So you want to help approving character cards? Great! But be warned, many have been known to go insane, or lose the will to live, from reading character cards! It's not a job everyone can, or should do! Takes a huge amount of patience, an eye for detail, and a good sense of balance.
When 'training' others to help me with character cards, I normally explain to them a few guidelines and then give them a series of cards to approve, cards that I have already read and know by my standards if they are or aren't approvable. I will try to emulate that in this post in the Forums, so when someone comes asking me if they can help with cards, I can point them here instead of repeating everything I always say, but also hopefully if regular players read this, it might help them know what we are on to when reading their cards, and they would avoid making the mistakes that make a card unapprovable.
Keep in mind that approving cards is a dirty process. It's mind-numbing, it's frustrating, and time-consuming. I may sound mean and spiteful with some of the things I'm going to say, but that's like a mechanic cursing at an overly tight bolt or something breaking while they're working on it. It's part of the job, it relieves stress. By no means do we mock people for their cards or the things they put in it. We never judge anything as being "stupid" or "silly" or "dumb". Judging a card's contents NEVER means we think you're a dork or something like that.
NEVER!
The very first thing I look for in a card when I get it is the size. As rule, your background story can be as long as you want to make it. But if the attributes on a card look too lengthy, I copy&paste the contents (minus the background story) into MS Word and count the characters. If it's 20000 or more, I instantly forget about that card and won't address it until the person who wrote it comes asking me about it and what's taking so long.
- Why 20000 characters limit? Well, first of all, we store a copy of the cards in the Forums, and the post size limit is 20000 characters (spaces included). Second, that is A LOT of text. I am a relatively slow reader, because usually I'm doing 10 other things at same time. Players can't expect to monopolize the staff's time with such lenghty cards. And third, if it takes you that much to write your character, something is for sure going to be wrong with it (refer to "Overly-Detailed or Excessive Ability Descriptions" on this post http://sculptyworks.com/lismore/index.php?topic=478.0 )
If the card is not over the size limit, I proceed to read it.
The approval process is highly subjective, but from the top-down, what we're looking for is anything that is excessive. A normal average human is the base standard. We are accustomed to comparing our stats to that (for example, "
hearing twice as good as normal", or "
half the strength of a normal person"). Certain attributes such as sharp claws and teeth are common for furries and often get mentioned as being weapons and that is normally no problem. Anything excessive will be on the lines of "
10 times stronger than the average man!", or "
I can hear everything within 20 meters". Furries are assumed to be an improvement over humans, but when your hide can double as armor, and your claws double as steel knives, red flags go up! We judge normal attributes as such:
- How many Natural Abilities are there and how do they compare to the standard average? Did they list their hearing, sight, taste, smell, strength, toughness of the skin, claws, teeth, fur, and however many other natural attributes you can think of, or are there just one or two? And are they within reasonable levels compared to the standard average, or are they super-senses and super-stats?
Average, or slightly above average attributes are alright, but once they start going up, the odds against the card being approvable start going down.
(and here I will take a moment to rant about something I see ALL THE TIME and that really bugs me: Super hearing, and super sense of smell! First, hearing: Sound is not a magical thing that travens uninhibited and unaffected by the environment. All the time I see this on cards: "Can hear a pin drop from 20 meters away". Yes, in a concert hall, most of us with good hearing could hear a pin drop on stage from anywhere in the room if it's been built with the proper accustics, but with elements such as walls and objects to re-direct the sound waves, sound begins to degrade. Also, unlike light, which is made of Photons which have infinite momentum, sound will only travel as far as the event that caused it produced enough energy to carry it. And the most important thing of all, ambient noise! The world is full of sounds, from the wind rustling the leaves on the trees, to waves breaking on the beach, to the fishmonger screaming that he's got fresh fish and the blacksmith hammering at his latest creation. Unless they are looking for that specific sound of the pin dropping 20 meters away from them, most creatures would never distinguish it from other environmental sounds, if the soundwaves weren't muffled/distorted/absorbed altogether before they reached Mr. SuperHearing.
And super-sense-of-smell: I see it more and more, for some reason: "I can smell anyone within 100 meters". NO, YOU CAN'T! Even more at a disadvantage than sound, smell is made of particles that are not emitted with any momentum (uness they were farted out of the character's ass!). Scent particles travel wherever the air takes them. Scent particles are left on surfaces and can be tracked, but scent is not sight! You can't know what the guy across the sim smells like just because you can see them! Stop writing you can smell people from X distance away! It's perfectly acceptable to say you can track someone if you already have an idea what scent you're looking for, but saying you can smell anything within X radius irritates me!)
- Are there eccentric (unusual) Natural Abilities? Such as fine manipulation of your 8 tentacle arms, or fur that insulates you like asbestos or that is made of sharp shards of crystal and that you can command into becoming soft and plushy or spikey and stabby.
