Talk:Consistency Requirements
The original intention was that all logs of prior RP are canon, and all future apps must support them, or creatively work around them with retroactive continuity.
No player would be bound to any elements of their character beyond what was established in their app and prior RP. No player would be bound to RP out a romantic connection, but those connections would be written out in cooperation with the affected players and staff mediation.
--BlondieWiki (talk) 21:50, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
I feel that the only RP that a character should be tied to is logged RP, and even then if someone can make a compelling case how they feel prior RP choices were not in keeping with how they seem the spirit of the character it can be waived. Any personal RP of course no one should be bound to.
Honestly, I do feel that if a player is found to behave wildly out of character without a compelling reason in a log, that log should be purged, for that matter.
Of course, if a new player wants to talk to other players about previous RP and wants to maintain them, that is purely up to the players in question and allowable if everyone agrees.
--Metahistory (talk) 20:08, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
I prefer the "logs and apps are canon unless you can give me a compelling reason otherwise" approach. People are going to want to play different variants of characters, but say, if someone apps in comic-based, adult, not insane Starfire and then drops and the next apper wants to make her the 12 year old psycho that is TeenTitans GO! Starfire, that's going to wreck the already established was she's been played prior. I feel like the ball should be played where it lies, unless there is an actual reason not to.
Obviously, work with dropping or whatever previous relationships as needed, no one should be forced into relationship RP. But I don't think I'm okay with "well I don't like that I'm picking up Starfire and she was previously dating Dick Greyson so I'm just going to write that out and it never happened". That's unfair to the theoretically Dick Greyson character who has been playing and assuming otherwise.
--OwlCity (talk) 7/4/2020 10:42PM
Adding:
I don't want to cope with 75 variants on a character. If a player legit has a specific reason to drop something, then I think we can discuss it. But. If there's been a lot of arc/RP regarding, say, Starfire having dated Dick Grayson in the past and new Starfire wants her to have never even met Dick, I cannot say I'd agree with that being "legit". That's crap.
You cannot just wipe game canon and other peoples BGs because you want to play out something. This is my concern. People will come in and be like "everything in the past doesn't matter, screw other players and their characters". and I'm just ripping my hair out about it, because this is going to cause massive ripple effects.
Basically, I feel like if only one or two logs might need altered or removed; and it's tweaking... that's fine. But!!!!! IT HAS TO BE LIMITED. Very limited. And none of this "it was a clone! It was an alternate dimensional version of me!" or whatever. That's a cop out, it's cheap, its BAD STORYTELLING, and it's unfair to everyone else.
If you want to entirely nuke a character with say, months of RP-- say, someone picks up Emma on HAM after I drop her and says "she never even MET Havok, much less dated him and lived with him"... I feel that's just... stupid. You would have to nuke so many logs and it would ripple effect so many characters. If they were like "I would like to just have the relationship end ICly so I can do my own thing" sure. But not "never existed" because that affects Havok, and Jean, and Scott, and Shaw, and and and... you see where I'm going? It's unfair to other players.
And as I said elsewhere: you cannot expect an honest answer from players on them "being okay with it" when asked by the new player or by staff. Most players will agree to be nice and then seethe silently or complain elsewhere about being railroaded. The best practice is to have a solid policy of the ball being played where it lies, UNLESS the player has a compelling reason beyond "I just can't wanna" or "I don't like it" or "I don't agree with how previous player did x". If it isn't a change that can be handled with minimal to no ripple effects ICly or OOCly, then it shouldn't even be on the table for discussion.
If a character has been played into a corner or made unplayable through player actions, staff should be willing to step in to figure out an IC way to rehabilitate the character if the player (old or new) cannot. It shouldn't be a handwaved retcon (those get confusing for everyone involved!); and it shouldn't be a cheap "they were an LMD all along" either. These situations should be few and far between; and further, a player who consistently ruins characters through their actions and makes them unplayable probably should be considered as a viable prospect to be removed from the game.
I feel like a terrible bad guy here. But a lot of these ideas I'm seeing feel very much like "we want everyone to do whatever they want and be happy!" and like a knee-jerk reaction to playing on a game like Firan or something where everything is over-coded and over-ruled. The answer to that isn't a "rules are bad, we need no rules; consistency is bad, we need no consistency!"; rather, the answer is to put in SMART rules, with GOOD REASONING, and then you don't have to make "too many" rules.
