Getting Started

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Currently due to spam bots account registration requires manual approval. In order to make this process as smooth as possible you can hop onto IRC on the Magicstar Server and join the channel #xaviers which I’d recommend doing anyway to say hi and meet your fellow players. We’re also always happy to answer any questions or help with character ideas. You can use any IRC chat program but Mibbit is pretty easy to use if you don’t already have a client.

Otherwise, here's a direct link to the Chat: Click Here

Once the account is approved you can post your character application by creating a new thread in the Applications Forum. Once approved by two moderators it'll be moved to the Active Character section.

The Mod Team currently consists of:
Samantha McManus (Traveler on IRC)
Will Stanton (WillStanton on IRC)
Nailah Weaver (Barrin on IRC)

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Character Creation
This post is intended to help you as you're creating a character to join into the XU game. It's not possible to cover every topic, so feel free to PM a moderator if you have some specific question that isn't covered here.



Power:
Putting together a character's mutant power is probably the trickiest part of the overall character creation process. Coming up with a unique power is difficult enough, and then you must decide how accomplished the character is with the power in question. Below you'll find some quick tips to help you with both problems.


Creating a Power: They say there are no new ideas left in stories, just old ones with new window dressing. This often seems true with powers in the superhero genre, decades of superhero stories have covered just about every circumstance imaginable. Don't feel that you have to create a totally unique, never before seen power for your character. Instead, focus on making the way your character manifests or uses the power different enough to stand out. Both the moderators and players will always be happy to help someone come up with a power, so don't be afraid to toss some ideas around in the OCC forum.

Some of the 'standard' mutant powers are things like, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Flight, Energy Projection, and Shapeshifting. Each of these powers may seem generic, but it's easy to give them a twist. For instance, imagine a Telepath who makes thoughts appear around her as visual or audio phenomena. Or a Flying character who actually can just step on the air as if it were solid. A Telekinetic character might have powerful lines of visible force connecting him to the object he's moving, or a Shapeshifter might have a body that is a colony of symbiotic organisms. It's a good bet that with some time looking at the powers of published mutants and other superheros, that some interesting and more importantly fun idea will come to you. And sometimes a “plain” power is perfectly fine. Not every power has to be super complicated.

Also considering making the ability more of a condition than a power. Perhaps a Psychic character becomes an entity of pure thought when using the power, or is always existing simultaneously in the physical and astral universes. A telekinetic might project an image of herself to the object being manipulated, and Energy Projectors have a long history of being elementals, that is, being made of the energy they project. Tweak your concept, have some fun with it, and you'll find you've got something that sets you apart.
These lists can also be helpful for inspiration: List of Superpowers and a whole Superpower Wiki


Power Control and Strength: The college aged characters generally have put behind them the awkward early days of learning how to use their power. Unless a power is designed to never be fully under control, it should be easy and natural for the character to invoke and use in normal situations. Powers may still go awry in stress situations or when some strange occurrence messes with a character's abilities, but by and large a character's power is a talent they have a high degree of control over. That doesn't mean that the characters can do anything with their power, there can still be room to grow as far as discovering new ways to use or manifest the power, if that's something you're interested in. As far as raw strength, XU characters should be low-tier X-Men level. The XU student characters are just now coming into the maturity of their powers.
The high school ages XI characters fall more into the category of trying to get their powers under control and stop breaking things with their telekinesis or setting their desk on fire accidentally. They don’t have to be entirely helpless and learning a certain measure of control will probably be the very first thing they do, but they should be a bit more clueless than college aged characters and more prone to accidents.



Background and Personality:
This next post should not be taken as any kind of hard and fast guideline, but rather simply some hints to help you create a character that will be a lot of fun to play.


Personality: Playing a game via forum is a different experience than many tabletop games. Combat does not take a central role, even within an action scene. Much of the game is played out via dialogue. For that reason, consider making a character that will want to engage with others, either positively or negatively. Characters that stand alone on the sidelines are likely to give you less chances to play. If you do make a character who is a bit of a jerk, or otherwise interacts with others negatively, make sure you differentiate between antagonizing the other characters, and antagonizing the other players. The former makes for interesting interactions, the latter makes the game less fun.


Biography: Try to create a character who is neither perfect nor horribly flawed. Too many terrible events in a character's past can make for a weird caricature of an abuse victim. Such characters are hard to take seriously, and you'll find that few people will play as if they really appreciate the character's bad situation, as it's too over the top to really respond to properly. By the same token, a character that had a perfect, happy, privileged existence may seem a bit boring. Everyone's life has a few bumps, and your characters should be no exception.

