Site Policies

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Staff Policies

  • Clear Communication: It is on occasion necessary for staff to answer a request with a simple and unequivocal no. In such cases, Staffers should clearly cite either a book reference or a wiki reference substantiating the denial, or otherwise explain the extenuating circumstances necessitating the denial.
  • Default Rulings: Staff must enact the rules hierarchy set forth in this document. Houserules supercede published errata which supercedes the most recent published version of a rule which supercedes older versions of a rule. If a houserule is not currently in place on the wiki, the rule defaults to the rules as written according to the above hierarchy. Unclear rules without clarifying errata or houserules should be arbitrated by the scene's ST be they a player or a staffer and submitted for clarification after the scene is over.
  • Impartiality: Staff are forbidden from involving themselves in any matter relating directly to their PCs, their PC's player group, their PC's family, friends, rivals, enemies, or IC partners. They may not process XP requests, equipment requests, action requests, or any other request for such individuals, or any other request that would directly benefit their character in any fashion. Furthermore, they are forbidden from taking part in discussions about such matters with other staffers, or even viewing requests relating to their characters or their character's circle of influence. Actions violating the spirit of this rule, even if it doesn't violate the letter of the rule will be taken with equal seriousness. TL;DR: Staffers should go out of their way to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.
  • Staff Role and Player Role Divide: Staff forums, discords, and direct messages are in place to facilitate staff communication about matters pertaining to staff. Staff should not discuss their player side intentions and actions in staff only spaces. While such discussions are permissible in player spaces, the intention here is to keep staff from unintentionally excluding players from avenues of fun, and to prevent any notion of influencing other staffers to favor another staffer's IC activities.
  • NPC Scenes: Any actual RP with an NPC must happen on the server, and must be logged onto the wiki and linked to the NPC's page properly. It's okay to like, 'Artje would tell the Sakima where to get good shoes,' 'great, the Sakima thinks that's cool.' in DMs, but anything that's actually RP'd has to be in public, where it can be seen as it's happening, and then go up on the wiki for documentation.

Player Run Plots

PrP Plot runners MAY involve their PCs in their own plots under the following circumstances:
  1. The character does not materially benefit from the plot. Your character can participate, but cannot receive equipment, goblin fruit, token materials, or any mechanically represented tangible award for having participated. Nor can they receive anything that might justify such an award in the future.
  2. The plot does not present the likelihood of killing another character. If your plot is considered 'high threat', your character is going to sit it out. If another character were to die in your plot, and your character survived unscathed? Even if you were the most upright and honest of persons, the appearance of impropriety would not be pleasant for you.
  3. You use a randomizer to decide who the antagonists attack first. This can take the form of a single die roll made in the open for all players to see.
  4. Your character stays largely in the background. The plot is for the benefit of the other characters, not you. Let them solve the problems. Learn to ask "What do you think?" a lot.

Character Limits

Players on From Dusk Till Jawn may have as many characters as they want, with the following restrictions:
  • All of our Conflict of Interest rules apply.
  • We ask people to be mindful of how much staff work they're creating with new characters. Try not to make more than one character every couple of weeks, particularly in the same sphere/venue.

XP Policy

Characters on From Dusk Till Jawn gain a maximum of 6 experiences per month. We use flat XP, and do not track beats anymore. Players may 'true up' their XP to the current max even if they didn't achieve full beats in a prior month. The Starting XP section on each sphere page is updated monthly by staff with the new XP total.

New characters begin play with XP equal to 35 + 6 per month since start of game. This means new characters start with the same amount of XP as characters who have been in play since start of game. Call it student loan forgiveness for XP. ;P

