AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

There are a few rules pertaining to character creation and development that I feel may have been forgotten or are difficult to find on our forum, so I'd like to bring them up again here to ensure that new and existing characters are falling in line with our requirements.

Homebrew Rules:

Here at Amia we wish to hold our setting to a high standard to reflect our changing stance to a more roleplay focused server. To that end any Homebrew lore created by players has to be vetted by the DM team to ensure the lore does not conflict with any pre-existing canon. Things which definitely need to be submitted include, but are not limited to, the creation of completely new cultures, lands and races. The use of existing canon cultures, lands and races with minor tweaks or twists are usually alright.

If in doubt PM a DM and they will tell you whether or not your background needs to be approved.

Nobility:

Characters who are nobility, or whose backstory details them as nobility in the past require a request. Drow are an exception to this rule as they are considered to be noble by default. Similarly, some Mulhorandi classes are automatically considered nobility and these do not require a request. If in doubt, ask a DM.

Characters with Unconventional Representation:

A character who is RPly one thing but is represented mechanically as another requires a request. Examples of this include a Human character using the Elf model in-game, or a Female character presenting as male utilizing the Male phenotype in-game. If you are unsure as to whether your character needs to be requested under this rule, PM a DM to clarify.

PnP Base and Prestige Classes

Classes (Prestige and Base) that are not mechanically supported by Neverwinter Nights must be requested, even if you do not intend for your character to have mechanical representation for this class. If you do wish to obtain mechanical powers or attributes from a Class outside NWN, this must also be requested. Essentially, if it's not in NWN, you need to request it. If you are unsure whether a class you wish your character to have requires a request, PM a DM to clarify.

Shifters with 5 levels of druid are the exception to this rule. The druid levels may be ignored, with all the restrictions that entails.

-----

These rules have been in place on Amia for some time, so if you believe you have an already created character that is breaching these rules and hasn't been requested, you need to inform us and then submit a full request in order to ensure that your character meets our standards for approval. If you're unsure as to whether your character needs to be requested, as always you can PM any of the DM team for clarification. Thank you for your time!

It is not as if the Amian tradition has not been explained repeatedly and with clear reasoning before, though. We had a clear formulation already on what's cool and what isn't, without the need for patronising and heavy-handed simplifications which seem more geared toward making the DMs' job easier than facilitating maximum player freedom. The DMs had been informed of previous tradition and rules and chose to unilaterally erase our founding principle (Amia was created largely in response to increased petty regulation on Arelith - that was the mantra of the year-old server, anyway) in favor of a totalitarian nanny state, without any public discussion. We should feel especially insulted by the "these rules have been in place on Amia for some time" nonsense, as we all know that is simply not the case (even if it may have been the DM opinion for some time).

If you were unaware of our rules, I would suggest that perhaps you're more out of touch with what Amia stands for than we are. Other players clearly aren't, as we've had numerous requests to emulate PnP classes both recently and in the past, and it doesn't appear to have compromised the freedom of our players.

Please refrain from snide and unnecessary comments in the future. This is simply a polite reminder to players that may be unaware of our rules, not a debating ground.

This is no more complex or insidious than transparency and accessibility of things that have already been the case, to help assure people are informed. In this case, in some things that are particularly commonly overlooked or asked about.

I personally think this is a great reminder about a number of things on the server. Sometimes new players also might not notice or even possibly understand how some things are done under these topics. I feel like this thread should get stickied, though. Keep it from getting flooded out by other posts. Haha.

It is your prerogative to change a rule, but you shouldn't be disingenuous; if it was not in R&L, no matter how well-known and established it was, it was not a rule. There was never any debate about this; just a series of slippery-slope decisions and precedents that ultimately led to this official decision. I am hardly out of touch when you can search back several years and find forum posts of me predicting this exact outcome as people change and nobody writes down established practice for future reference.

This is a better situation than the unwritten "rule" we had before, don't get me wrong. Sadly, it also dispels any hope of a better solution, or of the DM team communicating with the playerbase and investigating alternative models before unveiling their executive decision. There is no room for anything constructive, only for the snide and the resigned, in the face of something already done. Perhaps I should have been resigned rather than snide, but for ~5 years I seem to have been the only one who cared about this rule. I badgered DMs to either post the old rule or open a discussion on a new formulation, so it's not as if there was any chance the team was unaware of the old formulation or the lack of an official rule. But now out of the blue, exactly as I warned, you present us with what has supposedly "long been the rule" and act ignorant of the actual process that led to this point. I think some irritation is justified.

