Jig

Hogwarts World Tour

Yep :)

Hogwarts World Tour

He looks less like a introspective child prodigy in Ravenclaw and more of a lumberjack! XD

@Gowi

I think he looks more like if Dudley joined a boyband and got his hair bleached.

Hogwarts World Tour

In which case you're golden so stick him in the CTab when you're ready :)

Hogwarts World Tour

How come he can speak German? Anyway, I like him, though I'd prefer it if you could find a photograph for him.

Hogwarts World Tour

The United Kingdom

Nation: The United Kingdom
Landmass: Same as muggle equivalent - England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland
Politics: The United Kingdom is only now a stable country following the Second Wizarding War, and scars still run deep. Kingsley Shacklebolt remains the Minister for Magic, and has driven through an agenda of uncompromising undoing of anti-muggle and muggleborn legislation of both the Thicknesse and Fudge administrations to broad public approval. However, some people who wouldn’t have gone as far as Lord Voldemort (or who simply evaded capture in the aftermath of the war) have, as renegades, remain vehemently opposed to these changes, resulting in both political tension in the Ministry of Magic and rare muggle/muggle-born murders complete with Dark Mark in the sky. These are - finally - beginning to abate.
During this period of healing, the United Kingdom became naturally introspective and has not engaged much with the rest of the wizarding world, especially since it was largely ostracised, at least by Europe, during Voldemort’s reign. It is now becoming an outward-looking nation once again, thanks in part to the O’Lustrum Bursary.
History: Consult the Harry Potter books ;)
Points of Interest: We'll not be touring the UK, so, nothing to see here
Episodes: Presumably the first episode will at least begin in the United Kingdom, which is where we’ll be setting off from.

Hogwarts World Tour

Good to go.

In other news, I threw some slightly expanded ideas into the Episodes section of the first post on the Character Tab. If any of you want to shoot some ideas into the pool too, please do. Once we have a load, I'll make a poll so you can all vote for your favourites.

Hogwarts World Tour

Sober sheet readthrough comments:

@Gowi - good to go. Throw her in the CS tab when you're ready. If you could do me a favour and make the font colour a little bit brighter, that'd be handy. Then again, my laptop is currently outside so maybe it's just screen glare
@Smarty0114 - have PM'd you about the similarities between our characters
@Kirah - would appreciate if you'd bodge your stats down a bit or give yourself a few weaknesses. Two tens, a nine, and only one weak spot is maybe a bit much
@McHaggis - good to go. Throw him in the CS tab when you're ready

Yep, I know I said the CS tab was for my use only but if anybody wants to edit stuff, I'm not exactly gonna C&P everything across all the time. For those of you that'll be running multiple characters, please post them in separate posts so I can link to them individually.

Hogwarts World Tour

Will Lawrence

Player: Jig

Name: Will Lawrence

Date of Birth: 17/9/1988

Gender: Male

Blood Status: Pure

Wand: Oak, Unicorn tail hair, 14^½ inches, rigid

Personality: Will’s smart and he knows it, and, inevitably, has become rather smug over the years. Although he works very hard for his achievements, he suspects that he actually might not have to and is guilty of overestimating his own talents and abilities, while conveniently forgetting or dismissing his genuine weak points, both academically and socially. As a result, people can find him frequently obnoxious, although it’s an undeniable fact that it’s generally pretty useful to have Will on-side as he really is quite capable. He does try very hard to be liked and to do the right thing, in a way that can easily show that he’s trying - some people may find this endearing, while others might find it slimy.
Will is not used to failure, and consequently does not like losing or not succeeding - in such situations, he simply doesn’t know what to do, resulting in otherwise uncharacteristic gracelessness and temper tantrums. He is highly dismissive of muggles, while meaning them no ill will.

Appearance: With the exception of slightly bucked teeth, Will is a good-looking lad, but looks come at the cost of vanity and he can be notoriously high-maintenance. While he's not prissy, he does put a lot of effort into looking good, both in terms of his body and his overall appearance. Regular exercise (both cardio and muscular, about which he will not shut up), plenty of magical cosmetic products and enchantments (about which he is much quieter), and a diet of tedious care have made him a healthy-looking human. To top it off, he has a tendency to wear clothes that are at least 20% more formal than any given situation requires, because that's what the ideal young man does (probably).