You want a sandbox that's fairly broad, and fairly deep... but with HARD EDGES and a LID. You don't want a dumptruck pile of sand tossed in the backyard without a care, because the local feral cats and raccoons will just piss in it.
--OwlCity (talk) 16:26, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
I would greatly prefer if we could set a consistency for characters that have been played. To continue the example, I feel there should only be one version of Starfire, and that is the comic version. That is because the other portrayals (TTGo, TT animated, nu52, Dark animated, etc.) are radically different portrayals. The problem I see is, do we set what that is from the beginning and says 'this is the official theme version of this character', or do we let a player set it, and the first version apped becomes the theme version? Because that leads to issues like on HA where you have half of the X-Men apping as teens and half apping as in their twenties or even thirties, instead of being a consistent age group cohort.
So, that seems like we should says 'standard theme defaults to comic version' and set basic ages for a lot of characters and such. I don't think we can avoid that in terms of age and personality and portrayal. I think we may be able to fudge that a little bit in, for example, saying that Valkyrie can either be the blonde blue eyed Asgardian girl from the comics or the shorter dark skinned version from the movie in appearance, but the personality and background should always be from the comics. Otherwise we're going to end up with horrible mismatches, like if we had half our Asgardians thinking they're space aliens with characters based on the movies and half playing the true god Asgardians from the comics that actually did all the myths back in the day.--Metahistory (talk) 22:42, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
So I think I have a half solution.
I think that the player should set it. Within parameters.
Using X-Men as an example, we should be setting some of the basics, like... ages. "All of the First Class (Jean, Scott, Bobby, Warren, Hank) are between 33 and 35. The New Mutants era mutants should be between 20 and 24". etc.
This will help with a lot of that from the jump, because even if they app a version, it still has to fit within the box we've already set.
For the OG Titans, we may do the same, all the OG Titans are in their late 20s, or whatever. That was we don't have 26 year old Dick and 14 year odl Starfire.
--OwlCity (talk) 22:51, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
Seems reasonable to me. I'm fine with a broad 'must be within this age range' thing. That prevents the worst of the mismatches. --Metahistory (talk) 23:20, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
The 'you have to pick up the prior player's RP/history/baggage' that they have pretty strictly on HAM seems to be working fairly well. It has for me, it has for others. Even with some of the less agreeable baggage it's pretty easy to not say it never happened, but just never bring it up in RP again and use it as a 'my character has grown since X,Y,Z and has learned from his/her mistakes and is moving forward'. And, if needed, that's a conversation we can have with players who have an issue. IF there's something abhorrent out there, then yeah, we can examine that on a rare, case-by-case basis.
So, yes. We should be shooting for consistency.
In the case of 'romance', i.e., Dick was dating Starfire but Dick's new player doesn't want anything to do with that? We can't force that. So it's up to Dick's new player to decide, but it would have at least been in the past, and he can let Starfire's player know that he's not interested and that they ICly broke up, and that way the new player can move on and do what they want to do.
I think a general 'starting' age range for groups like Avengers/JL/Titans, etc... is good and makes a heck of a lot of sense. DeadWeather (talk) 12:21, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
As an aside here, the idea of having a relationship section has come up elsewhere, where you can put in on your character what their current IC relationships that are important to past RP for future players to be able to easily read. This is in the interest of keeping the effects of past RP where possible. New players would still be able to choose how they want to react to that previous RP or relationships from it.
My suggestion is as follows: if it affects other people, existing RP by a previous player for a character that is being picked up by a new player should be locked. For RP to be locked, it must be in an existing RP log people can refer to. Existing players always trump new players when it comes to keeping RP that affected their character. A new player must discuss with staff any substantive changes based on past RP and/or discuss those changes with any players affected before they can pick up the character. Staff is the final arbiter of what changes will be allowed and can require that previous RP stands (or, for example, if the previous version of the character was really a shapeshifter or LMD or whatever while the current "real" version was being held prisoner somewhere). --Metahistory (talk) 21:09, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
