Posting Guidelines
In the interest of keeping things standardized and coherent, we've come up with some posting guidelines. Please read these and abide by them; if you have any questions/suggestions, please contact the mods.
1. When posting to a location that does not currently have a post for a new period of time (during night, the entire night is considered one "period." During the day, unless you've escaped the prison, each shift is considered one "period,"), you are responsible for the first post. The subject line should read: "[Night/Day] [Shift if applicable]: [Location]." Example: "Day Shift 3: Library."
2. When changing locations during the same shift, link where you're coming from and where you're going in each location. It is not necessary to link to your previous post if the shift has changed.
3. If you are starting a new thread and absolutely must have an interaction with someone else, please make such clear in the thread itself, such as by putting text in brackets at the beginning of a post (i.e. [waiting for Kenpachi]). We highly encourage you to not do this and allow new characters to surprise you with excellent roleplay by joining their threads.
4. If a character is by themselves and there is no bracketed "waiting for," anyone may post with them if their character is in the same location.
5. If two or more characters are interacting and you wish to join their thread, please confer with at least one of the players, preferably all players involved. We highly recommend an OOC-Community post for thread coordination if you are looking to join a thread with more than three people in it.
6. There are a total of five bulletin boards throughout Hell's Gate, the main board, and one board for each classification of criminals. You can only post to the main board and the crime you are assigned (killers can only post to the killer board, etc). When posting to the crime-specific board, please put the crime in brackets in the subject of the post itself (i.e. [Killers] [Perverts] [Cowards] [Traitors]). If your character is not of this group, you cannot read the board postings unless you go to that wing at night and specifically look in that location. If your character IS in this group, they can assume to have read this at some point during each shift. You may post to the bulletin board anytime during the day, but at night you may only post if you are located at the location of the board you are posting. If you leave your subject line empty or post without the crime listed in the beginning of your subject, you are assumed to post to the general board.
7. Please label any posts on your character's journal as IC or OOC. If IC and written anywhere but a personal journal, please also indicate in the subject line. These posts are considered private unless someone reads where they are written, and may not be ICly commented on.
8. Movement: When moving your character from one location to another during the night, you may only post to an adjacent location, and must post into each location your character passes through.
9. Posting order: When there are two characters in a thread, simply alternate posts. When there are three or more, keep posting order to the order in which each character joined the thread. If you want to change posting order or jump ahead of somebody, make sure that you've got an okay from everyone else involved in your thread first.
Posting FAQ
1) How do you post getting from one location to another throughout the Nightshift Period?
Nightshift is when things become a little more difficult. It is when the warden releases each prisoner from their cells and they’re able to have free reign (to a degree) within the prison walls. To move around Hells Gate during the night periods, you need to track your movements. Let’s take random character A and their movements in one nightshift for example. Character A started out in their cell room, 101, before travelling outside to the library, around the yard, before eventually being forced back into his cell room at the end of night.
For character A even to get from his cell room and down to the library, they had to pass through quite a number of areas. Consider your character movements much like your own in real life. If you move from the study to the kitchen, you’d have to move out of your room, into another (few), before eventually arriving into the kitchen. You can’t just ‘appear’ there without doing the travelling (unless you’ve got the sweet layout of a fireman’s pole from an upstairs study to the kitchen below… that would be so damn awesome). It’s exactly the same in Hells Gate.
To get Character A from their cell and to the library, they have to move through the upstairs hall their cell is in, down to the second floor where the lower level showers are, through to the Central Tower (that all the wings connect to), out to the yard area from the Central Tower and over towards the library. So essentially Character A moved:
Cell rooms 101-120 -> Shower area -> Central Tower -> Outside between the Killers and Traitor’s wings -> Into the library.
Character A has to move through these areas for them to be able to step through the library doors. To move Character A from Cell rooms 101-120 to the Shower area, and then to the Central Tower, it needs to be linked together through your posts. When you’re moving your character from point A to B, you’ll need to put (at the bottom/top of your post) a record of where you’re moving to/from, like this:
Going to a new area -> < small >[insert movement quirk < a href ="http://www . the link to the area you’re heading to/"> Plus a token ‘here’< / a>]< / small>
Coming from a previous area -> < small >[insert movement quirk here < a href ="http://www . the link to the area you’re heading to/"> Plus a token ‘from here’< / a>]< / small>
Without all the spaces in all but the ‘a herf’ section.
It’s a lot of work, but it makes your life (and everyone reading the thread) easier since you don’t have to go back through pages of links to find where your character went.
2) There is already a thread started that my character needs to go through. How do I go about this? Do I start another new thread, or reply to the original one as a new reply?
We'll take the Central Tower, for example, since that's the room characters will travel through the most during a nightshift.
Once a character puts up a Central Tower post (or any other room) it will be the only one put up for that entire nightshift. We'll use Nightshift 9 as an example: Armand was the one to put it up that particular night, so any character travelling through the area needs to respond to a thread there. Like this:
Central Tower - Nightshift 9
Where we have Armand, Sasuke, Yuuri, and Sephiroth who have travelled through the area. Sephiroth is off doing his own thing, so he doesn't interact with the others in the CT since he's technically already through and gone from the area before Sasuke and Yuuri emerge, but Armand, Sasuke and Yuuri are all in one thread together because they're interacting with one another.
So if Character A was going to go into the area. If he wasn't going to meet up with them, then he'd post as a separate thread like Sephiroth had done. If Character A was planned to meet with Armand and co, then he'd join the thread that was already pre-established.
Each time you re-enter the Central Tower (or any other room) your character will need to start a new thread. We'll take Sephiroth for example. During that night period, he entered the Central Tower five times, and has five separate threads for each time he re-entered.