The Purpose of Social Media in Blackstone Hills Preparatory School
Since it has come up a lot we decided we sould explain our use of social media in our online role-playing City of Heroes group - Blackstone Hills Preparatory School located on the Virtue server.
First and foremost we want to say: It is not a requirement for you to sign up for Twitter or for Blogs or other such things in order to participate. These are strictly because they look more "real" for how information would be presented ICly. Much in the same way that your Gamemaster might actually hand you a hand-written note when your character recieves a handwritten note for the sake of authenticity so too do we have these things.
The purpose, however, of all of these things is the same as the Heard in the Halls post - to offer an "in". If you're looking for a way to reveal something about your character that simply couldn't easily come up in IC or open up a bit of a plot so you can run a story - please mention it to your officer contact and we'll put it in the twitter from our mysterious source. We've all been there: trying to get some bits of your character revealed so they can grow but having a difficult time figuring out how to do it without shouting "HEY LISTEN". Both the Twitter and The Heard In The Halls thread can help disseminate gossip too as what other students are talking about. Also, sometimes it's exciting seeing gossip come from an "anonymous source" even if you've written it yourself. Please use both of these and let us know more about your characters: One of the wonderful things about a community like this is that we help tell each other's stories because we share stories with each other.
The information we present from these venues - Heard in the Halls, the Twitter, etc, can potentially lead to introductions of stories. These may involve NPCs (Did you see that Strange Shirley has been acting... weird lately?), Paragon (A bunch of teenagers are crowded around 5th street in King's Row for some reason), or the School itself (Some people from the company came in and are now showing off some new experience). If your character is interested in what "someone" is reporting please drop a line to your officer contact saying that you're investigating and how you might do it. Open up a line of dialogue if this seems like something your character would be concerned with and we can create a story back and forth together. By seeing where our characters our interested we know what stories will gain traction for BHPS Plots!
Once the ball gets rolling with people getting information we will open up an RP thread for the event for PCs to gather ICly, share clues, investigate, etc. Of course, people are also encouraged to RP and talk about them ICly in CoH itself. Ideally a few of these may even end in an AE mission or two.
We are big time believers that a real setting lives and breathes and acts and reacts. Heard in the Halls, the Twitter and other future bits are done by "someone" in game. This "someone" may purposefully be misconstruing things, they may be confused, they may have a vendetta or favorites. The information should be taken with that in mind. How your character reacts, of course, is up to you... especially if the information gets scarily personal or the threats get close to home. Tweeting back, sending a message through us on the forums, hitting reply... all of these are valid options to do and we hope to see them! Be irritated that the Twitter person (whoever that may be) got your powers wrong! Be happy they caught you at your best moment and are bragging about it! Be confused that they somehow know what you were doing when no one else was seemingly there... This is an IC event and those only work if there's an IC reaction.
We don't want to be an SG where you just play your character eating pizza and then do some missions which are sometimes ICly and have that be the whole of our experience. We have story that we've written, we want to see plots and AE missions and stories you write and run for yourselves, and create a big picture for every one of us to get involved with.
When both players and officers create stories the setting comes alive for us all.
Happy RP
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