One of the largest potential stumbling blocks for new and old members alike is understanding the scale of RP we want to have at Westbrook Academy. There’s a lot of room between Big Damn Hero Epic Tales and 90210. Westbrook needs to have a balance somewhere between the heroic and the mundane. The lower limit here isn’t as vital as the upper limit. We need to maintain a solid sense of where the line is to help prospective members decide whether Westbrook is right for them and to help current members better fit within the landscape of our roleplay.
Scope
We are a character-focused group with a heightened emphasis on realism. The primary focus for our roleplay is on the everyday lives of our teenage characters. Much of our roleplay time involves interpersonal character development, where characters build and explore relationships with one another. A lot of our time is spent in character-to-character conversation.
The heroic aspect isn’t something we remove from our characters. In the end, we are immersed in a world full of spandex-wearing Big Damn Heroes. Most of our characters patrol in heroic garb and, for at least this phase of their lives, are heroes-in-training. We do some hand-waving and ignore much of what the game depicts our characters doing as it isn’t realistic for high school students to deal with the kind of in-game content one encounters at level 50. Our characters would not be asked to handle high level threats such as the Praetorians, they’re more likely to be arresting Hellions and Skulls. When we do run higher level content, we gloss over the details and more-or-less pretend what we’re doing isn’t nearly as epic as what the game would have us think.
When it comes to Big Damn Hero stories, the focus is on how to defeat the baddie of the week. This leads to the “it has to be bigger/worse next time” mentality in order for challenges to be believable. Westbrook stories are more focused on how the mini-baddie of the month’s actions effect the students’ lives and how they deal with the aftermath. Westbrook story arcs have an affect on the school and the characters who participated in them; life doesn’t just reset to the status quo once it’s over.
The students do even face off against some formidable foes, but this is done in the context of our group-wide story arcs where the entire student body is needed to succeed. Even then, it is done in service of saving our friends, our school, and possibly Westy’s, but not the world. Additionally, we are also conscious of the fact that not every member of Westbrook wants to scrape the edge of our “Minor Damn Hero” range and we strive to make Westbrook comfortable for their RP as well.
If you think your character’s storyline might be heading into epic territory, please discuss it with an officer so that we can help you work within the setting we’re trying to maintain.
Realism and Consequences
Many supergroups in City of Heroes are naturally very “comic-book” in theme and style. Westbrook differs from such groups in its heightened focus on realism. While we have some comic book themes, we do not adhere to the conventions of comic book storytelling.
We expect our characters’ actions to have realistic consequences. For example, if your character abuses the medicom teleportation system by activating their medbadge to take a shortcut back to campus, expect them to get in serious trouble for it. As another example, if you choose to roleplay a serious wound, be prepared to arrange for metahuman healing or else take some serious recovery time. Either way, it should have an impact on your character since most teenagers aren’t going to shrug off a major injury as if nothing happened.
In a more “comic-book” group, the consequences for such things would be glossed over or ignored. At Westbrook, the consequences are vital. Keep in mind that all actions have reactions and consequences, and that often you won’t be the decider of what those consequences are.
Time
This is another area where we differ from many other roleplay supergroups. Comic-book-oriented groups often live in comic book time, where characters never age. This works for them, because they also allow their characters to be big damn heroes, accumulating years and years worth of really epic events despite the fact they haven’t aged. That’s how it often works in the comic books, after all.
With Westbrook’s heightened emphasis on realism, that doesn’t work. Our characters age in real time. If your character is 15 now, then they’re going to be 16 a year from now. We’re interested in our characters’ growth. We want to see characters age and change and develop into young adults and, yes, eventually even graduate and leave. (We want to see the characters eventually graduate and leave; players, however, are encouraged to bring in a new toon when that happens.)
This also means that Westbrook is not the ideal setting for the total climax of a character’s story. Our characters won’t be defeating the biggest baddie of their lives while at Westbrook. They might save the dorms or the campus but never Paragon and never, ever the world. Chosen Ones will start the process of taking on that role while at Westbrook but they will not live out the title fully while at school. The role that teenage heroes play in mainstream comics can be highly variable but it’s always clear that these characters aren’t Superman or Iron Man level heroes yet. We must always keep that in mind.
This is the beginning of our characters’ stories. Even if we never plan on playing them once they leave Westbrook, they should be conceived with this idea in mind. Westbrook events are the sort of things that would appear as flashbacks in a mainstream hero’s story. The stuff that happened before which, although important, isn’t the real meat of their stories. Some of our characters will go on to become Big Damn Heroes after they graduate. Some of our characters will go on to work retail. However, the sense that there is a plan for their lives after Westbrook (regardless of whether we actually RP it) is vitally important to the school’s realism.
In terms of day-to-day time, we live according to the real world calendar. That is, if today is April 1 in the real world, then you can expect some characters to be pulling April Fool’s Day pranks when you log into the game. The school operates on a trimester-based schedule and we pin down specific dates for things like the trimester’s start and end. This further reinforces the sense of realism in our roleplay.
However, one area in which we do apply a bit of hand-waving and wonkyness is hourly time. Our players often play on time schedules that wouldn’t match a real teenager’s life. So we generally try to avoid making reference to the current time. It might be 4:30 AM in the real world but in game, we ignore that and just pretend that the current time makes sense for what we’re doing.