Lithaen, it's not possible to RP in future more than a month. You'll be able to RP her as adult in 7 years and not earlier. This is the general progression of the site and you have a lot of time to develop the character and learn the world before becoming an adult.

She is looking to forward-date her character multiple years.

This is not possible because you do not know what sort of character you will be, who you will meet and who might die. Significant life events will mold and shape your character over the span of years. We have a few month forward-date opton and even that has become problematic when I have attempted to do events and activities because it does not align with things that have already decided for their character.

A simple example:

I make a thread dates Sept 1, players have been forward dating their character's first few weeks of the school year for weeks. I want to make an event where the train is hijacked, it would be exciting for the players. The only problem is, a bunch pf players have been threading for weeks and something as significant as a train being hijacked would deeply effect the students those first few weeks of school. Because of this small amount of forward-dating, we are not able to do something exciting for the community. This would be magnified greatly if we forward-date for years.

Train hijackings sound fun!

Would it be possible to reduce forward dating to a week or less? Or eliminate it? (Perhaps except for during the summer?)

Colin McCoire wrote: ↑14 Mar 2024, 06:29 Train hijackings sound fun!

Would it be possible to reduce forward dating to a week or less? Or eliminate it? (Perhaps except for during the summer?)

I think there was none before but it was added for a month forward. A week isn't viable, imho, so a month is some middle ground.

I think forward dating has too many potential obstacles when it comes to planning events and other things. If you didn't have forward dating, unless it's just by 1 week, I think you could do more IC events and fun things for everyone and that would in turn make things more interesting too.

I wasn't around for the train hijacking part ; ; that would have been fun to do.

People got real mad when it did not exist so we compromised. I even advocated for making it 2 so it could be consistent through the year rather than 1 month all year and 2 over the summer but there was resistance to that also (for good reason admittedly). Unfortunately there is no making everyone happy. But yes, forward-dating serves as a barrier for unified events and activities.

As for the train, I ran some poor kid over and someone else tried to mercy kill him. They made it way worse than I intended. But that is exactly why forward-dating is so hard. I cannot murder you if you already wrote elsewhere you survived and there is an actual risk of death in these threads, so that would mean a ton of retconning and nobody wants that.

Hmm, I'd want more surprises IC than the ability to forward date by a month... makes it more fun and interesting that way. I feel like we're losing out/missing out on a lot of potential fun things otherwise. Maybe just make it so that during the start of the semester and the end of the semester, maybe don't allow forward dating? Just in case you want to do a surprise? I don't know, but I'd love to have what you said happen as a fun surprise. But yeah it's something to think about and see if you can come to some kind of conclusion?

Well, the issue with that is (esp. at the beginning of the year) players that are new to Hogwarts might not feel right about going to summer camp and would have to wait a whole 2 months before they can make their first roleplay. They want to also have the Ic experience of going to and seeing Hogwarts the first time.

Ahhh, well maybe if you are thinking of doing some kind of surprise you could make an announcement on the bulletin board that there will be a surprise at the end of summer/start of the semester. So if you want to participate in it, please do not forward date? That way if they forward date while knowing this, their characters won't be involved. But those who wait for the surprise can be involved?

It would still be a surprise since no one would know what it is but it would also give people info ahead of time to not forward date if they want to take part in it.

Marcus Iwasaki wrote: ↑8 Mar 2024, 21:06

Clark Baird wrote: ↑8 Mar 2024, 20:19 would we be allowed to add a "OWLs/NEWTs completed" section to our trunk so that index can just add it in as if it were a spell.. but in its own section of the trunk that can be seen by other members of the site? Because as of right now its only assistants, professors, administrators that can see report cards. Let's say in the future you decided you would one day allow index to approve the adult system stuff and just request the change in admin updates in the index forum... would this be effective?

It was considered and decided against because there's no point in adding yet another section to the trunk when OWLs/NEWTs are only needed for job applications. No one else needs that information and it would just clutter trunk posts further. But we may re-evaluate at another time if the current process does change or we realize it isn't working.

Okay, thank you. I just wanted to ask or at least bring up this suggestion. Like I personally would rather be able to see that someone has an owl in the expected subject (ie: they're a uh lawyer-in-training (forgot the term for it) and they want to become that role, if it were ever made an *index* thing and not an admin thing, not all index members can see the report card. Just like they cannot see the restricted section. Having that specific addition would've at least made it possible and easier for index to track that, (again, if index were to have that control rather than admin one day) so they don't have to dig through thousands of soft deleted ency update posts just to get a screenshot from their report card.