FAQ

[viveremuch]

What kinds of characters are appable at Lamplight Anything goes. We generally disallow doubles, unless differences in adaptation, AU, or CRAU make the characters substantially different from each other, in which case doubles may be allowed. Otherwise, fan AUs, OCs, CRAUs, and canon characters are all welcome. How many characters can we have in game? Is there a cast cap? Currently, there is a limit of two characters per player upon initial application, with a third slot opening after the player has been in game for at least three months and had two characters for at least a month. The game as a whole has a character cap of 50 characters. This number is subject to change in the future, depending on the development of the game. How do invitations work? Are there reserves? Players currently in-game can request an invitation for another player at any time. Generally, the mods will ask a few questions about the possible new player, to determine if they're a good fit for the game. Prior to game opening and for the first month after the game opens, it is also possible to petition the mods directly for an invitation on the Invitation page. Not all petitions will be granted. Because the invitation system limits the number of incoming players, there are no reserves. Instead, characters people intend to apply for are listed on the Invitations page. When are applications processed? When do applications close? Applications are processed in the order received. Applications never close and are usually processed within three days, unless there is an unusually large number of applications at once. What is the policy for 18+/mature content? Sexual content is allowed to a limited extent. A fade-to-black policy is in place for actual sexual encounters, and characters involved in sexual content must be of majority age (18+). Additionally, situations of dubious consent and sexual violence are not welcome. As for other mature content (violence, drug use, and so forth), players must warn appropriately and use their best judgement. What is the game's trigger/squick policy? A list of player triggers and squicks can be found on the Squicks & Triggers page. This list is anonymized for player comfort; the list is drawn from applications (which are screened) and comments to the page itself (also screened). Additionally, some common items seen frequently across DWRP have been placed on the list from the outset. To clarify the distinction: A "trigger" is something that causes panic, fixation, or anxiety in a way that you cannot control when you come into contact with it. A "squick" is something you would prefer not to see, but it won't ruin your whole day if you stumble across it. All items on the Squicks and Triggers page must be warned for, so we encourage players to check back to the page frequently. Repeated failure to appropriately utilize warnings is grounds for warning, suspension, and banning. Is there an age minimum? For characters, the age minimum is 13, with some fudging room on a case-by-case basis. (Generally, mods are looking for characters to have the maturity required to not be immediately broken by the horror aspects of the setting. If you can justify this maturity for a below-13 character, we'll allow it.) For players OOCly, the age minimum is 18. No exceptions. What are the activity requirements? Activity check is one thread of at least five comments from you per month. However, you don't need to do anything to submit this activity - it's automatically checked by the mod team on the first of each month using ACSavior! Characters who joined the game after the 10th of each month, or who were on hiatus for at least two weeks out of the month, are exempt from AC requirements. Failure to meet AC the first month puts you on activity warning. Characters on activity warning must 1) acknowledge the warning on the monthly AC page, 2) make double activity (two threads of 5+ comments) the next month. Failure to meet both of these requirements will result in removal from the game. Does the game have a network? How does it work? At the current time, there is not a communications network of any kind in the game! How do we interact with other players OOCly? Is there a meet-and-greet? The majority of OOC communication takes place on the game Discord server, which is closed to people who have been invited to the game. There is a CR meme/round-up post monthly that can also be used for OOC plotting, as well as as a meet-and-greet for new players. Players are also welcome to use Plurk, Twitter, and other social media to communicate. Hey, wait a minute, where's the Taken page? It's a Google Drive spreadsheet, and it can be found here! My character isn't human! Do they have to be humanized? Not unless you want to! If you do, feel free to let a mod know in your application, and we'll work something out. The only circumstances where some form of change is mandatory is that characters who did not previously have physical forms now do, and characters who are greater than 12 feet (4 meters) in height will find that they have shrunk (or everyone else has grown?) to a more manageable size. What do our characters bring with them? Generally speaking, nothing more than their clothes and what's in their pockets. (Actual, physical pockets; hammerspace pockets are handled on a case-by-case basis) It's as though characters were just picked up from wherever they