General Rules

• Warns and bans will, unfortunately, be required anyway. They are handed out at moderator/admin's discretion. The offenses that may cause your warning level to be raised OR a ban can be; language, plagiarism, spam, hacking, porn links/images, etc.
  
• The entirety of OOC (Out Of Character) can be followed from the general site rules. Don't be obnoxious to other members, don't make the site an unpleasant place to chill, and we can keep the community pleasant without having to put on the mod pants and start talking about warnings and bans.
  
• Controlling the characters of other players (Power-playing) or making yourself unfairly invincible/powerful/knowledgeable (God-Modding) are terrible form, and will be similarly punished. This comes into play in both ref-based and more free-form environments; saying that a random NPC said "hi" is fine, but having him give you fifteen Rare weapons or armour is not.
  
• Quantity does not create - or trump - quality. While posts that are too short are certainly a bad thing, excessively long posts are even worse, because some poor sod is going to have to read all of that. Flashbacks? Not a viable method of extending posts into the tens of thousands of words. Abusing purple prose, defined as "posts written in prose so overly extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to themselves," is also generally a bad idea, and not only because whichever poor sod tries to grade it is more than likely to just throw a very sharp zero mark at you. There is a time and place for reminiscing, but neither it nor purple prose are substitutes for good writing, and will do little to help your overall grade. A good rule of thumb for a post minimums is three paragraphs, and the staff of RP-FD reserve the right to refuse to ref a post based on length or quality concerns alike.
  Understandably, battles (if any) will be harder to extend and thus the rule of thumb for battles is one paragraph with eight lines.
  
• Swearing is a touchy subject amongst a lot of people. Keep in mind that swearing in general is not edgy; if it would be in-character to swear you're welcome to do so, but be very light and try and refrain from using it, but if you intend to make full use of this stipulation, some of the younger members, as well as those who are simply not comfortable with excessive swearing, would likely prefer that you leave a warning somewhere in the topic title or description.
  
• Everything you do and post on RP Fantasy Dream must abide by the Terms of Service.
  

Thread grading is based on three major aspects, one of which figure more or less prominently depending on whether there's a storyteller or ref running the shindig:

   * Grammar
   * Characterization
   * Challenge


The first aspect is whether or not the the topic has been written with a modicum of understanding of the English language. No matter how well planned out a topic may be, or any other good qualities it might possess, poor writing is a kiss of death. Periods, commas, semicolons, paragraphs - you name it, it needs to be used right. Not like. This; or this; or this. Or This, Which Should Be Obvious But Isn't For Some Reason That I Don't Know But Don't Like. You get, the idea, of what, I'm talking, about?

Second, frankly? This is probably the single most important section. Characterization is, to put it simply, how much your character jumps out of the page at an informed reader - the more your character seems like a living breathing person, the more we can empathize with them or feel pity for them or feel sadness alongside them, the better. By the same token, playing the character generally accurate to their profile is kind of helpful here, just because if your profile talks endlessly about how meek and submissive she is, and the entire topic is about her being a brutal dominatrix or something, there's probably something wrong. The rule of thumb here is mostly the first bit, though - just play the character well and don't worry if it diverges from the profile a bit; we all learn more about our characters as we RP them. Profiles can be updated with up-to-date information, but two-dimensional characters are inherently and probably permanently flawed.

Third, challenge. There is no journey without peril, whether it be a fire-breathing talking clock or just a suicidal floating bunch of trash cans - nothing in life is free, after all, and those poor sods back in the village would have already taken care of the bandit problem on their own if there weren't two dozen heavily armed lunkheads with terrible body odor in the way. If you're just walking through foes and adventures without even a shred of challenge... well, what the hell is wrong with you? You generally start off as a new character, the weakest of pretty much anyone in the world. You won't be taking out enemy hordes single-handedly for a very long time, and there are a lot of dudes along the way. Tactics can make up for some degree of disparity in raw power, but very few characters will be a complete pushover, and even the average wild slime can be fairly dangerous when cornered. This isn't a fairy tale - wild animals are just as liable to attack you, and you have significantly less resistance to being ripped in half by an orc. Obviously, this is less of an issue in topics focused mostly around character interaction, but by the same token, major mile-points in a character's development shouldn't be a rushed hack job; put some effort into it.

Referees will generally provide their own degree of challenge; this section is primarily aimed at more free-form or quest-based topics.

For events there are rules that I hope everyone will follow. If a staff member sees a normal member applying for an event give-away while the following rules have been broken, it will result in a warning.

• A member must have been active for at least one month before applying for an event give-away.
  
• A member must have at least 25 posts before applying for an event. This does not mean making random pointless posts to get the post count up.
  
• Further rules will be posted when they've been thought out for fairness for everyone.