rendered are sufficiently negligible as to be irrelevant. You may find that distortions caused by deliberately erroneous stylistic choices will not greatly impede your ability to perceive the Iteration.

Or in more simple terms: The only errors you should be mindful of are errors serious enough that, in accumulation, would detrimentally impact your ability to read and interpret my own passages if I were to adopt those same errors.

Since I am feeling generous, here is an example incorporating your point regarding gender identification. Those who know me well are probably aware that I loath gender pronouns and, in casual conversation, will refer to most individuals as 'they' - and I typically assert that the usage is grammatically correct, though I expect there are plenty who would disagree with me. I will be aiming to keep my initial responses more generalized and free of such personalized clutter so as to avoid ambiguity. By default, the meaning of everything I write should be immediately apparent and clear. If you then began using they as a gender neutral first-person pronoun, I would likely adopt that method of referral, and that might not detract terribly from your ability to understand what I write - unless combined with other ambiguous usages of various pronouns or the word they specifically that would render its usage ambiguous. You could argue that such usage is not an error, and I would be inclined to agree - it is less me being strict about punishing errors and more the contextual reality adapting to what you present it with.

In essence: As the spiteful Termite I am, I will be going out of my way to pick out and incorporate 'stylistic choices' from your writing that make it harder to understand overall. I might also incorporate certain elements of your writing that, while harmless on their own, might synergize with other seemingly innocuous elements of writing to create an unintelligible mess. I will not be so unreasonable as to create patterns of error that do not exist, but I will take advantage of even the smallest genuine mistakes made.

@Terminal ...I'm not entirely sure what this is going to mean, but alright. I certainly wish to join and see what happens.

By the way, is it fair to try one round with an unwinable scenario, so as to get information for later rounds without losing lives?

Oh! Right. Since a character's believability and their suitability for the setting and so forth are dependent upon the setting itself, are we submitting characters before or after the reveal of the setting?

When you say we must use our own characters, ones we created, I wish to make sure I understand the intent here. I have characters I've created that other people played and then returned to me. I have ones that I didn't technically conceptualize, but which I turned from concept to character, and which are entirely mine. I have characters that I was given permission to adopt for use from others, and ones I was given and then reworked a great deal (these I'm guessing are out). I also have characters that are entirely mine but were designed for use in a fandom, or in a world that was not entirely original. Which of these are and are not permitted.

Submit them now. Characters which you have made explicitly to participate in a certain fandom - such as Homestuck for example - are fine. Characters you have adopted from other people entirely are not, even if they have undergone substantial reinterpretation and development since then - if you identify them as being the same continuous entity, they are not really yours, are they? Characters you made using a concept as inspiration are fine, since the concept is not the character itself. If you made it initially, it is probably ok to use.

Additionally, given that we have 48 hours to reply, and that at times one person may be dependent upon another person's post before they may post themselves, and that will cut down the time from the full 48 to potentially far less, how do you plan to handle this so as to be fair to all participants? I have no problem with the 48 hour limit, but I do wish to have a full 48 or at least very close to post, and not merely a couple (and I've had this happen to me in other places for assorted reasons).

I intend to use the forum timestamps. The instant a post reads as "Two days ago," the deadline is reached. As for the consideration of needing to await another poster to respond - that is but another way in which the Contextual Reality is Not Your Friend. You may need to stretch some of your context muscles if you suspect you might not have the time to wait for the other party to post - perhaps their character got caught up in an awkward pause of some kind? Or perhaps you did not wait for them to finish what they were saying or doing? Reality does not hang up because of reliance on one person...unless you let it hang up and start to go skippy bonkers.

I cannot promise that the circumstances will always be fair. I can promise that I will generally avoid placing you in layered circumstances of contingent behavior with other posters since I acknowledge the issue may be problematic. I will leave it to your interacting with other posters to create that complication. My simple advice to you otherwise is to not treat the roleplay as a baton-pass relay race. That sounds like a good way to get all of your characters killed.

@Terminal ...I'm not entirely sure what this is going to mean, but alright. I certainly wish to join and see what happens.

By the way, is it fair to try one round with an unwinable scenario, so as to get information for later rounds without losing lives?

The first round is intentionally going to be a touch softer than subsequent iterations, but I am afraid that is the only 'warm-up' you will be getting.

@Terminal are we allowed to team up with multiple people giving lives to one character? To team up IC or OOC? and other potentially questionable interpretations of the rules, such as deliberately making a round unwinnable for future round benefits?

What is your opinion on toons? In general, are you going by the potential for abuse, or just by the actual implemented abuse of strong powers, in terms of how difficult and warped things get? How is character death defined and determined?

@Terminal are we allowed to team up with multiple people giving lives to one character? To team up IC or OOC? and other potentially questionable interpretations of the rules, such as deliberately making a round unwinnable for future round benefits?

What is your opinion on toons? In general, are you going by the potential for abuse, or just by the actual implemented abuse of strong powers, in terms of how difficult and warped things get? How is character death defined and determined?

As to multiple posters per character: It allows me to take more lives away from you all on a per-capita basis, so knock yourselves out.

