JohnSolaris

Fate/Install (based on the mechanics of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya)

Can I choose my summoned historical figure?

@Kariya

Yes. Class Cards will have their own character sheets, and players can submit those. Not just their starting ones, but subsequent ones that'll be fought in the wild too.

Fate/Install (based on the mechanics of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya)

Since this isn't getting much interest here, I've crossposted it in the advanced section. If there's more interest there, the game will be held there, with the expected complexity adjusted accordingly.

EDIT: The advanced section interest check is here.

Fate/Install (based on the mechanics of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya)

This idea has been posted in the casual section already, but it hardly received any replies, so perhaps it didn't have the right audience. I'm reposting it here, and if there's more interest, I will change my expectations of game complexity accordingly.

This is only a summary meant to convey the basic idea of what the RP will be about, with a lot of finer details left out that will be included in the actual game thread. But if you want to know now, feel free to ask questions.

As the RP is based on a spinoff of Fate/stay night, I assume that the people reading this already have at least a basic understanding of the Holy Grail War in FSN. If you don't know anything about FSN at all, but still want to join, you might have to read things up on the wiki a bit.

---

Summary:

As the title says, this will be an RP based on some of the mechanics from Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya, more specifically the Class Cards. To those who haven't read the manga or watched the anime, a Class Card is a magical card that contains the power of a Servant, which can be used in two main ways: Include, which uses a Mystic Code as a medium to manifest the Noble Phantasm or some other small part of a Servant; and Install, which merges the Class Card with its user, partially overwriting the person's existence with that of the Servant and granting the person the power, skills, and Noble Phantasms of the Servant, while changing the person's appearance and clothes to match. Thus, instead of with conventional Servants, the Holy Grail War of this RP will be fought with Class Cards.

One thing I should make clear, though, is that while this RP will use the mechanics of Prisma Illya, specifically the Class Cards and the Ainsworth Holy Grail War, it will not focus on the magical girl or loli fanservice aspects. Unless a player wants to make a magical girl character, of course, but that's a different thing altogether. This should illustrate the difference between what the title might suggest and what I'm trying to go for.

---

Setting:

The setting of this game will be one of the many parallel universes in the Type-Moon multiverse, one that's similar to Miyu's universe in Prisma Illya.

Since a few decades ago, the world had begun slowly dying, its mana drying up and being replaced by a mysterious dark particle called "Grain", which is toxic and inimical to all forms of life. Two centuries ago, a great ritual was held by the Ainsworth, Tohsaka, and Makiri families, three of the greatest magus families in the world, to attempt to reach the Root, and that ritual is now being resurrected by the Ainsworths of today to improve the world's conditions. The Holy Grail periodically summons Servants in the form of Class Cards, mindless degraded copies of the original Heroic Spirits that scatter around the world and absorb mana out of an instinctual desire to complete themselves. Seven prominent magi have been chosen by the Holy Grail to be Masters, and once a Class Card has absorbed enough mana to reach maturity, the Masters are sent to defeat and retrieve the Card. The mana gathered by the Card is sent to the Grail, while the Master who defeats the Card gains ownership of it, and becomes able to borrow its power. Masters are allowed to fight to take each other's Class Cards as well, and the Master who obtains all Cards at the end of the War becomes the victor. As the Holy Grail expends the collected energy at the end of the war to work its miracle and repair the world, the winner will be allowed a personal hand in the process, deciding the new form that the world will take and thus potentially granting one of his dearest wishes. And so the Ainsworth Holy Grail War begins, fought by seven Masters but many more Servants.

---

Some more information on Masters and Class Cards:

Class Cards are not limited to one per class, and each Master can possess multiple cards. Players can submit new Servants to be summoned, but there's no guarantee that a Servant you created is going to end up as yours. Each Master starts with a single Class Card already in his possession, and those specific seven will be one for each class, but aside from those all classes are fair game. And yes, starting Cards can be taken away by force too.

