Snowblind Moderators (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:40 pm
snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:40 pm
Frequently Asked Questions
| Frequently Asked Questions | |||
What sort of game is Snowblind? Snowblind is a plot-focused psychological horror game. Characters will primarily spend their time exploring and manipulating the environment they've found themselves in--the apparently abandoned town of Norfinbury. Isolation will be a major theme, with communication being largely network-based. There is a plotline to be followed, and the game is expected to run between three and three and a half years. What are the communities and how do they work?
What is the tagging system for Snowblind? When you make an IC post or reply to someone else's post, you must tag this post with your character tag. We will provide a character tag for you when you join the game; it will be formatted as follows: GIVENNAME FAMILYNAME (CANON), with adjustments as necessary for specification. What kind of events will happen in Snowblind? Events will primarily revolve around psychological horror. The atmosphere of the town is unnatural and causes an already stressful situation to become even more stressful, altering the way some things are perceived and maybe even how they really are. Events will also happen in response to the actions of characters--they will be able to discover new buildings and unlock new areas if they take the right steps. What kind of characters can I app? Snowblind accepts canon characters, canon AUs, and original characters. A canon AU is a different version of a character in a published canon, for example original Mickey Mouse versus Mickey Mouse in Kingdom Hearts. Characters that exist in a canon AU and not in the original work may also be applied for. Protagonists from games like the Persona series, Mass Effect Series, etc. are allowed with canon justification for their personality. Characters from canons with multiple routes, for example dating sims, will have all routes considered as part of the main canon, and will use the standard canon character slots. We do not accept fanmade AUs, canon-based OCs, multiple versions of canon characters, or game transplants. In order to apply for a canon character or a canon AU character, their application must primarily draw from canon as opposed to headcanon. If a character is primarily based on headcanon, they cannot be applied for in Snowblind. What happens when I want to play a nonhuman character? Nonhuman characters are for the most part allowed to keep their usual appearance, although certain abilities of their species that humans do not have access to (mind reading, flight, breathing underwater, etc.) will not be allowed. Very large characters must be shrunk to a maximum of ten feet tall. Characters who are not humanoid have the option of humanizing their characters, but will not be forced to as long as they are capable of carrying their network device (carrying it in their mouth is acceptable). If you choose to humanize your character, you may keep certain aspects of their normal form--for example, keeping animal ears/tails, fur, skin color, etc. Do you allow challenge reservations/applications? Yes. More information can be found on the reservations and applications pages. My character has a terminal illness/has suffered mortal injury at their canon point/requires some sort of magical object to live, what happens now? Characters will be healed of any terminal illnesses or mortal injuries that they may have suffered, although old scars and healed wounds will remain. Characters that rely on a magical object or source to live will no longer require that source or object, although if it's small enough a nonmagical variant may be brought along with them. How does my character arrive in Snowblind? Characters wake up alone at 6AM, locked in an empty house. Their network device, looking like a standard tablet with few apps, will speak to them, tell them the time, and ask them to register it by touching the screen. Your character will not be allowed outside until they have touched and registered their network device. In addition to the network device, they will be provided with a small backpack and a coat in the colors of your choice if they did not arrive with one. The backpack contains a week's worth of water and military-style rations: tasteless, but better than nothing. Will my character have their powers? For the most part, no. Characters will be largely reduced to human limits, although they will be allowed to keep flavor powers. Flavor powers are defined as abilities that do not give a character any advantages and instead act to give the character some sense of uniqueness. For example, hair that changes its look based on the character's mood, an innate connection to a location in their home world provided it does not grant additional strengths, the ability to change hair color at will, etc. If you have an ability you think falls under this category, there will be a section on the application where you can describe it to us. You can only keep abilities that have been detailed on your application. What can my character bring with them? Your character can bring any clothes they're wearing, jewelry, and small items they would carry with them. They cannot bring weapons. Any magical clothing, jewelry, or objects will be stripped of its magical abilities, although they may still bring it along. Technology-based items with similar effects will similarly be stripped of their additional abilities. My character has a pet, can I bring it to Snowblind? You may bring one pet to Snowblind provided the pet is important to your character within their canon and the pet cannot be applied for on its own. All animals will be subject to the same power limitations as normal characters: they will be reduced to normal animal strength, with only flavor abilities described in your application allowed. What is the time scale for this game? What time zone does this game run under? The game runs at a 3:1 scale; three OOC days make up one IC day. Each IC day is split into morning (6AM-11:59AM), day (Noon-6:59PM), and night (7PM-5:59AM). The game generally follows EDT/EST. What does the day/night cycle effect? Changes in the time of day can bring about changes of weather, new character revivals, and location availabilities. Characters must also take care to not be out at night; at 7PM, their network devices will show the "FIND SHELTER IMMEDIATELY" warning, at which point they have one hour to find a building to shelter in for the night. If a character is still outside by 8PM, all building doors will lock for the night, and a character will die of exposure overnight. Characters may not spend the night in places that provide food or revival points (unless they revive at night). All buildings remain locked until 6AM, when they unlock for the morning and everyone is free to come and go as they please. What is your policy on fourth walling? Please respect your tagging partners' preferences and do not fourth wall them without permission. What is your activity check policy? There is