As to the other questions,

See what happens.

Well, I"m not talking in a warmup sense. I'm talking in a don't-lose-lives-and-have-to-drop-out sense. I mean, I didn't even come across TTL until something like six or eight labors in, and while I have a vested interest in participation, the fact that my chars can only die twice is a severe limitation, as it would be for anyone who did not have the chance to participate. I realize this is part of the point. That doesn't mean I"m not going to try to maximize potential for myself and others.

...Or, perhaps, we could request you run one of these with slightly more generous terms -- a "repeat until someone wins" would be good. No trophies, but the idea is the same. ^.^

...Is there a limit to characters? As I have no idea what they'll be facing, I don't know who would work well, nor who would fit the setting properly. A fantasy character in a hard scifi setting, for example, tends to be an issue. ...And the reverse can also be an issue, and result in a mental breakdown, if one remains true to the character.

As for characters given to me...the way I view characters is...a bit fuzzy. So I have multiples of the same character, and those /are/ the same character. And then I have /my/ version of a character someone else created, which I was given permission to adopt, and if I made any changes of significance I would credit the original's person, but I would not consider it to be the same character in the way that I would call two manifestations of my little Seer girl the same character. In a sense, every time a base is used, it's a new character. In others, one may gather the various manifestations of every character I've ever played and group them into sets that are more or less the same character, even if they're not truly identical. Given that with characters that hold their origins with the ideas of others I generally start using them to support characters who originate with me, or have been turned into my characters, and that means that even when I change them they generally maintain a number of the same relationships. Where I would rename a character originating with me because of significant divergence from the previous concept, I don't do that as often when the original idea obtained for the supporting/adopted character once they take on a life of their own. After that, divergences gain new names as most of my characters do, but the first change does not usually do so. There is a clear line dividing the instances of a character made by someone else that they use, and any instance where I use them, and that line is actually a bigger division than exists between many of my own characters that I consider separate.

...So the short answer to this is that I don't think my idea of which characters are completely mine is the same as which ones are the same as a character someone else uses. This is probably not relevant in the end, but I do enjoy discussing the concept. ^.^;;

@Terminal

>take more lives away
It wouldn't, because the death of a character is one life lost, and if lives have been pooled for said character by multiple people, it would then cost a total of one life, not one life per person, if the answer to my question of permissions was indeed yes. It sounds like the answer is actually no.

>see what happens
When one only has two lives to work with, it is not exactly easy to see what happens. And I have a significant advantage over anyone that might wish to play but has not won any Labors. *tilts head* I'm suspecting that I may be quite frustrated simply by how difficult you make it to play, and while I like challenging myself in the sense of IC things, OOC challenges such as you speak of are a bit less appealing. *considering* My feelings have become mixed. *sigh* Then again, also in a bad mood at the moment. Maybe I'll sit the first one out. Or the second, given that I can then join the third....

So I have three lives, I think (One pass, one accolade (well it was a bonus category in number 1) and one as my standard starter life.)

I give one life to @shylarah, giving her a total of three. @terminal ?

I suppose it would in fact be possible if unsporting to have another poster assisting in the creation/handling of a character as long as only one of you actually posted for them. Given the anonymity of the PM system, there is little to nothing I could do to stop you if you really wanted to anyway, so I will concede that point.

Also, to reiterate: The entire point of the roleplay is as a merciless sudden-death bonus round. The reason there are significant OOC difficulties is because it is still, technically, a contest. The rules present are there both to ensure a small measure of parity in addition to keep things running smoothly, keep activity going and steady, and also to prevent it from malingering on death's door for months on end. There may be future Final Hazards post each successful series of the Twelve Labours - or not. We have to see how this one goes.

@RomanAria Duly noted. Your tallies have been updated on my list and should show as much once I get around to posting it.

@RomanAria aww, thank you~

@Terminal ...but TTL stuff was more of a personal challenge, not a contest. *tilt head* eh, whatever. I'll certainly try. So what do you want in terms of submitted characters? A brief blurb? Concept? detailed history? General skills? ...Just a name?

@RomanAria aww, thank you~

@Terminal ...but TTL stuff was more of a personal challenge, not a contest. *tilt head* eh, whatever. I'll certainly try. So what do you want in terms of submitted characters? A brief blurb? Concept? detailed history? General skills? ...Just a name?

Knew I was forgetting something.

Expect a character sheet template tomorrow. I will likely post it along with the tally list.

It is a shame you are apparently retired from roleplaying, since I imagine writing with you would be something of a pleasure

I should have known this day would come.

Both a Roster with life totals and a character template have been added to the OP. Here is a copy of the Roster in order to ping (most) of the relevant parties.

-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives
-@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade)
-@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade)
-@Doc Doctor 2 Lives
-@Holmishire 11 Lives (1 Accolade)
-@JulienJaden 2 Lives
-@jumpadraw 2 Lives
-@mdk 12 Lives (4 Accolades)
-@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades)
-@Psyga315 4 Lives
-@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah]
-@Sen 2 Lives
-@shylarah 3 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria]
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives
-@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives