Skyguard

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Welcome! I hope you find the lodgings suitable!

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Vivi the Spooktator

Name: Vivienne Rosewood
Gender/Pronouns: Female she/her
Appearance: Vivienne is fairly tall (about 5’9”), somewhat fit (she mostly works out to maintain her figure rather than any other concrete fitness goal) and slender. She is a brunette with brown eyes and a fair complexion, which she periodically tampers with using cosmetics and hair dye. As for apparel, her dress is typically seasonally appropriate unless she is otherwise going for a particular theme. Vivienne is careful about how much skin she reveals but she is otherwise unafraid to flaunt her figure.
Personality: Vivienne is approachable (if she doesn't approach you first) and full of energy. She likes to talk about herself and is quick to bring up her YouTube channel in conversations with those unfamiliar with her show. She can be naive, but she is not stupid. Vivienne is no stranger to working hard and charming her way to success. Although she has made a career out of visiting and filming haunted attractions, Vivienne herself does not believe in ghosts nor other supernatural occurrences.
Victim
Other: Vivienne is from our of town and is visiting the Wildwood Masters Library per the recommendation of one her supposed fans. Her YouTuber handle is Vivi the Spooktator and her show is mostly about, as her tagline suggests “experiencing America’s scary stuff so you don't have to.”
Mention: @leopard wcue

Draft up! Let me know if there is anything I need to adjust.

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Sorry I have been unresponsive. I got either the Flu or COVID and have felt like death for the past couple of days. I plan on getting a oc draft up today.

New person!

Hello! I'm still pretty new here too. I hope you find what you are looking for.

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Would you like us to submit characters ideas here, or would you prefer that we wait for you to make a thread with Character Sheet templates before we submit character concepts?

Hi there!

Hello, welcome to Roleplayerguild! I hope you find what you are seeking here.

2100 ☢️ BADLAND REPUBLIC

The water AJ had ordered had been brought out to him as his meal was still being worked on in the kitchen of Stella’s Dine-In. As thirsty as he was, the water was almost the best he had ever tasted, and it was all he could do to refrain from chugging it.

Come on man, control yourself!

And then the shooting started, and it was all AJ could do to avoid spitting the precious water back out. Memories of a firefight AJ and the scavver gang he had been a part of against a Ya’ii warband came unbidden to his mind, and AJ found his reaction then reflected in his reaction now; he froze.

His paralysis lasted momentarily as he struggled to process what was happening around him. Then, he took a deep breath to calm his shaky hands, grasped his cup, gulped down the rest of his water, then he lowered his profile and grabbed his bags. AJ would survive this the way he had that other fight; by staying low and avoiding making himself a target until absolutely necessary. Maybe this kind of thing happened fairly regularly around these parts, and it would all blow over soon…

“The Striders are attacking us!”

As the body count started going up, AJ forced himself to get moving toward the exit while he kept his head as low as he could despite his height. His hand gravitated toward the holster where he kept his pistol at. The gun wasn’t anything spectacular; it was just a snub pistol that had been assembled mostly from scrap at some point after the war, which AJ had acquired as loot from a raid his old scavver gang had perpetrated. Despite that, the gun had been surprisingly reliable for AJ to this point. He had been able to hit cans at nearly thirty yards with it during target practice, and the gun had only jammed on him twice. He doubted the gun would help him much against anybody wearing decent body armor, but hopefully he wouldn’t find himself in that situation today…

A Dime a Dozen -- Investigative Woes

Whoops! I had a number of typos in that last post. I have updated it for clarity. That's what I get for writing it up on my break and then running out of time.

I'll be interested to see where this goes. I have kind of thrown my name into the hat of two other potential games, but I think I will only have time for one of those (along with the active game I am already committed to). As such, I can't 100% commit to this one, but if the others fall through, I would like to try this one out.

A Dime a Dozen -- Investigative Woes

Yeah... always an issue. Metagaming is the very bane of my existence. Doesn't mean I'm not willing to try, somewhat. And probably watch it fall apart. Unfortunately these psychological things are my favourite things to do in terms of roleplay. Why am I like this? Oh well.

@ErosSense

In retrospect, I can see how my post comes across as "Your dream sucks", which is bad, so I apologize for that. Good for you for not letting it get you down. I do think this will be a challenging project, but that doesn't mean it can't, let alone shouldn't, be done. I doubt this type of game has never been done before, but I can say that I haven't seen it done in my 6+ years of online roleplaying. I think there is a case that that uniqueness is very much a justification for pushing through with this concept.

I guess the next thing to consider then is what the appeal of this project will be. In a lot of what your idea appeared to be to me at first glance was a murder mystery, which, as I said in my first post, is a different beast in this type of roleplaying environment than it is in a short story or novella. The primary difference that I believe will potentially cause problems is that of perspective. One of the means by which mystery novels typically maintain the suspense for the reader is by limiting the perspective from which the reader is being exposed to the story is through the point of view of somebody who doesn't know everything that is going on, and therefore as the protagonist is learning information, so is the reader. At least for me, it is this suspense and desire to discover the mystery that makes reading these types of stories appealing.

So going back to collaborative roleplaying and metagaming... In my experience, the nature of participating in the kind of activity we do on this site is that we read what others are writing, and then we feed off of that creative energy to produce our own writing in the worlds that we are more of less creating together. Metagaming is basically an extension of this very activity; writing based off of information that others have posted. Discernment can and should be employed to determine what our given characters should realistically know and be able to observe, but I can see where the line between good participation and metagaming can be hazy.

All of that to say, while one solution to the metagaming potential problem would be to make rules against it, I suspect that, for me anyway, that writing my character as if they don't know who the murderer is even though I personally know who they are might not be as fun for me. I would lack the suspense of striving to figure out who the culprit is and instead I would be struggling to find a balance between writing my character discovering and processing clues and writing my character coming to conclusions that they shouldn't have even though I personally have. As such, in my opinion, I think the game would be most entertaining if there was a way to keep us players in the dark about the identity of the murderer, and perhaps the GM could play the kind of head games with us players that our characters are also experiencing.

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I am rather interested in trying this game out as well. It's been forever since I've participated in a horror RP.