Adding unusual attributes will invariably weight against the character, because nobody ever adds something that gives them an outright disadvantage! Having 8 fine-manipulating arms would mean you can do what would take 4 people with 2 arms each as far as tasks that require such are concerned, and having special types of skin/pelt invariably gives you an advantage against people without it.
The Fighting Abilities section is often the most underused or the most abused section of the card (second only to the
Magical Abilities section). This section is where a little bit more detail counts when saying you know kung-fu. I have read countless cards that have simply a list of fighting abilities, and I'd rather you explain them a little, at least make mention to what skill level you have. I see this all the time:
Fighting Abilities:
Swordfighting
Knife fighting
kung-fu Normally I approve cards like that, but keep in mind: Poorly descripted stats make you automatically 'inferior' in skill level to someone who took the time to
at least say what level of proficiency they have at a skill.
And this section is abused by people who just go on listing abilities by their name that have nothing to do with their characters, they just want to have them without going through the trouble of making sense of them. People who want to have a "priest" character but don't want to be at risk of getting their ass kicked tend to list all kinds of fighting abilities here. So in here what I look for is
do the fighting abilities have anything to do with the apparent character concept?
Next down the line is
Magical Items. Personally, I adore magical items! I would love to have magical rings and magical knives and magical swords and magical cloaks! ...as a RP GM, I F*KING HATE MAGICAL ITEMS!
Magical items are cheap shots. They are a way to have a powerful special
something usually with no cost whatsoever.
Thankfully, most people don't have magical items in their cards, and those who do, for the most part it's simple, perfectly acceptable things such as "
a sword that never rusts", or "
never dulls". Things that magically do something that is normally not even considered in the RP, such as the rusting, or dulling of a blade, is Ok.
- Any magical item that performs an active task should have a cost to the character. If you have a staff that shoots lightning, it should cost you something to do it.
- Magical items that perform active actions and don't come with a cost for the character are a no-no.
- I absolutely despise magical items that have something like "only I can use it" or "can't be taken from me". Write your sword-that-never-rusts with such attribute and that will count against you on the overall balance of your card's approvability.
Exceptions to those rules are magical items that are given to you by the sim's staff that specifically don't have a cost to them (for example, the
Sword of Octavia doesn't cost the wielder anything to do its magic, but the
Ring of Anti Aging that Vincent was given is slowly driving him mad as part of its cost to keep him young)
Magical Abilities. Almost all the problems a character card has are in here. In times of cards overflow, I've been known to skip cards that have magic in them in favor of approving those that don't, because of how much faster it is. Because of the extremely subjective nature of our approval process, this is a tricky section, but things to look for are:
- How many magical abilities are there? Do they have a simple fireball spell, or a list of spells that requires you to scroll down on the card to see them all? Magic is an extreme advantage, it's a supernatural attribute to which not everyone has any defense against. Most characters should have a very good reason to have more than two or three spells.
- Do the magical abilities listed give the character an unfair advantage? Certain magics are simply overpowered by nature, either by the way they are cast or the nature of what they do. Look for specific details, for example, if someone say they can manipulate water, that might include the water found in..., well, pretty much everything has water in it. Certain magics are taboo, such as drains and forms of control.
- Do the magical abilities listed have anything to do with the apparent character concept? Most characters follow a concept. A mage, a druid, a ranger, a warrior, a bard. It makes sense for a warrior-mage to be able to cast fireballs, but it makes little sense for a bard to be able to conjure death-rays.
- Are the magical abilities descriptive enough? (refer to "Improperly Described Attributes" on http://sculptyworks.com/lismore/index.php?topic=478.0 )
- Are there loopholes to be exploited in the magic? When dealing with certain things, such as water manipulation, you need to be very specific about it. The rule on poorly described things is that whatever the average is, or whatever the staff member judging the situation decides, is what is valid, but many people write vague abilities and later assume they can do anything with any water whatsoever just because they say they have water manipulation.
- Are there Banned/Restricted abilities? Banned/Restricted Powers/Abilities: You can't have the powers/abilities listed below unless under very special circumstances, so only bother to write them in your character sheet if they are absolutely essential to the character to begin with:
Invisibility - Nope. Don't even ask.
Mind Control - Under extremely special circumstances with OOC approval of the target of the power.
Teleportation - Under extremely special circumstances. Unlikely to get approved.
Weather Manipulation - Under extremely special circumstances (we don't like people messing with the weather, it affects too many things).
Telekinesis - If it's no more than what Luke Skywalker could do with the Force, then maybe.
Elemental Control - Closely related to controling the weather, it can be no greater than on a personal scale.
Resurrection - Nope. You can only do this if a GM says you can do it because we decided you could do it.
