Wildcard:Atmosphere

Wildcard has a very specific atmosphere that goes well beyond its genre and characters that we would like to maintain. Both out of some past experience and out of pre-emptive desire for clarity, here are a few pointers in case you're new to the game (with apologies for the authoritative tone):

Focus

We value a character's...

• personality/attitude rendition

...before...

• appearance
• abilities
• usefulness to the plot

We like to torture our own respective characters.

We like losing against impossible odds... and we like having impossible odds to lose against.

We're not afraid of killing characters, be that our own or others, but it will never happen without consent of the involved player(s) (or implied consent - if you've been absent long enough, we assume it's probably okay to kill your character(s)).

In the same breath, we're not afraid of invoking the network's wrath or aid as a deus ex machina.

Consequences

Combat

We don't do it.

To be fair, that's not entirely true - we have the occasional scuffle between characters and sometimes even a boss fight, but it's so few and far between that it's counter-productive to try and expand on a character's combat ability.

You can of course bring in a combat-oriented character, but if you do, expect to be bored out of your mind - or dead a few sessions in.

Strength

Adrethyrian is about as far as we'll go. In fact, Adrethyrian is exactly how far we go, exclusive - if Adrethyrian can't bitchslap your character into the afterlife, ideally without breaking into sweat, we don't actually want your character here.

This ties heavily into the note about 'combat', of course.

Villainous tendencies

Please give your characters tangible reasons to act 'evil'. Characters that are an asshole for asshole's sakes, or characters that are assholes where you leave no narrative clue to the players as to why they're acting the way they are, will probably not get a lot of attention from players. You won't get kicked out for it, you just might find it harder to find someone to play with you.

Loners

Are welcome if you think you can pull it off.

Not welcome are loners who don't integrate despite efforts from characters to make them integrate, unless they have some other trait that manages to offset this. If you want to write a character that reacts to everything with boredom or a variant thereof, you also won't be kicked out, but as with the villainous characters, you'll eventually find it difficult to find anyone wanting to RP with you.

Bypassing constraints

Wildcard is not about winning the main plot arc.

We've been running it for a while. It's about losing it repeatedly and arduously and mind-numbingly over and over again. If you can think of a brilliant way to bypass the network constraints, that is very welcome (no, seriously), but keep the tradition of ours in mind and try not to fake cakewalk it up. Come up with your own hurdles to your own supposed solutions. Synchronise with the gamemasters.

Meta

We encourage OOC communication. We discourage (but do not forbid) secrets.

We assume we're all adults and we know how to separate IC and OOC. Something that is a secret IC does not need to be a secret OOC... and probably shouldn't be. Such 'spoilers' haven't, in our experience, detracted from the enjoyment of the game - we're curious how our characters will find out, and we don't (usually!) like to be blindsided by it OOC. As an example, when Dread brought the knowledge that every trapped character had actually been (presumably irreversibly) digitalised rather than 'just' trapped, that was known to the veteran players for months prior, but it came as a massive shock to all characters, to the point of vehement denial.

Also, while the sessions up on the site tend to be devoid of OOC commentary, most of them have OOC discussion happening on the side, where people speak about their characters thoughts, motivations and issues (often humourously). Aside from being a fun way to pass time between posts, it helps characters pick up on subtleties the post narrative didn't grant them but they likely would have caught (unmentioned body language, facial expression subtleties, and so forth) and lets the RP flow better.

Conclusion

If you can't think of a way to make fun of your own character and aren't thinking of ways you can bully them from your deity-like podest of OOC power in punishment for it ;) you're probably not going to enjoy Wildcard.