There will only be seven Masters, and each player is only allowed to create one Master character, but other non-Master characters can be created by players. The game should be focused on fun and creating an entertaining story, so I'm going to stop you if you try to abuse this to make yourself an army of followers just for the sake of winning.

---

Alternate universe considerations:

Since this is an alternate universe, none of the canon characters should appear, except the Servants, which are mostly mindless and all copies anyways. Alternate universe versions of canon characters can exist (e.g. Miyu compared to Illya), but those are still different people, and thus should have different backstories due to the alternate history. More specifically, the Ainsworth family has replaced the Einzbern family in this universe, so the Einzberns either don't exist at all, or have much less prominence.

On the other hand, many details of this particular universe are still open, so players can fill them out if they wish.

---

Lastly, a disclaimer: I am only a relatively casual Type-Moon fan. I have watched the Unlimited Blade Works anime, as well as all seasons of Prisma Illya, and read all chapters of the manga, but I have not read the original Fate/stay night visual novel or any of the supplementary materials. I have done what I believe to be large and extensive amounts of research on the wiki, but as I said, I'm only a casual fan, and thus not obsessive about strict canon accuracy. Sure, I'd like to avoid blatantly obvious contradictions of canon when possible, but I'd rather be flexible and focused on fun, than making sure absolutely everything is as accurate as possible. So please, if you're the kind of hardcore fan who would get really bothered upon seeing me bend the setting's rules a little, this RP might not be for you. Likewise, players will be asked to try not to blatantly contradict anything in canon, but quite a bit of leeway can be given on how the setting's rules can be bent.

That's it for now; I'll give more details in the game thread if enough people are interested for the game to be a thing. So, anyone interested?

Should I give up on an RP idea if its interest check thread receives little to no replies?

It also helps you bump your stuff up on the list to make sure people are seeing it towards the top of the page. Sometimes people don't scroll down al that far.

@ELGainsborough

If I bumped the thread more than just a few times, it'd just make myself look desperate and other people annoyed; in some forums this might not be allowed either. So that's why I haven't done it. So are you saying bumping is acceptable here if I don't overdo it?

Since you said to try at least twice, I'll probably repost it in the advanced section too.

On the other hand, what about this "Guildfall"? Was it an all-around decrease in activity or whatever?

Should I give up on an RP idea if its interest check thread receives little to no replies?

While the actual game sections do seem to have concise thread titles that mostly just contain the games' names, the threads in the interest check sections all seem to be a bit more descriptive than that. I can't say for sure what those trends mean exactly, so someone more well-versed in this forum's culture would have to enlighten me on that.

I have my reasons for bringing up lore accuracy, but it ultimately comes down to a matter of personal preference anyways, so I don't think I need to press it further. Unless you really want to know, of course.

Should I give up on an RP idea if its interest check thread receives little to no replies?

First, I think it's important we actually look at your interest thread instead of make judgements based on hearsay.

@BrokenPromise

Don't get me wrong, the advice is helpful, and I appreciate it. But the reason I didn't link the interest check here was because, as I said, I don't want to make it look like I'm so desperate for players that I'm using this thread as an excuse to advertise my RP. Hence why I only originally asked how many people actually look at the interest check sections and how reliable those actually are. If you're willing to help regardless, of course I'm going to accept it.

#1) The tread title is too long in my opinion. A shorter title will almost always get more interest than a longer one. "Fate/Install" is fine. "Fate/Install (Fate/stay night RP, based on the mechanics of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya)" is too long and might actually stop an interested party from checking it out. As a Fate/Stay night fan, I get it's a FSN RP without the explanation. The goal is to lure them into the interest check/OOC subtly, not advertise everything. If you let people get curious, they will look.