Desolidification (non-physical, incorporeal) - If you want this, you better not want to be able to affect the physical world either.
Invulnerability - No. Something must be able to hurt you.
Materialization - Conjuring objects out of thin air requires a very good reason for it and special GM approval.
Transmutation - Transforming something (or someone) into something else also requires OOC consent and special GM approval (this is not Shapeshifting).
Time Travel - You're joking, right?
Phenomenal Cosmic Powers - ...what??
Summoning - Summoning creatures touches the NPC control area, which is by default restricted to the Admins. Since everybody who's been given the priviledge of summoning something has only made a fool of themselves, this power is now banned.
Telepathy - All forms of telepathy and empathy require OOC consent.
- And the foremost: Is there cost on the magical abilities? If there's no cost, stop reading the card right there and toss it aside and when asked about it, point the dumbass who wrote it to the rules and tell them to read them and make sure to read http://sculptyworks.com/lismore/index.php?topic=478.0 and waste their time finding out what they did wrong. Serioously, no cost in magical abilities is the single most annoying thing I come upon on cards!
Skills. Here is where people should write if their characters are able to read/write, if they have some special talent such as playing the lute or carving wood or making excellent pie... MMMmmm! Pie! Interestingly, usually people don't write much as far as skills go. It's very rare for there to be problems in this section. The most common problem is stuff such as "
I can read/write/speak most known languages", or simply "
I can read/write/speak all languages". Nobody is allowed to know ALL LANGUAGES. You should be specific. If not sure what languages are available, ask a staff member damnit!
- Problems in the Skills section usually involve lack of description or overpowered or out-of-proportion skills.
The biggest problems I see in the
Disadvantages section are disadvantages that aren't a disadvantage at all, disadvantages that everybody has (as explained in "
Disadvantages That Every Normal Person Has" on
http://sculptyworks.com/lismore/index.php?topic=478.0 ) or the worst of them all:
- Disadvantages that are in fact an advantage. Many people have done that, so watch out for it. Sometimes it's done in a deliberate manner, such as
"Can't Feel a Thing: BigBurlyGuy has the disadvantage that he can't ever feel touch on his skin or eyeballs or insides or anywhere. That makes it so he will never feel when a sword cuts his flesh or if someone punches him really hard but not hard enough to impair his functions"
Not being able to feel touch would be Ok, if it weren't immediately countered by an advantage!
- ...and Disadvantages that are countered by advantages, such as when people have 'blind' as a disadvantage, but up on their special abilities they have some other way of seeing, that usually means they aren't missing anything from being blind to begin with.
Then key things to look for in the cards are:
- Does the card follow a theme/concept? Sometimes we have water mages that are water mages all around, other times we have warriors that know necromancy and air magic. Weird combinations of skills/magic/attributes tend to make a character unbalanced and overpowered.
- Is there too much of something? Or even, is there too little of something? Do you feel that attributes are poorly described? Or are they overly described and that excessive amount of details ends up being a problem?
- Do you think there is something that is too much? Remember, card approval is highly subjective. Nova might think something is too strong while I think it's perfectly Ok. If it's not something that is absolutely a glaring problem, it's Ok and it is normal that sometimes we in the staff disagree with minor details, but almost always we always agree when someone in the staff thinks something in a card is 'too much'.
- Is the card well balanced? Are there 20 different fighting styles on a character that only listed they can wield knives? Does the character have a lot of natural attributes, a lot of fighting skills, a lot of magic, a lot of skills, a few disadvantages? These are examples of cards that are not well balanced.
- Is there a 'pattern' to the card? And by that I mean cards that are super-strong, super-senses, super-skills, super-magic, super-everything! Many have been known to write cards that cover ALL bases. They aren't just a mage, they are a mage-warrior-priest-druid-blacksmith-scholar-merchant-farmer-alchemist. Players that try to account for all possibilities and all situations invariably ruin their cards. Don't try to do everything, don't try to be everything. It won't work.
- Are absolute terms such as "all" used in favor of the character? As explained in "The Use of Absolute Terms in Attributes" http://sculptyworks.com/lismore/index.php?topic=478.msg2366#msg2366 . The only times absolutes are good in a card are when they work against the character. Any time they are in favor of the character, that can be cause for rejecting approving the card.
And of course, are there things from this extensive list of things that tick me off?
http://sculptyworks.com/lismore/index.php?topic=478.0 Those are easy ways for a card to be unapprovable.
So there you have it! Approving cards isn't an easy process, but it can be taught!
And as closing statement on this post, let me point out how big and huge and long it is..... and it's less than 20000 characters (19005 to be exact) and it contains all sorts of metadata you can't see taking up space (bold/italics/underlines, links, lists, etc). It doesn't happen often, but from time to time I get the "over 20000 characters" notecards. There is no reason whatsoever for a character to be this long!