As for the other reminders, they are well and good like Terra said and quite in line with what was previously officially announced. This should not be a sticky, though: rather post them to R&L under the Creating Your Character topic, where all such rules ought to be compiled.

So yeah: congratulations on finally having a written rule. I am just sad it's such a patronising one and that you felt the need to go about it so unilaterally.

Shadowfiend wrote:

I was never aware you had to request prc's (homebrewn or official) that you didn't want to implement mechanically.

And you would be correct. Until this last year one was free to RP their character in anyway that didn't exceptionally stretch the bounds of our fantasy reality and cause trouble for other players likewise Rp'ing their characters as they saw fit. Now however, that one player I met a few years ago that had a purely unique way of emulating his characters class abilities and interactions would have to be more concerned with what new rule he's breaking than his stellar RP.

Oh, and to clarify, is a request required for one to play a female kobold as it's not mechanically supported by NWN?

Bravo21 wrote:

Shadowfiend wrote:

Oh, and to clarify, is a request required for one to play a female kobold as it's not mechanically supported by NWN?

Short answer: No.
Shorter answer: No

The ruling about the PnP Bass and Prestige Classes does seem to be a slight revision of the policy we used before. We never made it so that they had to be requested and approved, but we preferred that people let us know if they are doing something other than what was NWN standard so that we could understand their intent and maybe even help make suggestions to help them with the concept. Thus anytime we talked about talking to a DM about playing one, it wasn't in the context that it needed approval but in the context that the DM Team just wanted to be aware of it in case it came up.

I fully admit the Team has the freedom to do so differently now if they choose. I would just caution against becoming too policy heavy on that front and affording the playerbase as much trust and liberty as possible unless our fun is threatened by that freedom somehow.

Last edited by Pony on Tue, Feb 03 2015, 17:51 PM, edited 2 times in total.

I am with Iron and Yossarin on this. It is the first time I am hearing of this rule. I also agree of the wanting nature of it, and support the cautioning tone of Yossarin.

I will only add that since some time, my approach has been to request everything that is not a base class vanilla standard to be on the safe side. The reason is because otherwise I feel that it simply exposes my characters to dm rulings that would considerably compromise the character and may break them. With recent experiences, I even now stay away from such requests as special races or non-nwn (prestige) classes, because I do not trust that an approval with will stand if down the road the DMs begin to feel differently.

So I am very skeptical when it comes to these type of rules, especially when they come to be in this fashion.

Moreso than most, yes, Richard. But I would be remiss not to make my opinion clear, and do so without being rude.

Having a dialogue with the community is important. A new rule was introduced, that was not established until the first post of this topic, and hence it is important the DM Staff gets their feedback (be it requested or force-fed). I also do not feel that the length of the discussion the DMs may or may not have had on this topic behind the curtains is that relevant. I find the quality of the decision they came to and the trend it sets relevant.

Thank you Yossarin for voicing a concern of mine more eloquently and politely than I ever could.

One of the things that kept me coming back to the server was the seeming resistance of the staff to be RP police. As long as it didn't cause issues with other players or break the commonsense rules of the server, myself and others I RP with were able to RP as we saw fit.

Even as a heads up to the team, making a request implies that it might be denied, thus it's no longer a heads up and an actual request to RP. A major departure from the DM team not telling players exactly how to RP their characters. I'm not advocating total RP anarchy, but rulings like this make me uneasy.

Most of it sounds good to me. Mind, I'm of the same mind that MPCs should be exterminated (70% or so.) and less monsters roaming cities/streets. :- P That being said, IMO, Amia allows its players quite a bit of freedom from what I have seen/heard. Putting a handle on chaos doesn't sound entirely out of line. Compared to a lot of servers (I've been to plenty.) Amians got it good.

I didn't know about the noble stuff though, which was interesting. Always felt that was flavor backstory, unless it for some reason would have an impact on gameplay affecting multiple players or was plain silly to the point flux capacitors would need to be brought in.

So it is a reminder that nobility is to be requested? Although it was not an original design (What, 9 years ago?), my character's nobility has always been in the backstory for years with a small hin-sized handful of players/characters aware of it. Only recently as far back as mid-last year have I began to open it up in preparation for the continuity. To legitimize it, a request will be done regardless and may as well make it public at that.