Player Policies

  • Conflict Resolution: All players of From Dusk Till Jawn are adults, and we ask that you treat one another as peers. Not everyone can get along with everyone else at all times, and conflicts will naturally arise. If someone is upsetting you, presume positive intent as detailed below and reach out to them directly to ask them to change their behavior. This is the first step anyone should be taking. If you have approached the other player about their behavior and the behavior continues, or they simply refuse to change their behavior, then you should be reaching out to staff to request our help in arbitrating the manner. The exception to this would be behavior that is deliberately antagonistic or violates our harassment policy; in such instances, contact staff immediately.
  • Courteous Practices: All players should read and follow our site's courteous practices guidelines.
  • Harassment: It is never acceptable to disparage another player on the basis of their age, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, appearance, body type, sexual orientation, or gender identity. It is never acceptable to contact another player with unwanted sexual advances. It is never acceptable to run a whisper campaign against another player. It is never acceptable to contact another player to attempt to coerce, intimidate, or harass them into changing their IC actions. You can contact another player to attempt to cooperatively discuss mitigating the potential fallout of IC actions, but if they state they prefer to keep the matter entirely IC, that request must be honored.
  • This Is Our Living Room: And staff won't tolerate any behavior in it that we wouldn't tolerate in our real-life living room: racism, sexism, queer/homo/trans/bi/acephobia, classism, ableism, fatphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and any other structural biases we forgot to list are not welcome here. It's okay to ask people to spoiler images or text which upset you in OOC channels. For IC situations, see Safe Hearths, Safe Tables below. We want everyone to enjoy hanging out here.
  • Presume Positive Intent: Online communication lacks tone of voice and body language, so very often our words fall flat. We ask that you assume the best of both staff and your fellow players. If someone says something that upsets you, by all means bring it up, but do so in such a way that presumes the other person didn't mean to upset you. And similarly, if someone suggests something you did or said has upset them, be gracious and apologize for it. Open and honest communication helps keep the game fun and casual during easy moments, and makes it possible for tense moments to take place without hurt feelings and in a continuum of trust.
  • Safe Hearths, Safe Tables: We attempt to emulate the Safe Hearths doctrine in Changeling: The Lost, pp302-304. During tense scenes, players and staff are encouraged to check in with the other people in the scene using the Stoplight system. Red means too intense, please dial it back and/or talk about it OOC. Yellow means the intensity is great where it's at, keep it there. Green means the current intensity level is fine and could even be dialed up a bit. Similarly, in keeping with the Lines and Veils system, players are not obligated to RP through any scene they are no longer enjoying. There are no exceptions to this rule. Once a player has stated they wish to fade to black, all other players in the scene must immediately stop roleplaying and decide if the scene must be resolved entirely without further RP, or if the player who wishes to leave can simply have their character step out of the scene, allowing play to continue for the others once they've stepped out. Players cannot use this rule to escape IC consequences. While the roleplay can and should end if a player is no longer having fun, the negative events happening to the character must be resolved on an out of character level. Players should feel free to involve a staffer in arbitrating this resolution.

Conflict of Interest

Staff Conflict of Interest is covered under the Staff policies. The below covers PC interaction.

Most of the concept of CoI when it comes to players comes down to common sense. Here are a few guidelines to better delineate what staff thinks 'common sense' means, just so we're all on the same page:

  1. Multiple characters of yours should not participate in materially or directly negatively affecting another player character or providing benefit which directly and intentionally harms other PCs.
    1. If Bob's character A makes a sword for Jane's character B to attack Alice's character D who A hates, Bob's character A should not also be getting spells from Jane's character C, nor should he receive equipment or social assistance on this vendetta from character C.
  2. It is permissible for Character A and Character C to be in the same Civil organization, as long as they aren't doing the above, or using it to shut people deliberately out of plots. This is a small game, that kind of thing becomes obvious fast.
  3. It is totally permissible for Character A and Character C to have the same Court, as long as they do not provide direct material assistance to one another in PvP.
    1. Material assistance provided to the Court, that is, 'Character A has a job that requires him to do something for his Court like gather Goblin Fruit, and then Character C has access to that as a member of the Court,' is not permissible as a means of transferring assistance for PvP.
  4. Oaths, Bargains, Sealings of words are permissible as long as those items never come into play as forbidden above re: PvP
  5. Casual social RP is not considered direct assistance.
  6. Don't hog plots with multiple characters.
  7. Under no circumstances may you transfer items or resources from one of your characters to another of your characters. Your Mage can't heal your Changeling. Your Vampire can't do Status actions which benefit your Mage. If it's grey area, ask staff.

The intent of this is to allow players to interact reasonably on a small game without being able to use multiple characters to ... well, cheat with regards to PvP. There's almost never PvP on FDTJ, so don't worry about it. If you feel "weird" about CoI or have questions, chat with staff. We'd rather say "nah that's not a big deal, go ahead" than "uhm, I think that's not cool" after the fact.

This is not an exhaustive or definitive list but a list of examples. Staff may add to this list at any time, and just because something isn't directly listed doesn't mean it isn't CoI; we'll talk to you if we have concerns, and we ask that you talk to us, too.

Players who repeatedly violate Conflict of Interest rules may lose the ability to run multiple characters. Really, this all comes down to 'please don't give us headaches.'