a monthly activity check of twenty comments from your character over a maximum of four threads, which must be linked individually when submitting AC. Activity check will take place over the last seven days of the month. You will have five days to submit your activity, at which point the initial activity check will close and the warning list will go up. You have two days to reply to that with activity or to request a strike. If you take a strike, you must make activity check the following two months with the character who has a strike before it will be lifted. Failing activity check at this point will result in the character being removed from the game. What counts as one thread when submitting AC? Each initial response to a post made by a character in the How does the mandatory HMD work? Every month around the 15th we will put up a locked HMD meme to the OOC community. All you have to do is make sure you reply to it at some point during the month and you're set! What happens if my character decides to stay in one building and doesn't travel around? If your character doesn't travel, they will begin to experience cabin fever. As a result of the unnatural atmosphere of Norfinbury, they will begin to hallucinate and suffer from other psychological effects. This can happen as soon as you'd like, but it will always happen once a character remains in one location for one in-game week. What are the effects of cabin fever? The first sign of cabin fever is increasing paranoia; they will begin to think that other characters cannot be trusted and may even think they're working for Norfinbury in some way. Hallucinations come next--they vary quite a lot, but they always effect the place your character is staying in. They can hallucinate the walls breathing, the floor being made out of bugs, corpses hanging from the ceiling, all sorts of things! It will always be a series of increasingly distressing and difficult to ignore hallucinations, however. In severe cabin fever cases, the hallucinations will gain auditory components and include hallucinating living things chasing them around. What happens if my character dies? If your character dies, their body will remain where it fell until night falls, unless their cause of death is by a monster encounter and there is no body to speak of. If they die at night, it will remain the following day and then vanish the night after. They will revive a random amount of time later (no later than an OOC week except for deaths that precede a hiatus) in a random revival point. Revival points are places like chapels, funeral homes, and morgues. They will awake in cold storage in a body bag on a locked body shelf, which will open on its own and slide out after the character is fully awake. Any items they had with them upon death, including their network device, will be at their feet on the body shelf. If they don't have any food or water at all, they will also be provided a week's worth of food and water. They will always wake up alone. If your character is not a humanoid, they may wake up in a freezer at the veterinary office instead. What happens if my character guards a body/tries to keep it for other reasons? Characters can guard bodies but will find that after one night it vanishes when they're asleep or elsewhere. If a character is particularly stubborn about dragging it around and not sleeping, they can make it last for another day or two, but they'll find themselves becoming very tired very easily to the point they'll have to sleep within three days even if they're capable of forcing themselves to stay up longer under normal circumstances. May I canon update my character? Yes. In order to canon update your character, they must die in-game. During their revival period, they will experience whatever has taken place in their canon up to the point you are updating them to. If you wish to canon update, you will have to note that their death is a canon update death on the appropriate page and include a short summary of what they will be experiencing. The character will not change physically (for example, aging) or gain any new items as a result of their canon update, but mentally, they will still feel as if they have experienced all of the new events. What happens to a dropped character? What about one on hiatus? A dropped character dies within the game and remains dead. Their body can be found and observed in one of the revival points, but it cannot be touched or moved. A character on hiatus may either be left on autopilot or die and not revive until the player returns. How will my character travel around Norfinbury? Travel will primarily take place in terms of map grid spaces. The amount any character can travel on any given day will be limited by the weather for that day, injuries the character has, and the nature of what they're doing as they travel. Travel into already visited squares may be done without requesting information from the moderators, while travel into unexplored squares will require posting to the search post. Searching buildings for plot-relevant information will, of course, require posting to the search requests page. If a character is not looking for any special information, their movements are simply reported on the character movements page. How does searching work? What can I find while searching? This information is contained on the search requests page. However, there are no electronics in Norfinbury except for the tablets. Similarly, there are no cars, although there are roads. My character lost/broke their tablet! How do I get a new one? Your character will find a new tablet in the next building they search after losing/breaking their old tablet. Note that they must break the tablet to the point it's unusable in order to find a new one--if it's just the speakers that are broken, or they can't use video, but they can still access the network, then they would have to lose their tablet to get one that functions completely again. What are the light blue lines on the edges of the maps? Those lines represent areas of impassably high snow--measuring at least fifty feet tall. What are exposure effects? Staying in Norfinbury for an extended period of time has adverse effects on a character's physical and mental health. Making personal connections with other characters and solving the mysteries of the town can help abate these effects, but it's unlikely to keep them away forever. Every two OOC months, players will be asked to update and report on their character's exposure effects when turning in their activity check. If your character has turned on the beacon, this is extended to every four months. Full details about exposure effects and how they are managed can be found on the exposure effects page. What is the beacon? The Beacon application appears sporadically on the tablets. This is the only time that a character can manually turn their beacon on or off, though certain characters who have had their beacons activated under special circumstances will find that they are unable to change the status of their beacon. What the beacons actually do is unclear to the characters, though @ADMIN