What should we do about Hogwarts

ahahah. as usual, you're one step ahead of me, darren.

As a coming back present, I have two ideas! One of them you will probably scrap, but it might (might) be our only hope to legitly and fairly prevent powerplaying.

Anyway, to that in a minute.

First, I think we should have a true, blown out war under the teachers' noses at hogwarts. Breaking into different common rooms, sabotaging stuff, giant missions to give Hogwarts a sense of self. And for the grand finale, instead of a giant battle, it should be a giant food fight. Well there's the first idea, now to the idea that you'll probably scrap:

Institute a battle system. Not complex, like dungeons and dragons, but enough to make a duel strategic. I could help with that if you wanted, but I doubt you want to. Not many people do. Anyway, there are my 2 cents!

Avoiding battle systems is one of the reasons people are attracted to text RP just saying.

I honestly think most people only do those things mistakenly. They're either new to RP or they write something in a post without realising and if you give them a quick, polite PM to let them know, they'll change it for you.

Those three things are just courtesies of the RP world, when you get one of those players who constantly thinks it doesn't apply to them, or gets angry when it's pointed out to them, they're probably not someone you want on the board anyway.

I understand that. Maybe an optional battle system? Use the tier ranking system as the default, and if two people want to duel fairly they could use the battle system if they want. That's truly the only fair way to do this. I don't really like the tier ranking because it's like playing war with cards. 10 ALWAYS beats 9, no exceptions. That brings me to my next point:

Monsters and npcs need tier rankings/stats as well, not just characters. Because a first year could hardly kill a werewolf, we need something to show that.

The tier system doesn't work like that. It's never worked like that.

The tiers have only ever been used in extreme situations, where people playing less powerful characters (such as students) weren't playing realistically. For example, I've had two characters on tier 2, and I only ever used it to alert the admins when I was trying to be fair but the person I was playing against was making things difficult.

The reason monsters and NPCs don't need tier rankings is because a monster or npc is always going to be manipulated by the group. Also, they're disposable. Generally speaking, people don't like their characters being killed, but it's okay if that happens to an NPC.

Characters can only cast spells up to their level and can only cast a certain number at a time (I think it's around three).

There are some people who in a fight scene, cast the number of spells and type of spells that's useful for their character according to what's happening in the thread with the expectation that the other people in the RP will be fair and do the same thing, as well as taking a few hits from time to time as well.

Then, there are some players who will ALWAYS post three spells that are the most powerful their character can do and who never take hits, or if they do, only from minor spells.

Obviously, it's really frustrating to encounter the second type of person, because they're powerplaying. But powerplaying doesn't only happen in fights which is why the tier system is less useful than a simple rule.

ETA: I also did initiate a duelling system for PA and nobody was interested. Just FYI.

The tier system just seems pointless to me then. And I probably missed that dueling system. Ah well, it's not up to me. I was just making a suggestion. It's not site breaking or anything, and most people on the site are the first type from what I've seen. So it's not too big of a deal.

The tier system has been removed because we no longer saw a need for it. It was introduced because we were having huge problems with power-playing, and the admins at the time thought that it could help cut down on that without the admins having to review each case themselves.

Now however, we don't have nearly the problem with power-playing and godmodding that we did before, so we removed it. It was a tad too static and unchanging for the members' liking and a mess to maintain for the admins so we dropped it. You could argue that there's only less power-playing because there's less fighting, and that might be true. We'll see what happens if/when battling picks up again.

For now, there seems to be no reason to implement any kind of battling system, so it probably won't be happening.

It's too bad that the underground dueling thing didn't work out. I thought it would have been really fun, but then there's nothing you can do if your partner never shows up...

Not entirely ready to scrap the idea, though. Maybe if we implement a dueling system, we have some sort of rule as to what happens if your partner never shows up. Give them, say, a week or two to post a response, and if they don't...partner up the one who did post a response to another person who's partner went MIA. Same idea would work for classes. Give people a deadline for when they need to post by. If they don't meet the deadline, then their original partner gets paired up with someone who has posted.

Someone should open up the nice and always friendly, Chamber of Secrets and have something evil pop out.

By the way. Earlier in the tread someone mentioned boggarts attack. It could be fun. Terrifying kind of fun. You open your drawer - pop, a boggart comes out. Yo go to the potions locker - pop, a boggart. There should be one person who simply goes trought threads and checks if it's possible to sneak a boggart in there, post something like "you encountered a boggart" and leave the players to sort it out. The good thing - there would be action, there would be reasons to talk, there would be reasons to help each other and there would be reasons to laugh. So it'd be balanced. The fighting, the interaction and the fun.