This is the official charter of the Corporate and City Roleplay, which originated on BeastsMC in 2014. It was written by TheArchiteck, the leader of the aforementioned roleplay group, on the day of Friday, June 22nd, 2018. An addendum, adding points 5 to 7, was made on Wednesday, February 20th, 2019.
This document is outside the roleplay realm. It is only to be taken into account from the roleplay-exterior perspective.
My writing here is, for the most part, not intended to be followed letter for letter. It is a guide to the feel which the roleplay ought to take on. I have written this to ensure that we as a group do not lose sight of our true goal, as we have countless times in the past.
These are some points to keep in mind whilst roleplaying:
1. Create structure and lore in equal measure.
I cannot stress this point enough. Major developments in roleplay should always reflect what is built, and whatever is built should have some sort of roleplay development surrounding it. If you do one without the other, the point of doing it at all is weakened severely.
It is not a good idea to go on a roleplay text rampage. An example of this is when you talk as if a fictional group exists and interacts and such, but you don’t actually build anything for them. In past arguments I’ve often referred to this as “air”, because it doesn’t produce anything that lasts or has relevancy into the future. It is detrimental to the function of the roleplay world as a whole.
However, don’t take that too far, and sink yourself entirely into pure building, either. It’s a good idea to have lore for anything you build into the world, even if it’s just in your head and not written down. That way, if something happens involving whatever it is you built, your structure can react in a way that fits the lore behind it.
2. Improvise events randomly and on the spot rather than planning them out with the others involved.
Planning is very tempting, especially when it’s with your friends. However, spontaneous reactions without explanation are typically the most engaging and entertaining of any type of roleplay interaction. Even if you haven’t an explanation in mind at the time when you decide to do something dramatic and surprising, do it anyways. The explanation will eventually blossom into a beautiful piece of lore.
3. Work your desires into the lore rather than making recluse movements which break it.
Be smart about the lore. Be a good sport: don’t walk away at the slightest pang of boredom, and don’t shout obscenities at the smallest urge of anger. If you feel really bored and want to stop participating in an event, come up with a roleplay reason as to why you want to leave, and incorporate it into the story. Be creative about it.
And most importantly, be patient with the others involved in whatever you take part in. We’re all humans here, not machines.
4. Plan your character and your faction to have unique traits, particularly unique flaws.
I’m sure we’ve all seen it a million times: the perfect, generic hero character that never makes any mistakes, bathed in a “James Bond” sort of light. Boooring. Perfection in characters, as a rule, is boring. The most interesting characters have unique personality quirks, obsessions, and odd personal developments. Their imperfection is what makes them memorable and enjoyable.
This idea extends to factions as well. Corporations, cities, and any other group entities you can possibly come up with, all ought to have special strengths and weaknesses built into their backstory.
5. Don’t try to use infinite money, power, or resources.
As with any roleplay attempting to approximate reality in some sense, there has to be a limit on how much you are able to do. Ideally, this limit should be something you figure out on your own. No, that doesn’t mean you are allowed to set it to infinity, you have to set it to something realistic. You should only have so much money in the roleplay world. You should only have so many resources. You aren’t invincible, unstoppable, inexhaustible, or immune to being bought up or out competed.
There is, however, another meaning to this, which is somewhat related to the first. You should not be able to have certain types of power over other people. You shouldn’t be able to decide what happens to someone else’s character, unless they give you the go ahead first. In roleplay language, acting omnipotent about someone else’s things is known as “power gaming”. Descriptions which are third person, but which decide that certain events or actions are “good” or “bad” to other parties, are another example of this. The best way to avoid power gaming is to only act on what your character or faction has the ability to do, and to only attempt to do things to others in your roleplay actions. You cannot ever force anything to happen to anyone besides yourself.
6. Act only on information that your character knows.
People often like to discuss things outside of the roleplay. Sometimes you might find out about things that your character within the roleplay does not know. You cannot act on this information yet, because you have not found out about it yet inside the roleplay. You also cannot suddenly accidentally stumble on something which you aren’t supposed to find, simply because you overheard about it in discussion outside the roleplay. In roleplay language, acting based on information you found out from outside discussion is known as “meta gaming”. Stick to doing things related to constructs you already know about inside!
7. The most powerful plot devices are reserved to safeguard the roleplay lore as a whole.
There are a handful of very powerful, realistic situations which have the ability to change the entire roleplay world. Such situations include the detonation of a nuclear weapon, the crash of a stock market, the death of a character, or the occurrence of a natural disaster. Sometimes, a severe discontinuity in lore may appear out of the random actions of members of the roleplay. The best solutions to such discontinuities are often found in the powerful situations listed. In most other cases however, these powerful situations can be too much to deal with, often requiring the adjustment of the physical, legal, or monetary setup of the world in an extreme way which may go unperformed, resulting itself in a discontinuity. Such situations should be used sparingly, and only when they add more to the roleplay continuity than they take away.