If you're going to make a character who's had a traumatic past, try to stick to one big trauma, this will be easier for the other players to remember and respond to in their interactions with your character. Also, try to have your character either dealing with the trauma, or able to push it aside and not let it completely cripple them. Playing a character whose trauma has rendered them non-functional may be fun and interesting for a short while, but in the long term it'll feel like a straight jacket.

Finally, give your character a reason to have come to XU. Being that the school is a university, and a special one at that, some students will have as their reason that they need the facilities of the school to be safe, or that their parents insisted. But you may find that you have more fun, and more to do if your character has some specific goal, such as joining an X-Team, completing a normal major, or getting a technical education in the amazing science and technology that X-Corp has available. Think of this goal as a plot hook that will help you get things moving when you're not sure what your character should be doing or who they would want to talk to. Such goals are an excellent reason to have your student character make a friend of one of the faculty, after all, it's quite common to bond with a faculty member as an advisor and mentor in college.
For high school aged students this might not necessarily be as big a deal since they’re a bit more railroaded in life and to them Xaviers is a bit like a boarding school that they’re send to. But that still leaves some room as to whether they want to be there or not and if so why.

In general, create a biography that describes the past of a person you would like to play. But with each bit of information you create, ask yourself if that will make the game more or less fun for you, and try to tweak things so that you're creating a character that will be as much fun as possible. Don't go crazy with biographies that involve multiple alien abductions, but don't worry too much about realism. It is after all a cinematic, comic-book universe, there is a lot more wiggle room when it comes to strange or coincidental events.

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While it's not 100% necessary to follow the standard format, in general a standard application is much easier for the moderators to read, and therefore to approve quickly. If you have some super creative idea for an application that won't use the standard format, feel free to surprise us. If you're more worried about the content than the format, as most people are, just copy the following text and paste it into your application, so you can get started on writing up your student right away.

Code: Select all

[b]Name:[/b] First 'Codename' Last (Codename is not required)
[b]Age:[/b] Most characters should be 17-21 for XU, XI students must be of high school age
[b]Country of Origin:[/b] optional
[b]Hometown:[/b] optional
[b]Birthday:[/b] optional


[b]Power:[/b] A description of the character's power and their level of control goes here. See above for a more in depth section on powers. Just provide a general framework for us to understand what the character can do.

[b]Personality:[/b] Give us a quick couple of sentences about how your character behaves and interacts with others and what they’re like. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive and a character’s personality often only truly develops during actual play. Just have a general idea of what you’re going for.

[b]Description:[/b] Describe the character physically. This is a great tool for people who look the biography up later, so be general, and more focused on say, clothing style than a particular outfit.

[b]Background:[/b] Explain anything you think is important and interesting about the character's personal history and circumstances.

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Character Advancement:

The game world we play in is a dynamic one. We try to keep the setting vibrant and fluid, and part of that fluidity is how the characters evolve over time.

Character progression is a good thing. It can get pretty boring to keep playing the exact same character, and having a plan for advancement is a great idea. The game has been going for a while and many characters have developed their abilities. In some cases they have enhanced existing mutant abilities, in some cases new abilities have manifested, in others new equipment has made a difference.

Most of these changes have been informal and player driven. We don't have an approval process that governs when a character can "level up" or the direction that characters are "allowed" to take. As with most of our moderation philosophy here, we prefer to believe that less is more on our end. At times we may give feedback or ask for clarification on the direction that a character is taken, usually with an eye to greater harmony. Just as we don't want to have characters that are terribly similar at the creation stage, we prefer to see characters grow in unique directions as much as possible.

Character advancement can be woven into the story in many ways. Downtime periods are ideal to have a "training montage" that explains where a new talent comes from. Working with the various teacher characters for one-on-one tutoring can also give opportunities for role-play and advancement. Informal practice (i.e. not in the context of the X-Teams) also works well. If you're having trouble coming up with a good direction to go or a fun justification, feel free to PM a mod or post something in the OOC forum or Plot Farm asking for help.

Please use discretion, of course. Just as a starting character who can do everything is boring to play with/around, characters who become too powerful or who overlap with too many others can be less interesting for other players to role-play with. If in doubt, ask! We're always happy to help.