The vision of The Easting Reach (TER) persistent world and roleplaying community is to provide a living breathing world in which players can tell great stories together, experience the thrills of adventure, exploration, and quality roleplay through their characters within the dynamic landscape of the setting.
In order to uphold TER's vision and the fairness of the experience for all parties, we put a great deal of faith in our playerbase to responsibly use the tools and powers made available to them, to bear in mind the immersion of fellow players whilst inhabiting the game world, and to respect every member of the community despite any differences that may exist. It is thus expected that all members of the community abide by basic standards of human decency and civil conduct. In order to ensure this is so, the following rules and guidelines are to be followed:
Rules
- Be excellent to one another. [1]
- No metagaming.
This means taking care with differentiating the knowledge that you as a player might have but your character does not. Always think about what sort of knowledge is IC (in character) as opposed to OOC (out of character). This also means that dungeons should be considered a new experience when repeated. Though there is a variety of dungeons spread throughout the gameworld, much of this content is static. Your character does not remember the exact location of traps, spawns, dangerous rooms, etc as this represents areas being different and changing over time and locations being presented as a different section of the same overall area since the gameworld does not reflect the entirety of the setting 1:1. There is much more to the world that is off-screen but no less present thus why repeated content is considered a new part of the same overall region rather than the exact same place being visited over and over again which is both unrealistic and a gamification of the setting that detracts from roleplay. - All instances of PvP must be consensual. See PvP guidelines for more information.
- No muling/item swapping between characters; selling an item to an NPC trader and buying off of them is acceptable.
- No twinking; this includes loaning out powerful items to low level characters.
- Only one prestige class may be taken on a character.
- Only one Divine or Nature class may be taken on a character.
- Divine and Nature Classes must abide by the One Step rule; see Alignment.
- A character's chosen Divine or Nature class must be the highest levelled class when Level 8 is obtained--the minimum is Level 4; see Classes for exceptions.
- No exploiting or abusing mechanical/technical limitations for unfair advantage or unintended effects. Report exploits and bugs when they are first experienced and if in doubt, always seek clarification.
Footnote 1:
To assist in being a decent person, we have found the following advice may be helpful:
- Find alternative words in roleplay for modern day slurs to respect people OOC.
- Do not assume the worst of people OOC because of what their character does IC. Consider it instead as an opportunity to learn and understand more about what led the character to behave the way they do, as an avenue of exploring backstory and expanding on shared narrative.
- Feel free to discuss things openly on Discord but know that harassment is not okay in any topic or with any context.
- ‘Loot skimming' is the act of secretly pocketing or stealing goods during a party venture without giving any indication the character is doing so to their fellow party members. This behaviour is not acceptable and becomes a purely OOC advantage for one player with no ability for other players to react and is against the spirit of our collaborative environment. In these situations we want to see fairness for all as well as story development, and the roleplay from these selfish acts of covertly dipping into a shared party pool being noticed or even having the potential of being noticed is part of that, creating potential IC conflict and stories which result from that. To be clear, it is okay for a character to steal or try to steal (or collect without intention of sharing) goods from a party venture, but these acts must be revealed in an IC manner to fellow party members – through emotes etc.
Soft Rules
These are more of guidelines/best practices due to technical limitations, roleplay opportunities, or fairness.
Party sizes are advised to be less than 6. This is to help avoid unintended consequences in the difficulty experienced as a result of scaling in dungeons – as such, it’s fine to have a party size larger than 6 but doing so comes with the increased chance of encountering insurmountable foes.
Do your best to keep the amount of items on your character below 75 items to help ensure server stability.
PvP
TER is not a PvP arena. Classes are not balanced around it and PvP is not encouraged as a solution to IC problems. It is not forbidden either but we do ask you observe some rules. For the sake of convenience, we assume PvP occurs between two player characters here. In reality situations may be more complex, but the same principles apply.
PvP should be avoidable, have a clear goal and clear rules. What these are is up to you, as appropriate to the circumstances. However, please note that consent does not mean that one party can just say 'no,' and leave it that - we are looking to ensure that even the very threat of PvP has a meaningful impact on the narrative rather than giving any one party the ability to avoid all consequences - that is not the idea at all.
Please see PvP for rules.
Rule Clarification
In-Game RP Tools and Meta
25/04/2022
Dear TER community, it's come to our attention that the item renaming tools on the server have been very recently misused. Case in point, a standard weapon item had been renamed by a player, and its description changed to include item properties that did not match its default assignment. Afterwards the item was used as an RP prop to perpetuate an IC act of fraud. The team has decided to retcon the RP surrounding this item as this is considered meta-gaming. While we are all for story continuity and player creativity, we cannot support or condone such misuse - adding misleading descriptions or specifically item properties to the description of items is not acceptable use of the @description and @name commands. These RP tools are provided for players to enable them to create their own stories on TER. However, as with other things in life - please use responsibly.
-Kilaana