General
Valucre is a mild powers forum.
We allow the use of powers, abilities, magic, etc. but limit their ceiling to keep the site relatively balanced. Wiggle room for outsized impact exists but is almost always for the sake of collective story, not aggrandizing a single character. A new member who joins Valucre with a balanced character and sees someone cleaving mountains in half might feel pressured to beef up their character in response, but as combat is always optional, this isn't required. As a site Valucre seeks to emphasize character development over ability or power development. If you would like a loose framework to follow along with check out Flow and Fiero in Freeform Roleplay.
As a free-form site, we don't manage rank or stat based systems for development. Instead we ask members exercise prudence and emphasize narrative when choosing abilities to navigate the fantasy setting of Valucre. Given the wide scale our below mild powers examples establish, we care more about regulating the end result or consequences of powers than their origins or types. Our Character Creation Guide can give you some direction if you find yourself at a loss and want suggestions as to what we think makes for effective character creation.
As mentioned earlier combat is always optional and requires both declaration and consent. As long as it is stated and agreed upon by both players, any system can be used to resolve an in-character conflict. Examples include collaboration (staff recommended), coin flips, dice systems, and so on. If players agree to combat but can't agree on a system, the default is the Mostly Orchestrated Battle System. Alternatives include the Terrenus Dice System, among any of the various homebrew systems that you can find or create.
When in doubt, following the philosophies outlined in Roleplay Etiquette will steer you in the right direction.
Mild Powers - history and examples
In its historical context mild powers was "somewhere in between" the poles of Realistic Melee and Power Characters. The former allowed only realistic characters, abilities, weaponry, and the latter allowed concepts which tend to be more about power gaming than telling a story. There's a lot of room on the spectrum between those two poles and so it should come as no surprise if what you consider mild, or even just plain serviceable, varies from what someone else does. When in doubt talk with your partners and come to a consensus on what makes something interesting vs what deflates all tension.
The below is not an exhaustive list, just examples:
Examples of forbidden abilities
- Excessive temporal manipulation ("Haste" is often Mild; time travel often isn't)
- Large scale reality manipulation (at a small scale this is just a different flavor of "magic")
- Creation of black holes or other celestial / astronomical bodies or phenomena
- Attacks that manifest instantly or otherwise don't allow a character to react to them
- Indestructible weapons, armors, unstoppable magic, infinite or impervious items, etc
Examples of generally disallowed abilities (can be used for NPCs or collaborative story purposes)
- Soul stealing or manipulation (some writers don't believe in, or make use of, souls in their writing but for others it can be a pivotal aspect hence the "allowed for story purposes" designation)
- Manifesting an attack inside of another person ("blood bending" is an example of where you want to make sure the player is fine with it)
- Automatic mind-control (vs attempted)
- Teleportation and other "instantaneous" abilities or actions
- "Magical scanning" or otherwise being able to meta-game knowledge about another user
Examples of allowed abilities
- Enhanced senses
- Augmented physical and mental abilities
- Psionics (telekinesis, telepathy, pyromantic, etc, all dependent on the scale)
- Magic (spells, runes, hexes, voodoo, etc)
Amplitude
For storyline purposes, large scale attacks are allowed within reason. World- or continent-destroying attacks will essentially always be disallowed; city-busting is sometimes feasible depending on the effort and activity leading up to this as well as obtained permission and coordinating of plot; and the destruction of a building or buildings is usually considered the upper limit of a character or group of characters.
Someone inevitably fixes on the fact that "building" is a generic term and fail to realize that the term is kept generic on purpose. A single story home and an apartment high rise are both buildings, but are clearly not equivalent in size. In general the takeaway is that as a player you should be prepared to put in a considerable amount of work to destroy depending on what went into making the item. Contributors can work for years building up conceptual sand-castles and don't want to see them destroyed in a turn or two even if they are open to conflict.
Abilities are judged primarily on their destructive or constructive potential, or the scale on which they apply, as opposed to their complexity. Stopping a boulder mid-flight and pushing it away is less complex than turning it to sand but both work on a similar scale and essentially accomplish the same thing.
Creator: supernal
Editors: traxien cion, supernal
Edited by supernal