Background: The Lawrence family is a small wizarding family with relatively few connections that other pure-bloods might enjoy, and, although both of Will’s parents have magical blood, he has one grandparent and two great-grandparents who are muggle-borns, so ‘pure-blood’ might be a misnomer in this instance. During the second wizarding war, Will’s muggle-born grandfather was sent to Azkaban (where he died), and so there is great personal resentment there. Will’s mother is a healer at St Mungo’s (and attended the Battle of Hogwarts to patch up the wounded), while his father is a racing broom manufacturer, and, between them, represent many different branches of magic, possibly accounting for Will’s all-round magical prowess.

Aspirations: While the world is Will’s oyster, and he knows it, his most immediate goal is to become an auror, although he has no plans to stop there.

House: Hufflepuff

Academic Record: Will has a glowing academic record and is tipped for great things. He aced his OWLs and performed well in his NEWTS (Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Arithmancy), while being appointed both Prefect and captain of the duelling club in his fifth year. Many in his year, including himself, expected him to be appointed Head Boy, although that accolade was given to non-Prefect Quidditch goon Darren, which both astonished Will and made him just a teensy bit salty.

Skills:

• Transfiguration: 8
• Charms: 8
• Herbology: 4
• Potions: 6
• Defence Against the Dark Arts: 8
• Duelling: 9
• Flying:6
• Muggle Studies: 1
• Care of Magical Creatures: 1
• Healing: 4
• Arithmancy: 7

Was too drunk to post him last night with the result that two people's characters have already clashed with him. ;_;

Hogwarts World Tour

Drunk Announcement

[@Everybody]
Woke up still drunk and in a room that's so unbelievably fucking hot that I'm probably going to be poking ice cubes down my smalls until further notice. I have an electric fan pointed directly at my face but the air in the room I'm in is so fucking warm it's actually contributing nothing to the whole 'Jig melts into a jiggly pile of goop' situ. Incidentally, all of my 'I expect everybody to see this' posts will be flagged with a centered heading like this one. Please keep an eye out for them, because, ya know, important.

Have seen character submissions and thank you for them but haven't quite gone through them with my usual Laser of Justice^TM yet because of aforementioned drunkery and the forthcoming ice cube situation.

Yes, everybody that has posted in this thread or the interest check and that would like to still submit characters may do so including secondary characters.

That said, the label of 'small group' is looking more tenuous by the minute and tbh there's nobody here that I don't think could play at the kind of standard I would ask of them, which is wonderful and also horrendous because it's gonna make crowd control difficult or arbitrary - but I shall endeavour to make sure that everybody gets to take part. What I shall therefore do, is fire my Laser of Justice^TM at

1) Any further participation apps from people I haven't played with before and people who haven't already posted in here or in the interest check

2) Similar characters. If two people present similar characters I'm going to ask them to work something out to distinguish them. Currently, heh, this means myself and @smarty0114 - sending you a PM shortly

3) Nobody has suggested they might do this, but third characters won't be accepted

4) Inactive characters or players. I will have an Official GM Rule^{Also TM} on inactivity which will simultaneously be both lenient and merciless because I am a creature of paradox

5) Characters who don't have an established role in the group dynamic, since all of us understanding the group is going to be twice as important since there's, well, about twice as many of us as I was expecting. This doesn't mean you need to be friends/enemies with everybody and I'm sure some characters will be more or less strangers to some others, but I do expect all of you to be talking to each other, based on having read each others' sheets, to work out some context for the group (and to make this info public so we all know what we're doing)

Currently I'm going to leave things in a state of flux so things can hopefully iron themselves out organically and it all turns out wonderful. What this means for your characters is that they're all more or less accepted. Hopefully none of the above seems overly demanding or stringent. I'd also encourage people at this stage to start dibbsing countries and shouting out Episode recommendations.

If, of course, having watched all the movies multiple times is the type of sufficient knowledge you're lookin' for.