were and brought to Transfiguration like that. Magical items (and magitech items) will generally be functional. Technological items (such as cell phones etc) will function as long as they have battery charge, though there are no networks for them to connect to. Larger items that characters require to live or function, such as wheelchairs and other mobility devices, are also brought along. Can my character bring Pokemon/their animal companion/their familiar with them? In most cases, characters will appear alone, without any living creatures alongside them. Creatures that are magically bonded to your character - such as familiars, daemons in the His Dark Materials sense, and so on - will accompany their masters (unless you as the player don't want them to). Additionally, required service animals appear alongside their owners. For everything else, if a character is making physical contact with the creature in question (including through a harness), it may arrive with them - but it may not. Creatures that are simply standing beside them will not appear alongside characters. Can we canon update? What's the spoiler policy?? New canons and updated canon material is considered spoilers for one month after official English release, or two months after other release if there is no official English release (fansubs, etc). Canon update information can be found on this page. Are there ways to regain items from our characters' worlds? Item regains are linked to events and explorations. Circumstances where items can be regained will be noted in the event information of any event that allows regains. Is there power nerfing? How does that work? For the most part, exceptionally strong powers are toned down, but "regular" powers are mostly unaffected, unless they fall into an exception category below. If mods feel like your character has powers that need nerfing, we'll open a conversation with you about that in response to your application. The following special cases to powers apply; Supernatural/magical sensory abilities - anything that gives characters information beyond what they would get with a mundane human's senses, whether passively or through active use - usually work fine on other PCs. But on the setting itself and setting elements, they may return strange results, no results, or nothing but a headache. Mod posts and events may have additional information for characters with these sorts of abilities. Abilities that come from an outside source - divine power from a character's god, contracts with a demonic patron, what have you - do not function at all. Characters who could communicate with such an entity as a part of their powers will find that they cannot reach their patron. However, repeated attempts may get the attention of something else - please contact a mod if this is something your character would attempt. Characters who have the ability to perceive the future directly, through visions or other means, will find that involuntary uses of their ability have just stopped happening to them. Intentional attempts to divine the future also fail, and may result in a splitting headache for the character trying. Indirect means of perceiving the future (such as tarot cards that have legitimate predictions) give only incredibly vague responses, or occasionally responses that are so specific in detail as to be useless ("you will not choke to death on a fishbone at dinner next Tuesday"). Characters who are immortal are no longer so, though the exact details of this depends on the type of immortality they have. Generally speaking, things that would be so obviously fatal to a human (such as beheading or burning to ash) that no one would check the body for a pulse will kill them, but they'll recover from most other injuries in whatever way is 'normal' for them. Finally, characters who have the ability to project their souls out of their bodies will find that this ability is strictly limited. Although they can still exit their bodies (with a bit more effort than previously), they cannot go far from their physical forms, and remain tied to their bodies by a thin tether of glowing light, leading from the mark location on their body to a corresponding location on their soul projection. They cannot enter the bodies of other characters, and will get bounced back to their own if they try. They will also be yanked back to their bodies, suddenly as a snapping rubber band, if they try to go more than a hundred feet or so from their bodies. My character is unconscious/dead at their canonpoint! What happens? Nothing too out of the ordinary, compared to other characters. Unconscious characters still experience the black fog, but only from the point where it thins enough to start to reveal the game's world, becoming aware in the middle of the fog. Dead characters experience much the same, unless the canon has some form of canonical afterlife (in which case they experience the black fog normally, but from the afterlife). At player option, the character may have scars or the feeling of phantom injuries from whatever caused their death. What if my character has some specialized medical need? While there may be some things that are handled on a case-by-case basis, there are a few good rules of thumb that can be followed. Specialized diets (whether that be a vampire drinking blood, a celiac needing gluten-free, or some other more magical diet) generally still need