How I Judge Applications

[dalamb]

These are criteria I intend to use in choosing applications to accept into the game. I say “intend” because other factors might occur to me as I check final applications, but I am trying to let everyone know in advance, as best I can, what my expectations are so as to be as fair as I can to everyone.

Fundamentally, the overriding goal is to put together a party that would be fun for me to run with. These are in (roughly) decreasing order of importance.

1. Your application has to be complete according to the criteria in the character creation post. Some things like mundane equipment can be missing, and I do allow some minor adjustments for party balance after acceptance.

2. Your writing has to be something I want to read for weeks and weeks (maybe years if this works out better than most campaigns on the Weave). So your prose in the first post of the application, and in the pre-acceptance in-character thread, is important to me. In the pre-acceptance thread, it’s not just isolated prose that matters, but how your character interacts with other characters, so watch what other characters say and find ways to react to them, as well as initiating conversations yourself.

3. One factor in wanting to read is that the party has to get along. If you don’t interact with others in the pre-game thread, if your character annoys me, if you annoy me, I don’t want to play with you unless you are very very strong on the other factors. I’m not looking for goody two-shoes – privateers aren’t evil, but they don’t have to be nice – just prose that’s not annoying or upsetting to read.

4. The party as a whole has to look balanced to me. It has to look like it could handle the kind of challenge I expect to have you face. This means some mix of fighterly types, skillmonkeys, casters, and support. If there are two bards I probably have to favour a slightly worse writer who is the only one in some other role over the second bard – and similarly for any other role. I will make some adjustments to my plans if the best party is a little imbalanced, but there are limits.

5. The application has to be set up in a way that is easy for me to find the things I’m looking for. Being complete is much more important, but making my life easier is a factor.

6. People who participated in the pre-game discussion and helped me debug the rules have a small advantage over people who join after the announcement goes out.

7. Officer spread is a low-priority concern. If two applications are very close to equal by the previous criteria, then if one duplicates a role and the other doesn’t, the second would have a slight edge. On the other hand, being the only one in an officer role doesn’t give you a big advantage aside from when things are nearly equal, since I can always create an NPC to fill an empty role. It might be wise to list more than one officer role, in decreasing order of attractiveness to you.

[dalamb]

Addendum re "already on the crew."

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People are free to write a background as though they were already crew members, but no one escapes the need to play in-character in the Purple Dolphin pre-game thread, and no one escapes the need for an interview. An "already on the crew" player wouldn't have any advantage in being accepted for the game; the presumption if they aren't is that they are moving to a new ship the Captain captured not too long ago.