@HalfOfLancelot

The films tend to be a bit skimpy on the details but if you're willing to HP Wikia anything you're uncertain of, shouldn't be a problem.
also they're shite
:D

@Kirah - could you unbold the body text of your CS because that's gonna upset my poor poor eyes

Jig out

Reputation & Influence

1) Believe half of what you see, not what you hear

Speaking as GM and as a player, I will not join an RP with more than one player that I simply can't work with. This is brutal, but true. I do this for fun and self-development, and while people who are willing to learn and teach are great people to work with because they test you in surprisingly similar ways, people who will not patiently learn or patiently teach, as I discovered in a game reasonably recently (by my own standards), are people that I simple cannot work with. I won't fight other players to 'work something out' - I like to be able to trust others to work with me to find a compromise. A good example, I think, is that of myself and @McHaggis in my latest game, literally in the last twenty-four hours. We were both pitching for a mutually exclusive role, but because we have played together in the past and there is a degree of trust, we were able to work together on a compromise that serves both our characters well.

If I didn't know McHaggis previously, this wouldn't have been possible. I would have been reluctant to suggest an idea without knowing how she would respond and without being confident it was a good idea she would work with based on her interests as a player and trust in her, her trust in me as a fellow player and in this case a GM, and an understanding of how she worked.

What I'm getting at (and, I have to say, reluctantly), is that understanding of other players matters. I won't say reputation, as I've played with other players with great reputations and found them to let me down and, I'm ashamed to say, feel I have something of a reputation I've also dishonoured to other GMs through one reason or another - so hopefully no hard feelings either way there. But, ultimately, sometimes you know who you click with and who knows what you're getting at, and that they're good people to focus on. From there, I feel one can expand and take a chance on people who're somewhat untested in a given group without worrying too much as group should carry them in (as I found with the newcomers to the reasonably successful if short-lived Wolf Manor).

Tl;dr - know your strengths, as a group. Then, build on them.

2) Know yourself, know others

A funny question. I feel like I've earned something of a reputation, which may or may not be borne out through retrospective appraisal, for murder mysteries, based on Wink Murder and Wolf Manor, both of which were too short-lived, mostly based on my own failures but also unfortunate timing with regards to a personal meltdown. Either way, at least while the two game were running simultaneously, I was highly buoyed and thrilled by people indicating in this section of the forum that they were reading the games that I was driving (though I by no means take full credit for them - good players are as important as the GM), even though they weren't participating in them. They were interested in and actively following the storylines, presumably based on interest in the plot (which was me) or the writing (the players).

Now, it's funny. Even though I feel I screwed both games up, through, as I will freely admit, over-ambitiousness and personal distractions (in both cases), they were, I feel, were well-regarded at the time and highly valued by the players now. Your (@Gowi) positive attitude to Wink Murder, which I really feel I personally felt I really let down, both for myself and others, inspires my current profile title, and, apparently, you regard me as a decent GM. That means a lot to me. But, at the same time, while violently doubting myself, and trying to foolishly start a game called Hardly Divine at an obviously inopportune time for me to take that commitment seriously (while asking others to do the same), I maybe have something, at least among my friends, as something you might call a 'reputation'.

So that's the background I'm coming from as I return to RPG. Nobody is perfect. But people that 'get' what I do seem to really 'get' it, in spite of my very obvious flaws. Then again, people who might've been judging me might've kept schtum out of politeness or understanding or both or some other reason. You never truly know what people think of you - but there are some people, I find, you can rely on time and time again to take a punt on your ideas, or who bring their ideas to you based on mutual understanding of what kind of response each can expect. I don't want to say 'strangers are bad' and I try to make a point of giving my games nowadays space for newcomers to prove themselves.

Tl;dr - I don't think forum-wide reputation is a thing. Knowing the circles you're working in and the expectations and eccentricities of them is key, not that I advocate elitism or exclusionism.

3) Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

My reputation is, I think, a mixed one. Some things I drop out of just because it doesn't 'click', and some games I've had to allow to die because of my own failings and distractions. I fully expect people to take my strengths and weaknesses on board as they assess me as both a player and a GM. The thing is, RPing is so frequently random or dependent on factors beyond one's prescience that it's simply not a reasonable proposition to judge people forever based on their mistakes nor to be so over-awed by players who seem good only to find oneself feeling let down. All of this stuff changes from game to game anyway: I recently tried an NRP properly (rather than previous half-hearted efforts) to find myself simultaneously bogged down in the difficulties and thriving on the opportunities. Everything is always in flux in this field and to try to control for every variable is a fool's mission.