to be followed. The exception is characters who require a special substance that can only be found in their worlds; these characters either must now consume a human diet or will find they require no sustenance at all, at player option. Illness corrected by medication, similarly, may seemingly just vanish, including magical illnesses, or its progression may be incredibly slowed. However, those who take either of these options will find that their marks are more reactive than those of other characters, and regularly tingle and perhaps even tremble seemingly at random. More detail on marks can be found on the Marks and Deaths page. Characters with permanent disability - blindness, loss of limb, etc - or non-life-threatening illness will find that nothing has changed. What's up with the marks? What happens when our characters die? This can be found in more detail on the Marks and Deaths page! How do character languages work? How do we communicate with each other? Characters continue speaking their native languages (or, if they so choose, any other languages they might know). Languages they don't understand are translated based on intent... Most of the time. Sometimes, whatever magic is doing the translation seems to get overloaded, or honestly a little drunk, and errors happen. Think of the result as the result of a three-person game of telephone with someone between your character and the speaker. Usually things come through well enough, but sometimes there's something, quite literally, lost in translation. The accuracy of the translation is also decreased the more people are talking at once (and in large crowds, it may give up entirely), during certain events, and when eavesdropping. Also, thanks to how it works, it's obvious that the natives of this world speak a language that is unknown to all player characters. What is the IC:OOC time ratio for this game? What's the IC calendar like? The current time ratio is two OOC days = one IC day. There isn't any particular IC calendar at all; the residents of Lamplight have lived in darkness disassociated from time and the sky long enough that many of them have lost track of the date. How do our characters arrive? Characters typically find themselves just within the borders of Lamplight, following the set of circumstances described on the Premise page (which is virtually universal for all characters). There is no particular individual or organization to greet them when they first arrive, and this end of town seems to be mostly empty. The first group of characters to arrive will have an Arrival Log with further details on the circumstances of their arrival; later characters arrive individually based on when their applications are accepted (That is, after the first, there will be no special "intro log" for new characters.) What's the town/world/outside the town like? For the most complete information on any matters related to the game's setting, please go to the game's Setting page. What are events like? How frequent are they? Events are roughly monthly, and will only rarely last longer than a week out of the month. They will generally alternate between individual-scale (things that affect characters directly as individuals, such as alterations of mood or perception or other individualized events) and setting-scale events that affect either the entire town of Lamplight or offer the opportunity to explore beyond its borders. Events will more often than not lean into the horror and unsettling, with a focus on psychological exploration. (There may be other forms of horror in events, but these will always be warned for.) On all horror events, there will be an opt-out or "soft" option in which characters can remain in play while engaging with a minimum amount of the event. Event information will go up a week in advance of the event start date. While all information about the event may not be revealed, all content warnings and the opening scenario will be, in order to allow players some plotting time, as well as enough heads-up to choose not to participate. Events may have lasting impacts on the setting, which will be included in an end-of-event post at the conclusion of the event. Will there be combat events and monsters to fight in the game? Yes, although these events are not the focus of the game. There are certainly monsters lurking out beyond the edges of town, and they're usually hungry enough to look for a fight, if you're willing to give them one. How frequent are setting updates? Updates to the current state of the setting, as well as any information players may need to know that is not directly related to an event, will be posted along with Activity Check and the meet and greet on the first of each month! How does the game feel about playercest? Being a smaller game, there is by nature a higher chance of playercest (two characters of the same player interacting) than there is in most games. Our general policy on playercest is that it doesn't count for AC, and if you're primarily having interactions only between your own characters rather than with other players, you may be asked to leave the game. However, some minor interactions between two characters played by the same person is fine. In any small town, it's hard to entirely avoid someone, and we're not going to make players bend over backwards to try and have their characters do so when that stretches believablity. Back to Navigation