New Feature Proposed Rule Change - Multiple Characters In One City

[Gossamer]

Greetings Mizaharians.

I have a proposal. Our current rules state one can only play a singular character per domain. That means, within each city, a PC can't have multiple characters. NPCs are allowed, but as someone recently pointed out, even if you do tons of work with those NPCs, they get to reflect no growth or gain unless they are Organizational NPCs. And yet PCs who have personal NPCs still must pay expenses for them. The rules change proposal shall fix this. I wanted to put it up for discussion to hear everyone's thoughts on it before I actually made the change I was leaning towards.

Here's the following proposed change.

• Individual players will not be restricted to the number of player characters they can have in one city as long as that number doesn't exceed their total game wide allowed total of five PCs.
  
• PC's who are owned by a singular player may be employed, related, and interact with other PCS owned by the same player. These can earn wages, do business transactions, and enter into agreements or arrangements like marriage, slavery, co-housing etc.
  
• Upon death or retirement of a PC, any transfer of possessions or coin between PCs owned by the same player must be approved through the Help Desk. One item may be 'inherited' by surviving PC family members or friends upon the death of a PC so long as it is okayed by a moderator and doesn't fall into the 'large scale item' category of house, business, etc or are considered quest or artifact level items.

Please feel free to weigh in on this discussion throwing in your support or opposition and any pros and cons you see to this rules change.

[Rohka]

Throwing in support. As long as a PC can support themselves, why not?

Also, love the cursor!

I'm curious about the role of NPCs. Currently, the lore states:

Non-Player-Characters are the individual characters that either the Storyteller or a individual player controls (with permission) as a supporting role (shopkeeper, companion, nemesis, child, spouse) that helps to augment and enrich the story. NPCs are never the focal point of stories and they rarely if ever progress in terms of skills or arcana throughout the stories they appear in.

As a 'supporting role' character that 'helps to augment and enrich' and is 'never the focal point of stories', what if there was an NPC Character Sheet?

Does playing an NPC feel like breathing life into a character? Does playing a PC feel like playing a full-time character that you own, whereas playing an NPC feel like playing a temporary character that you borrow?

Would an NPC Character Sheet have a Ledger? Wages?

Who would edit an NPC Character Sheet?

Is this a good idea or a bad one?

Boxcode credit to Antipodes

[Gossamer]

I'm confused.

This was a thread I started to do a major rules change. Can we talk about that and not a new totally unrelated topic you decide to introduce?

If you'd like to start a different thread with a topic completely off the topic of Multiple Characters In One City Rules Change feel free to do so. We have a Q&A forum for such questions. Just being honest here... NPCs are always approved via an NPC submission forum in individual cities or via the help desk which get posted to SS threads. They don't have NPC sheets and that would be a nightmare to maintain NPC sheets on every NPC in the game. I much prefer the NPC stats listed in the businesses and NPC Libraries in most cities.

[Gossamer]

Thanks to many of you who spoke privately to me, and to Gillar who helped me finish up the last of the work I needed to do in order to make this a thing.

If anyone has any last-minute comments, feel free to make them. I'm going to implement this tomorrow evening otherwise.

[Gossamer]

As stated, the rule change is effective as of today. Feel free to play with yourselves all you'd like in the same domain. Enjoy the new relaxed rules. Rules, Alt Characters, and Multiple Character pages have been updated in the lore.

I'm always open to suggestions on improvements, changes, and expansions of the game system, rules, or lore. Remember, it will never change if you never ask... and it never hurts to ask.