Fandom High OOC

I think I'm done spamming your flists for today after this. Possibly. Hopefully.

Ahem. Thank you all for getting your e-mail addresses up on your userinfo pages. Now it's time to see how well they work.

We're going to be sending an e-mail to each address we have on file now. If you have multiple characters who share the same account, keep in mind that you'll only be receiving one e-mail. Here's what we need you to do if/when you receive your message:

- If you receive the e-mail in your inbox before Sunday evening (eastern time), please reply and let us know everything went fine.
- If you receive the e-mail but something went wrong - it went to your spam folder, you didn't get it until late in the evening, etc. - please reply and let us know exactly what went wrong.
- If you do not receive an e-mail by Sunday evening, please send us an e-mail and let us know.

Hopefully, you'll all receive our e-mails, and we'll receive all of yours. Please try to get back to us as soon as schedules allow, so we can begin to investigate what providers might not be working as well as we'd like. This will not only help us communicate with all of you better, but it'll give us a heads-up to give to new players in the future.

Again, if there are any questions, feel free to leave them here. Thanks!

ETA: All e-mails have been sent!

After some discussion of the responses to the poll that was in the Open Forum, the plot calendar has been resurrected in a slightly more simplistic and hopefully easier-to-understand form, and has been linked in the profiles of fandomhigh and fhplotterywheel for future reference. If you have any questions, please let us know.

1. You get out of this game what you put into it. If you want to get involved, the key is to get your character to know other characters. If there's a common room post or any post that says 'open' that's an invitation to go for it. If you want people to notice you, you have to put in the effort to be noticed.

2. Don't bite off more than you can chew. With such a big game, there is always a lot going on and even within one post there is the temptation to ping into every thread. It's better to be timely in replying to the few threads you have than make people wait ages while you get through everyone. Same goes for workshops, classes, clubs and plots.

3. ICA=ICC. You will see this acronym a lot. It means "in character actions = in character consequences." If your character does something, you are expected to deal with the consequences. Pretty easy stuff!

4. Everyone is fictional, so no one is fictional. We use meta in place of normal pop culture references so that everyone stays real. So, for example, even if Heroes is a real show in your character's universe, your character would not know that show in Fandom. They would know it as 'Supers' (the meta version). Confused? We use fake names for shows/movies/some books/etc so everyone here gets to stay real. You can find examples at the FH Wiki at www.fhwiki.com. The exceptions are mainstream Disney (Mickey, Minnie, etc), Looney Tunes, The Muppets and classic literature (excluding Hamlet and Macbeth). Your characters could conceivably know about these things because Bugs, Mickey and Co. are considered to be real "people" who are actors and perform their shows. The Muppet Show pretended to be a real stage show, so the Muppets were an acting troupe in their time and classic lit is free game until a character from there shows up, then we pretend the meta name was in usage all along or that the book is a retelling of a real person's life. Reality is still reality, so reality TV shows, Do It Yourself makeover-type shows and The Food Network stay as is. Confused? You'll get the hang of it.

5. Learn the ropes. The handbook is a great place to figure out the basics of what goes where. If in doubt, ask someone if you're confused, but learning the basics is a good place to start. FHWiki is also great for poking around for information (especially if you have no freaking clue what some people are going on about. Sometimes it's an easily explained in-joke).

6. OOC Communication is Your New Best Friend. Got a problem? Talk to someone about it. Don't know what you're doing? Talk to someone about it. Pretty much everything can be resolved by talking to someone. Keeping your lines of communication open makes things oh so much easier. It's probably a good idea to get AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) as that's what most folks around here use.

7. You don't have to read everything. Lots of people. Lots of characters. Lots going on. You don't have to get through it all. fandom_radio's main purpose is to summarize the day's events in an in character broadcast (ie: the characters can tune in and listen to the day's gossip) and give you links that you, the player, can click on to read if you really want to. But you're not expected to know everything that's going on. Just be sure to keep up to date with fandomhigh_ooc and listen out for in character announcements on the fandomhigh comm. Everything else is optional.

8. Modding is bad, mkay? Modding is when you try to dictate what someone else's character or environment is doing. The biggie here is that you can't dictate what the weather is (check fh_weather for up to date details) and you can't suddenly come up with big things that the rest of the island will have to deal with like a new statue in the park or a herd of mammoths waltzing through town. On a smaller scale, infer what you want to do, but always give your RPing partner a chance to do something else with their character if they want to. Example of modding: "Hades hugged Rikku." Example of getting the point across without modding: "Hades went to hug Rikku." This states Hades' intention and still gives Rikku a chance to run far, far away if she wants. If in doubt, check with your RPing partner to see what's okay either via OOC comments in the thread or poke them on AIM.

9. You have to run guest stars and plots by the admins first. Want to run a storyline of your own? You'll get the hang of this by seeing what other people do, and definitely talk to your sibling/buddy about this as they'll be able to explain it in more detail, but basically if you want to do anything big or have anyone visit the island for whatever reason, you have to email the admins for approval in advance. This is to moderate character traffic, make sure things stay cool for everyone involved in the game and so the admins can help you iron out any problems that you might not immediately see. This pretty much falls under the "when in doubt, ask" thing.

10. Don't assume everyone knows your canon. You'll find an array of players at Fandom High coming from a variety of backgrounds. Even if you think your show/movie/comic/book/play is the most commonplace thing ever, chances are someone will never have heard of it and, as such, may not know that your character is awesome. Enlighten them! Put up an information post, tell people where they can get the canon if they want to, fill them in on details about your character if they ask. The best way to pimp your canon is to give the best portrayal of your character that you can.

( Other random tidbits )

( Linky linky )

This looks like a lot, but basically it's just here to preemptively answer any questions you might have and to be a nifty reference tool. We love us some obsessive-compulsiveness when it comes to being organized.