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Author Topic: Introducing: The Character Library!  (Read 389 times)

Carillon

Introducing: The Character Library!
« on: November 03, 2009, 11:14:16 pm »
Hello all,

The GM and Character Approver Teams are pleased to bring you ... The Character Library!

Similar to the Character Stable, the Character Library is a forum full of pre-written submissions. The difference is that the Character Library does not have the restrictions for simplicity that the Stable does, and is intended for any player to write for or borrow from! Players can write biographies that they don't have time to develop, leave half-finished ideas for characters, or even submit completed biographies that don't quite fit with the Character Stable philosophy of simplicity. (Of course, players are still welcome to write for the Stable as well, within the guidelines for submission.)

Where is this all coming from? Well, when we developed the Character Stable, we were pleasantly surprised by the generosity and creativity of several players who submitted biographies to it, but sometimes those biographies did not fit what we needed, like biographies for magic classes or those with special, unique and challenging backstories. We began to realize that we needed a place for players to post, exchange and share these great ideas so they didn't just gather dust, and hence the Character Library was born.

We see the Character Library as hopefully becoming a place where authors can share and trade ideas, character biographies can be developed, and players can browse and look for interesting ideas they might want to try out themselves. This is intended as a player-to-player forum, so the GMs will not be taking an active role in it, except to monitor content for family friendly appropriateness as we do with all the forums and perhaps to participate as players. (Yes, we are still players too! Heh.) While it is not in any way a shortcut to the character submissions process and GMs and CAs will not be looking over, commenting on or pre-approving characters in any way before they are submitted through the usual channels, we truly hope it serves and fulfills the need we saw in the community for a place to share these ideas.

Please take a look at the Welcome To The Character Library sticky, or the sticky explaining in more detail how the Library and Stable differ for more information.

Also, this is your opportunity: still confused? Not sure what this means? Have a comment or question? Ask here! We know the forum is new and might take some getting used to, so we will happily answer all questions here, or receive and consider any comments.

Well that's all for now, except to say we hope you get lots of use out of this forum and that it has even a tenth of the potential we saw in it. To horribly paraphrase Casablanca, we hope this will be the start of a beautiful friendship ... between you and the Character Library. ;)

~Carillon
 
The following users thanked this post: miltonyorkcastle, Hellblazer

Lynn1020

Re: Library vs. Stable: What's The Big Difference?
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2009, 03:37:10 pm »
I hope it is okay for me to post here.  But I'm a little confused. So the player can choose if they want it to go in the Stable or Library?  Shiff, Pseudonym, and Masterjack could have chose to have theirs to go in the Stable if they want to?

Is there a way to tell who wrote the ones that are in the Stable now?

Sorry know it is a lot of questions just trying to understand it better.

Thanks!
 

ShiffDrgnhrt

Re: Introducing: The Character Library!
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2009, 03:51:34 pm »
The Stable is for the simple ideas, ones new players can pick up, customize and get to work with quickly.

The Library seems to be for the more complicated characters.
 

Carillon

Re: Introducing: The Character Library!
« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2009, 04:04:53 pm »
Hi Lynn,

No problem! We like questions. :) I hope you don't mind but I've moved your post here, as this is where we anticipated answering most of the questions about things.

First of all, yes--an author may choose to submit to either the Character Stable or the Character Library. However, those who submit to the Character Stable must do so within the "donation guidelines", which means the submission must be one of the four basic classes (fighter, barbarian, ranger or rogue), the five non-restricted alignments (LG, NG, CG, TN, LN), a standard race (human, elf, dwarf, halfling, gnome). The submissions should also provide clear details on things like where the person is from, whether they have any family, what happened to them before they left home, any training or what led them to their class, etc. We are trying to keep the submissions here as very simple, easy concepts to play, as we intended them for very young players, players with low proficiency in English, players who are brand new to RP, or players who for any other reason might struggle with the regular submission process.

We've been working on developing the Character Library for a couple of weeks now, so when we saw submissions that were either of a different class than we needed or had something else about their stories that made them unique but a bit too much of a challenge for a new player (such as retrograde amnesia), we made a decision to leave them, knowing we'd be rolling out the Character Library within a week or two. In fact, it was these submissions that led us to the idea in the first place.

After the Library was rolled out, each author was sent a PM explaining what the Library was, and giving them the option to have their character moved there. We made sure that each author knew what specifically would have to be changed or added to the submission to make it fit within the Stable, but let them choose the fate of their biographies, since they were their creations. Each author who we PMed requested that their work be moved to the Character Library, but they could certainly have chosen to keep it in the Stable if they preferred, knowing it would be edited by one of the Stable staff. We tried to give as much of the decision making power to the author as possible in this case, and didn't move anything until we heard back from them.

As to who wrote or authored the characters in the Stable now, as far as I know the original author of each submission is the player who posted it up.

Hope this helps,
~Carillon
 

 

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