The nobility background was turned into "need to be requested" primarily because the new character already starts with a certain influence and standing that is not earned. That is something that moves you into a need-to-be-requested category by default. Your character is in the majority of the cases part of a powerful caste that in many cities and nations across fearun has a great deal of wealth, power and contacts. It grants the characters a certain un-earned standing.

It gets a bit trickier if your character is not a noble of a distant land, as for instance Wiltun is notorious for threatening with war if one of their nobles is taken prisoner or harmed. The same way the exiled cordorian nobility is very much intent on protecting their own, and will go to great length in allowing one of their own to be harmed. The elves tend to treat their nobles with enormous respect and are very protective of them.

There can also be a lot of history attached, that the DMs prefer you are aware of and your character fits in. If you play a cordorian noble, you were very much part of the revolution in Cordor in one way or another. Kohlingen only had the roughly dozen old houses that came from Benwick until the developments within the last four years. Of that roughly dozen lines, several died out leaving even fewer. So several new kohlinger noble families popping up would make little sense.

MadrikVale wrote:

So it is a reminder that nobility is to be requested? Although it was not an original design (What, 9 years ago?), my character's nobility has always been in the backstory for years with a small hin-sized handful of players/characters aware of it. Only recently as far back as mid-last year have I began to open it up in preparation for the continuity. To legitimize it, a request will be done regardless and may as well make it public at that.

Madrik is a grandfathered character, like a lot of older characters with a homebrew lore background and nobility, so not sure if you need a request for that.

If it was never established, it is a good idea to write a request for it. Just better to make sure it does not feel like the grand-father clause is being abused to turn the character into something he never was played as.

Alright. Everyone hush for a moment while I type out a response here, instead of everyone fluffing their opinions all at once.

First of all, this is not a punishment for the community. As DMs, we have a need (and a right) to know what our players are doing, and RPing, and believing about their characters because it directly affects the online world that we are, literally, the masters of.

Second of all, no one wants to hurt your experience or take away your characters. We hate doing that, and we hate telling people how to RP their characters, especially the pre-established ones. We enjoy your creativity and characters and your RP. It entertains us, inspires us, and makes us want to DM. At the same time, we have to enforce a standard.

It is my belief that in the past, no one wanted to even be accused of squashing creativity or telling people how to RP, etc, etc, so the sentiments we had about a rule, making people request or inform the DM team about their characters was never solidified, in order to "keep the peace" and postpone making the DM team seem like totalitarian bad guys, even if it is not the case.

However, we have had a call from the community to make these things more solidified, widely known, and established, even if it comes with finally ripping the bandage off and making people feel we're crippling creativity, hurting their characters, telling them how to RP, and/or trying to take their characters away from them (at least in the fashion that they have come to know and love, and others have come to know and love.)

During discussion, all the DMs (even before becoming DMs) were aware of the need to request special PrC and nobility and backgrounds and inquire about abnormalities. Several players of this community knew as well, and I can only assume it is because they felt the need to inquire and ask, and have communication with the DM team first instead of just assuming. Inquiry is harmless, but it seems a lot of people won't PM a DM, or send a tell to ask the DM online (for me, I answer about five-thousand times quicker in tells than PMs, just FYI). For some reason there tends to be an "us against them" mentality, and I really don't like that, and I don't appreciate some vocal members of the community trying to foster it or make it seem like we dislike you guys, so we're giving you more rules. We're offering clarity, which is what we have been told (through feedback, and it was requested, thank you very much, Pony) and it will be healthier for the community.

Unlike on other servers, our DMs are still very much parts of the community, and the standards we're giving you and these reminders apply to us as well. We are not exempt. Being part of this community means having a healthy dialogue with the people who run it: us. We're not going away, the DM team isn't going to dissolve so the server has no oversight at all, or rules, etc. We're the friendliness, nicest, happiest dictators you'll even meet and have the pleasure to work with. We listen, we discuss, and we do legitimately listen and consider all the feedback we get, but at the end of the day, we make the decisions.

Are you referring to me when you reference a vocal member of the community trying to foster the us vs. them mentality? My statement was a caution, and I even said the DM Team is free to do what you feel is necessary. On our side we just lack the same understanding the DM Team does. You had the discussion amongst yourselves, but not so much with us. Which puts me in the position of just stating, "Hey, just make sure you're not, etc."

This is us attempting to adapt our rules to concerns we (and players) have questions about, or feel we want to have an eye on, or a handle on, or a say in, which is reasonable. Not debatable, it is reasonable. Our nobility requests are literally just a checkmark to make sure this is something in line with lore and makes sense, most of the time, unless something additional is being requested along with it.

