Voidus

Sometimes I feel more like the absentee father who keeps promising that he'll be home for the family and then ends up staying late at work. Translation: Sorry I still haven't done anything with the summary stuff, anytime I try to commit to Alleyverse stuff the rest of my life conspires against me and gives me no free time.

Unless you bring him cookies within those five minutes, then he forgives all and everyone can continue living.

Everything ends the moment Voidus is freed.

Yeah some characters being able to teleport isn't an issue, but when basically every character has a Tia card that leads to everywhere that is convenient it starts stretching implausibility. I'd be proposing something similar with steel compounding, not that it be banned, just restricted.

This is unfortunately in the nature of RP,. without any rules we essentially just have 50 different RPs, each taking place in the mind of only one person. Having a ruleset means we establish a shared understanding about how the world functions which allows our imaginations to overlap with each other and create a shared world. If everything was defined by rules then we're essentially playing a video game but if we don't establish any rules then we have no overlap in our views of the world and we just become a bunch of different novelists each writing our own mental book. We already have a large number of rules, both implicit and explicit. Some are obvious and assumed, like 'getting punched in the face hurts' others we've explicitly stated 'No Godmodding, where godmodding is defined as...' Rules are a trade off, yes it limits your freedom, but so does the rule that says you can't kill other peoples characters without their permission. That rule however actually improves player enjoyment, so saying that restrictions decrease player enjoyment isn't necessarily true. Having too many or too few rules can reduce player enjoyment. So I don't think that generically claiming that rules are a bad idea is necessarily a good defense against the creation of new rules. Arguments should be made against specific rules, not rules in general.

Going back to the topic of people being in multiple guilds, one issue that I think it causes is that everyone becomes involved in every plot. Having too many characters in a scene makes it incredibly confusing and fast paced and some players who aren't on as frequently have little to no time to actually react to something which causes the same issue that godmodding does, someone is unable to react in a way appropriate to their character in a given circumstance. If people are in multiple guilds then there's a higher chance that they'll want their character to be involved with anything to do with those guilds, which leads to the above issues and the problem of teleporting all around the Alleyverse 300 times a day and calling into question just who is selling Tia cards that teleport right into Solace's bedchamber. (Not meant to be a real example, I'm not sure if anyone's actually used a Tia card to get into Solace's bedchamber). Which now that I think about it is another thing I'd like to have addressed: over usage of teleportation. It's probably the most ubiquitous power in the Alleyverse and it can really cause a lot of problems. Now usage of the CR to worldhop or having some Aonic teleportation circles between cities is understandable, but a majority of characters having the ability to personally teleport at will becomes a bit of a problem. It's a handy mechanic for moving scenes rapidly but that also means that we're deprived from the RP opportunities inherent in travel scenes. Some of the most amusing scenes in the Reckoners RP just happened because people were in transit and came across something they didn't expect. It's a great way to get characters to meet each other or stumble upon someone else's plot and a great hurdle for characters to overcome.

I know it's a little tongue in cheek but this sentence still makes me happy. Also that should be historian singular, we all know that @Ookla the Cited is the Alleyverse historian Also, that was an amazingly well-articulated post and I'd like to pretend that that was also my reasoning. (It kind of was, but you put that to words so well)

I think this is kind of a good thing, you shouldn't be able to retcon in a bunch of history that no one else can change or object to. This sounds like an amazing character arc... just saying.

Having already vanished the man was very confused as to how this was being explained to him but he nodded along politely before pointing out the lack of clarity in the wording of the law, contrasting it with several successful lawmakers attempts to explicitly forbid arson. He then retreated back into his void.

I'll leave it to @Ookla the Paragon to make any relevant polls on this.

He protested on the grounds that he had committed none of these crimes, and also pointed out that the people who arrested him were harrassing him and the law had as of yet, not added an exclusion that allowed the harassment of someone even if they were criminals. His mission accomplished the mysterious man vanished in a puff of logically sound chaos.

The mysterious stranger ticked Arson off of his list and proceeded to the next still-legal element on it. He pulled out a baseball bat and began to smash any destroyable personal property, stopping every now and then to ensure none of it stuck to the bat so he couldn't be accused of thievery.

Sure we do. But the people we share them with tend to be a little the worse for wear. We prefer... practical teaching methods.

Personally I am more in favour of a shift to in-character actions. I mean ultimately any plans, spying, etc. needs to be acted upon by characters to have any meaning, and it justifies those character actions more if they are themselves a spy rather than if a character just one day wakes up with an epiphany of what a rival guild is planning.

He also keeps telling stories about the old days that no one is sure whether or not to believe

*Meaningful cough*

The previous mysterious stranger noted this and observed that arson had not yet been explicitly banned so he began setting fire to things, ensuring that none of them would kill anyone.

I think there's a bit of a problem at the moment where too many people are aiming for a big surprise moment or a sudden reveal. The issue is that we don't just have one storyteller, and if we have 20 different people each making their own huge surprise revelation, it kind of devalues all of them because no one is really surprised any more and there's barely time to react before the next big reveal happens. I think we can trust each other to separate player knowledge from character knowledge which helps with one of the reasons people want to keep plans a secret (to avoid obstruction from other people). The other reason would be that you want to surprise the players for a narrative purpose (To heighten the enjoyment of readers) but I think we may have to accept that having too many of these secrets actually results in the opposite, it makes things really confusing for readers, a bunch of sudden plot changes coming out of nowhere can be disorienting and not lead to the best or most coherent story.

The mysterious stranger immediately stopped stabbing peoples shins. He sat on the ground and pondered a moment before jumping up in glee. He swapped his forks out for psi-forks, which would cause all the pain of having been stabbed with a fork, with none of the physical injury, and would not fall under the definition of assault as being defined as the application or threat of inflicting bodily harm on another. He once more set about around him, stabbing people in the shins with his psi-forks.

A tall, mysterious stranger appeared suddenly in the midst of the citadel, brandishing an illogical number of forks which he immediately began stabbing into the shins of anyone who wasn't a soldier, ensuring that each stab was nonlethal. "I found a loophole! Apparently this isn't illegal!" The man began giggling madly and continued running around the citadel stabbing shins.

Personally I find the character creation of a more rigid RPG to be quite useful, even with a FFRP. It helps flesh out parts of your character that you may not have thought of, applies some rules to them so that others can understand and anticipate the character a bit more. Even then, this is simply assigning a numerical weighting to different abilities so we can unambiguously say whether or not a character is too OP or should be allowed.

Laurelai prepared the stamp as a nearby acolyte loaded the Essence spikes into a weapon that seemed to resemble a nailgun. He seemed to have a little trouble with it at first, either inexperience or nervousness causing him to fumble momentarily before managing to load the spikes. "Alright, here we go." Laurelai said as everyone prepared themselves. She applied the stamp using her boon, watching the lump of flesh twitch for a moment as it took hold. A small creature seemed to appear in the air next to her as her bane manifested, but it didn't seem likely to impede the experiment so she ignored it. "Go!" The acolyte with the spikegun quickly took aim and fired them into the body of the mistwraith where they were quickly absorbed by the shapeless mass. Another twitch. "And last is the memories. KoTiel?" Laurelai asked, seeking this final confirmation from the Kandra. "Are you ready?"

Epics with PIs are about as common as skaa Mistborn

Did any of these people have a spike-shaped hole in their left shoulder? Might be some former experiments of ours, turns out that the ability to get a joke is a spikeable property.

The DA tends more towards a horde than an army, both because it's fitting in RP purposes but also as a mechanical restriction so we don't try to invade other guilds, etc.