Roleplay Expectations
The following is an effort to summarize the overall culture and objectives which surround roleplay as it appears in The Domains of Dread. As these are expectations, they are not rules per se but should nevertheless inform how success ought be measured when participating in the stories espoused by the server and its community.
- Characters should behave foremost true to themselves as well to the setting. The Realms of Terror are complicated, beautiful places shrouded by conflict and misery, where hope and horror mingle freely in a space between. It is neither grimdark nor kind, rather expressing a stubborn, bittersweet optimism shown even in the face of all its challenges.
- Roleplay is intended to be a platform for collaborative storytelling where players and their characters seek other players and their characters so to share storylines and plot points where feasible and reasonable to the circumstances involved. In this way roleplay on The Domains of Dread may be likened to a game of improvisational theater, where everyone may be called upon as their characters to contribute even in some small way to the stories held here.
- Characters may have a variety of goals, aims, ambitions and worldviews—all which will be taken to task by the setting either implicitly or literally through stories told through players and the Game Masters. Whether any such character survives these challenges—and survives them intact—depends on the character and the people they involve themselves with.
- Conflict is central to The Domains of Dread—characters who die will never again be alive and in many cases are dead outright. However, conflict may be engaged with through means that go beyond mechanical fighting, per the Character versus Character Rules, and social conflict is as common as blade facing blade. Lethal fighting is rare and reserved primarily for Dread Figures.
- No story lasts forever in The Domains of Dread. Closure may happen at the end or as part of any given storyline, though the threat of closure will always be communicated to players and their characters ahead of the choices they make that invite it.
- The concept of a rising tide raising all ships and building up the characters around your own is key to managing expectations when roleplaying. Not everyone can be the “star” of any given scene and certainly not all at once. Yield the scene as it flows from one character to the next with conscientious grace. Be curious and dig into the hooks provided by other characters as they appear. Even self-absorbed characters cannot exist entirely in a vacuum of their own creation, much as they might see the world differently.
- Because conflict is so core to the experience, there should be an element of resilience when there are bad outcomes for character decisions, as no-one beyond the Misty Border ever gets what they want every time that they want it. Characters may be scarred, even maimed—but until closure they are not finished, and wrinkles along the way help tell more interesting stories when all is said and done.
- Despite everything, as above, The Domains of Dread is not an exercise in hopelessness and there will be victories both on the side of good and evil. Characters who fight for their ideals may even be able to reach closure still alive and made whole by their ideals, but they will have fought hard and gotten lucky enough in the doing to set them apart from those who weren’t able to live to see the same opportunities.
- Characters are their own people and will react accordingly to the world around them. It will always be taken with a dim view if the pursuit of conflict comes across as being for the wrong reasons, like to “resolve” out of character misgivings and disputes. Likewise they should not innately know or understand information they would not have if not for the player having another, more informed character.
- Taken together roleplaying on The Domains of Dread is not one that can be “won” in the same sense that a fight with AI-controlled hostile entities can be “lost”. As long as the roleplay is engaging for all players and lets everyone express some facet of their character, then it is by any metric successful even if those characters must suffer consequences or some other complication in their way.