Sounds like a nice game then. But my list was far from complete, of course. URU, for instance, (played the single player game) gives a rather artsy, surreal, dreamlike feel, which is not for everyone (could be for me).

We'll never find a game everyone will like, I'm afraid. There's too many factors to consider. Unless there's another non-combat sci-fi cartoon game with time-based skill system, RP-friendly community, cute chimbots, and the possibility to affect the development of the world, we're out of luck.

I just don't think we should ruin this community by trying to force it to stick together. (Of course, it's easy for me to say, as I'm more or less enjoying SoR.)

That said, if a game comes up that more people like, I can be convinced to give it a try.

EDIT: However, I don't really like the idea of jumping from one game to another indefinately on the holy quest of finding the perfect game for us all.

Strange how people have such opposite opinions about the amount and level of roleplaying in SoR. I heard from a couple of veterans there's a lot of good RP, and also Trevenni mentioned the Zoraï capital was "teeming with RP" when she got there.

I don't think it's necessary to have rules/agreements on how to roleplay each and every gameplay element. I'd rather trust our imagination and just make the details up on the fly, rather than try to memorize a ridig set of rules. Apart from the harvesting problem, which I know nothing about, most of those mechanics/roleplay translations are pretty straightforward.

Nevertheless, here's my input on the topic:

Hit points: quite simply, they measure how close your character is to death. Usually the lack of hitpoints means wounds, sometimes another kind of health hazard (like goo damage). If we want to really go deep here, I'd say that only the wound that knocks you out is truly serious. After all, you can go on normally if your health is at 1 and it naturally regenerates all the way back to full.

Stamina: physical exhaustion from a long hectic battle or whatever best suits the situation.

Focus: a little trickier, but I suppose it measures your ability to focus intensely on your task. When it runs out you get disoriented, because your mind just needs a break from all the thinking/looking for open spots in your enemy's tactics/whatever. Whatever you were doing, you lose focus of that.

Sap: not sure if it's explained differently somewhere, but I'd see this not as actual physical sap slowly dripping from a treeside. (If it were, how would you regenerate such sap during battle, and why would you have a maximum based on your mental stats?) Rather, I see it as a mythical life force, the blood of the planet that flows within us all and can be drawn on to perform extraordinary deeds (and it just happens to be called "sap" instead of, say, "mana").

Remember that this kind of set of four numbers to describe the state of a human being, is always an abstraction, and the same mechanical situation can be roleplayed in countless equally valid ways.

As for the metric system, it would seem likely the Karavan kept that system around when the rest of the world went medieval.

Using universe/region for OOC feels like a bad idea, because I doubt many of us are reading it. And if I have an OOC question, I'd rather ask you and not some random power-leveller who reads those channels.

And I agree with Victoria, that I don't really get the big fuss about this. I'm never really bothered about OOC as long as it's bracketed. I suppose it's about immersion - some people want to immerse really deeply in their character's life, so for them anything that's not part of it is detrimental to the experience. As a narrativist puppeteer type I don't really care, personally, even if half of our chat is OOC/metagaming.

That said, I'll go along with this telepathy thing as Darkhawk explained it.

For each skill. I was talking of combined skill levels, not necessary a single skill.

Agreed that the best might be if none of us grinded at all, and I admit I've been grinding myself, so if someone plays even less than me, the same problem is there. That'd mean, of course, that we couldn't progress in the game as a group near as quickly. Which I wouldn't mind, if our ability to create our own content didn't depend on that...

EDIT: Considering the guild/guilds, one alternative still not mentioned would to join some of the existing RP guilds. That would further enlarge the network of contacts and RP, though we'd not be RPing with each other as much as we would in a guild of our own.

I vote for sticking with SoR. Even though I'm totally annoyed by the grind based progessing system (mostly because of the level cap that's arisen between our group), I like the world and the atmostphere quite a bit. Plus I'd hate to throw away the stories we've already cooked up there.

I gave ATITD a (very short) try, and I agree that it seemed plain, boring, too simple and unfinished. And NWN2 would likely be too much for my computer. Second Life might work too, though I'm not quite sure what kind of stories it would support.

If we go for the IC chat on guild/team channels route, I strongly prefer the magical solution to the technological mobile phone like things. As far as I know, none of us possesses any other kinds of electronical or equivalent items, so it'd be really weird if everyone had their own mobile phone with them. The magical solution I could live with, and it would solve some problems, all right (most relevantly: finding out who's online and where the RP is - other kinds of organizing can be done by simply gathering in one place).

As soon as we know what kind of place we're going to settle in, I can put together the landscape.

Probably the easiest way to share the payment would be to pay it in turns. Sending countless 50 centers around the Internet would be too big a burden.

And we should also verify what exactly it is we're getting for that money. Is it per Ring (which would be a problem if we wanted to swap it into another one for some special occasion)?

Sounds good about the server. 4.95/month doesn't sound unreasonable, especially if we manage to split it somehow (though it might be far less trouble for one person just to pay it (might even do it myself)).

True, Victoria. It can be great to RP the Kami bringing you back from the gates of death for one of two times, but the 20th resurrection becomes just... routine...