@BrokenPromise

This is something I'm rather unsure about. I'm working under the assumption that most people don't bother to look at anything beyond the title, at least at a first glance, so I wanted the title to immediately and clearly convey a general idea of what the RP is going to be about. If it was just "Fate/Install", some people might be able to tell that it's a FSN RP, and even those might just write it off as just another FSN carbon copy that they'd seen a hundred times before and thus nothing particularly noteworthy; the majority of people might not glean anything from the title, and not spend the effort to actually open the thread and read it. Are you speaking from personal experience that a longer and more detailed title is more likely to turn people off than a shorter and more concise one? Without some more concrete evidence, I'm hesitant to believe that the majority of people do anything more than "judging the book by the cover", as they say.

#2) The first paragraph is mostly about what you don't want in the RP. We're trying to lure, not push away. If you're worried saying "Fate/kaleid" is going to draw in a bunch of magical girl/loli fans, strike it from your description. Don't tell me what you hate, woo me with how awesome this RP is going to be, and all the cool things I WILL be able to do in it. That's what I want to see FIRST.

@BrokenPromise

This is worth some consideration. However, to expand on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I didn't want people to think that this is just going to be another cookie-cutter FSN clone that they'd seen many times before. I personally have nothing against simply copying the premise of FSN canon, but I wasn't willing to take the chance with other people when trying to attract their attention. Additionally, one of the main points of my RP is that its main mechanics are different from the main FSN, so I wasn't sure how I could convey that without saying something like "based on the mechanics of Prisma Illya". I didn't want to say something like "Fate/stay night with a twist", since that 1) actually tells people nothing about what the twist is, and 2) would probably just end up looking tryhard and/or desperate anyways. So I do think Prisma Illya still needs to be mentioned somewhere.

You do make a good point on starting with telling about what the RP will be, instead of what it won't be, however. For now I could rearrange the paragraphs and edit them a bit, so that readers are immediately exposed to the basic summary first, instead for the fact that it won't contain loli magical girls. If you have any other suggestions, though, please tell me.

I would also watch fate stay night or unlimited blade works. UBW is an easy recommend since it's on net flicks and has really good animation. I would have a hard time taking anyone seriously if they didn't experience the original work or one of it's more popular variants.

@BrokenPromise

In the disclaimer at the end I did say I watched UBW, and did some fairly extensive research on the wiki. Do you think I should make that part more obvious or something? I didn't think it was as important, compared to actually grabbing the reader's attention and telling him what the RP will be about.

Should I give up on an RP idea if its interest check thread receives little to no replies?

@NuttsnBolts: Thanks for the advice. I believe I've conveyed the basic idea of my RP clearly enough, and without being overly restrictive. But it might not have been formatted very well, so I've reformatted it.

Is there any sort of stigma against posting the same interest check thread in multiple interest check sections? I'm not quite sure if my RP is more suitable for casual or advanced, so I'm thinking of posting the interest check in both, but I'm not sure if that'd come across as desperately trying to get attention or something.

Fate/Install (based on the mechanics of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya)

One person in another thread pointed out that an interest check thread may fail to get much attention because it's not formatted very well. As a result, I've reformatted the opening post so that it's hopefully clearer.

Should I give up on an RP idea if its interest check thread receives little to no replies?

I think an interest check is a good idea, but it's not a guarantee things will go smoothly.

@BrokenPromise

Thanks for the reply, but that's not exactly what I'm asking. I'm asking how likely an RP is to not go smoothly if the interest check doesn't receive many replies, as opposed to how likely it is to go smoothly if it does receive many replies. The game dying due to OOC drama is not going to be relevant if the game doesn't get off the ground in the first place.

Should I give up on an RP idea if its interest check thread receives little to no replies?

Though I joined over a year ago, I've hardly been active at all, so I don't actually know much about how a lot of things are usually done here. But from my observations, it seems that not many people actually browse the interest check sections. So how reliable do you guys think an interest check thread is as an indicator of how likely the RP is likely to get off the ground? More specifically, as the title says, if an interest check thread receives little to no replies, does that mean there are actually very few people interested, or that it's only because not many people browse the interest check section in the first place? To those who have been more active here, I hope you can enlighten me on the subject.