has recommended in the past that the characters turn their beacons on for their own safety. If a character has their beacon on, it will slow the progression of their exposure effects, but it will also make them more likely to run into monsters. The beacon also occasionally influences the way events will affect characters. Who is @ADMIN? @ADMIN appears to be the mysterious overseer of Norfinbury. Their origins and motivations are unclear, and they do not often interact with the characters, but they occasionally respond when a medical emergency is reported. Who knows what qualifies as a medical emergency, though? Are there monsters in Norfinbury? Yes. They take many forms and disturb the atmosphere of their surroundings, causing an oppressive eeriness in the air. Outrunning them is an option, but they chase relentlessly, and it seems impossible to fight them. Coming into close proximity with them causes headaches, dizziness, and nosebleeds that get worse the closer the victim is. Contact with a monster causes instantaneous unconsciousness. A monster will swallow its unconscious victim whole, leaving no body behind. Monsters are encountered by traveling through the town; if your character runs into a monster while traveling, you will receive a mod response on the relevant search request or character movement. | |||
What are the network devices like? The network device looks like a standard generic tablet. There's a slot on the side that seems as if it would accept something like SD cards, but aside from that it doesn't seem to have any ports for charging or headphones. It never runs out of battery, though, so it's not a big deal. What features does the network tablet have? The tablet comes with a few applications pre-installed. There's private messaging in the form of text messages, voice messages, and video messages, and the tablet can also function like a telephone for real-time phone or video calls. There's the network application, which is the main function your characters will likely use; it connects all tablets to one community where they can share text, voice, and video messages with everyone else on the network. Aside from this, there's basic settings, a notepad function that allows characters to save multiple notes (which can be typed or drawn on), a camera/video function that allows for taking and saving regular videos and photos of your surroundings/yourself if you're into selfies, a news application that only displays the obituaries, a clock, a calculator, a Geiger counter, and help options. How does the Geiger counter application work? The Geiger counter app works as follows: When active, it displays radiation not in terms of numbers, but in terms of three danger levels: green, yellow, and red. Green is its default state. Yellow is dangerous but probably safe enough to stay in for a night. Red is too dangerous to stay in for long. How is my character identified on the network? Your character will have the option to create a screenname the first time they log onto the network, which can be whatever they'd like. If they don't pick anything, the network will default to their actual name. This screenname cannot be changed once it's chosen. Screennames can contain letters, numbers, and underscores, but no spaces or other kinds of characters. Letters with accents (such as the one seen in @jiaxú) are allowed. How does the help function of the tablets work? There are the standard boring written-out explanations of what all of the default functions do. More interesting is the Personal Assistant option. If selected, it will trigger a small avatar to offer to assist with your tablet use. You can select a name, avatar look (humans, animals, mythical creatures, even things that look like you if you're not human), and voice, and the avatar will assist you in keeping your tablet organized and using its functions. Think of it as a far more useful Clippy. The default avatar is a floating silver eye with a genderless voice. Can my character create filters on the network? Can filters be broken? Characters will be able to filter their network posts to specific people, but they will have to select which people they filter to it each time and cannot save filters. Note that filters aren't foolproof and can fail due to network malfunction or error on the part of the filter maker. Can my character accidentally post to the network? What about anonymously? For now, accidental posts will not be possible. Anonymous posts will never be possible for the characters; a screenname is required to access the network. Can my character take their tablet apart? Can they just plain break it? What about losing it? The tablets cannot be taken apart. They're very sturdy and should stand up to most treatment, but it is possible to break them. If your character breaks their tablet, they will be without access to the network until they can find a new one via searching. If your character loses their tablet, it will remain wherever they lost it until the end of the day. Once the night has passed, it will be considered permanently lost, and they will have to search for a new one. Can my character use someone else's tablet? For the most part, no. Tablets are locked to their owners and only respond to them. However, it would be possible for two or more people to be recorded in one video, or for a second person to interrupt a first one's voice post and talk over them, etc. Basically, any function would have to be initialized by the owner of the tablet. | |||
How is my character going to get food and water? What about other supplies? Characters will obtain supplies through the search function. They are provided an IC week's worth of food and water, but aside from that they will have to find it on their own. There are only certain areas that have regular food, but when these locations are discovered it will be pointed out that it seems like a regularly restocking location. How do characters understand each other? What language is being spoken? There's an automatic translation system in Norfinbury that mean that everything characters say is automatically understandable by everyone else. If a word is untranslateable, it will remain in its original language, and if a character wishes to speak in their native language, they can as long as they focus on doing so. The language everyone is speaking is English, and characters are free to recognize that fact if they would notice. What's the technology of Norfinbury like? Difficult to tell! There are no electronics or cars to be found in town except for the tablets, but there's no denying the tablets are more advanced than those found in the modern day. Aside from its ruined state and peculiar lack of certain items, Norfinbury appears to be a roughly modern day town. What happens if my character tries to leave the town? Norfinbury is blocked in on all sides by snow that's easily over fifty feet high. If a character manages to climb up all this snow, they will find the weather gets worse the farther from town they are until they either go back or die from exposure. | |||
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