This is not a discussion topic, but I will explain exactly what this is and address concerns stated thus far. Yes, Madrik, you can please PM me about your character in bullet points and/or certain terms, with nice formatting to make it easy for me to read and understand.

Yes, special PrCs need to be requested so we can review them and see what characters in the community are doing.

Yes, nobility needs to be requested (even if it's not valid nobility, active nobility, foreign nobility, or nobility that was robbed of your character by weird circumstances, and so on) except in the cases in the original post.

Yossarin wrote:

Are you referring to me when you reference a vocal member of the community trying to foster the us vs. them mentality? My statement was a caution, and I even said the DM Team is free to do what you feel is necessary. On our side we just lack the same understanding the DM Team does. You had the discussion amongst yourselves, but not so much with us. Which puts me in the position of just stating, "Hey, just make sure you're not, etc."

No, it was not, but thank you for asking. This sort of "us versus them" mentality has been something I, personally, have been recognizing for some time and I feel this is just as good a time as any to address it, for similar reasons. "Please make sure you are not inadvertently working against the community by pushing an us versus them mentality." It just makes things difficult, and disrespectful, likely out of frustration. Which I think all of us can understand.

Burningoutbright wrote:

Yossarin wrote:

Are you referring to me when you reference a vocal member of the community trying to foster the us vs. them mentality? My statement was a caution, and I even said the DM Team is free to do what you feel is necessary. On our side we just lack the same understanding the DM Team does. You had the discussion amongst yourselves, but not so much with us. Which puts me in the position of just stating, "Hey, just make sure you're not, etc."

No, it was not, but thank you for asking. This sort of "us versus them" mentality has been something I, personally, have been recognizing for some time and I feel this is just as good a time as any to address it, for similar reasons. "Please make sure you are not inadvertently working against the community by pushing an us versus them mentality." It just makes things difficult, and disrespectful, likely out of frustration. Which I think all of us can understand.

You're welcome.

I felt it was better to ask before I assume.

This isn't a discussion topic. If you have specific questions, please PM me with them. I'll be cleaning up the questions people have posted, after the last ones I addressed out of being polite.

Offering clarity to the community is very much an endeavor I support. This topic in general, or the work Letumn is putting into the question topic, is wonderful. I also seriously doubt the DM Team is doing something they do not feel is for the best. What I do not understand is why a discussion would be inappropriate, or we may only relay or questions or concerns directly in PMs.

If it is soley because this topic is only an announcement, would it be possible for you to just split the first post from the rest and lock this topic? That way, the discussion can continue in a separate topic. I simply do not think expressing unease regarding restrictions for what you may play is unwarranted or an inappropriate topic.

I don't think rule discussion in general is a bad thing, so long as all parties involved keep respectful as you and Yoss have for example, Pony.

I would prefer to start a whole new topic, so people can restate their opinions, exclusively, with cooler heads.

I agree that discussion is important, but needs to keep respectful, on all sides. As Yoss' and Pony have.

Incidentally, my opinion so far on the original post is a firm "supportive agreement with mild concern", and pretty much entirely in line with that of Yossarin.

I'd love to see a discussion topic, if we're not allowed to discuss it here. (Though I find that odd, since this is a post in General Discussion. Should've locked it or made it an announcement if you didn't want replies!)

People don't generally read the announcements as often. We are going for reach here, to get people to read it within a day or so, not weeks.

Last edited by Tyrak on Tue, Feb 03 2015, 21:30 PM, edited 1 time in total.

Ah. Well, yeah. I still concur with the others in that discussion is kind of a good thing, however it needs to be done for everyone to feel comfortable with it. Personally, I never minded discussing stuff in the thread it's pertinent to, for the purpose of simplicity and organization. But, a split topic is just as viable if that is preferred. (Even if, perhaps, slightly inconvenient. It does bring more focus to the original post without immediate distraction, though, so that's a plus.)

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80618

The us vs them mentality, if it does exist didn't materialize out of nothing. Certainly something done, or being done must've sparked it.

There's a lot of factors that come into play with such things. Individual past experiences, faults or poor communication from either peers or non-peers, typical gossip through rumour mills, social disconnect/distance resulting in less closeness, common human fear of authority and projection as a result... Et cetera.

Not sure this is the topic for that, though. In fact, this isn't the topic for much of anything. There's a discussion thread now. Why are we still posting here? Why am I still posting here?

A Reminder

Who is online