Welcome to Gaia! ::

RP: Role Play (easy enough)
RPG: Role Playing Game. These are more involeved than most RPs. They tend to have room for advancement of the character, and the story is usually thought out ahead of time by the creator.
OOC: out of character
Username: The name you sign in with
Charry/Charries: Short for Character(s)
Cannan: A known character from a pre-existing story line. For example, Harry from Harry Potter would be a cannon
Bio: Biography or back story of a character
Mary Jane: This refers to a profile, usually the bio. It means that the story is sort of cliché, or humdrum, its best to be originalviii.
Mod: Short for moderator, not the same as God Modding. Listen to mods.
(God) Modding: a character is too powerful, or doesn’t allow other characters to react to their actions. People hate this, and it’s been known to get people kicked out of RPs. Even the creator shouldn’t god mod, it’s just not fair.
Avi: short for avatar. Not really related, but sometimes its brought up, so you should know about it.
NPC: Non-playable Character. These are charries that nobody is actually controlling. Sometimes they are used to allow your charry to talk to someone unimportant. Somtimes the chreator will add them to move the story.
Lit: Literate, some elitist gaians will tell you that this means writing several paragraphs per post. Most of us consider a person lit if they use proper grammar and spelling, and post more than a few word in a post.
Semi-lit: Semi-literate, this is the same as lit, but occasionally chat jargin gets slipped in there, things like bff, l8er, u r, etc.
Siggy: Signature, at the bottom of posts PMs.

These are generally accepted guidelines for how the post is actually done.

______Post in third person. Use he/she, instead of I. Its more like telling about the character than actually being them.
______Post verbal communitcation in quotes.
______You can post things the chracter thinks, just make sure to indicate that it is a thought. Some people switch to italics, some use quotes, some just say "he though..... "
______Post things about the character as you tell what's happening. If its important, make a note of it.
A sample is below.







Etiquette

These are some generally accepted standards of roleplaying, especially here at Gaia online.

______ God modding is a terrible no no. God Modding is an action where you basically don't allow the other character to fight back or post for themselves. Something like "he slammed his sword down and knocked out XX". You can fight, but must always give the other character a chance to react or fight back.
______ Literacy is the best option for role play, save semi-literacy for chatting.
______ Don’t make OOC comments, unless the creator has a method for it. For example, some people will tell you to use double parenthesis ((like this)). Occasionally it is necessary to make OOC coments to clear up points you may not understand. Most of the time there is a separate OOC forum.
______ Abide any rules specific to the RP.

Story/setting: The first thing you want to do is to set up a place for the RP to happen. Some RPs are open ended, so there isn’t really a story line, but you at least want to describe the actual location. Remember this is a world of your making, so you have to let people know anything you think is important.

Rules: some RPs include their own rules besides those of the guild/forum they’re located in. These may be simple, like “Don’t post OOC.” Or they could be more complex, it’s all what the creator wants to have happen.

Profiles: It’s best if you keep all the profiles in one place. It’s pretty universal to have them PMed to the creator, and theat person will put them in one post near the top of the page.

Monitoring: It’s important to watch an RP that you’ve created, try to read every post. Besides the fact that you should be active in your own RP, this makes sure that others aren’t god modding, altering the direction of the story, or doing something else that you don’t like. If you created it, you’re in charge.