Cerberus Daily News Rules & Guidelines

Rules List

1. Your character does not have to be important to be interesting. What do I mean by that? Your character can be a mercenary with a bad past, but they don't have to be the founder of the Blue Suns to be interesting. We are the background characters of the galaxy, the guys that are keeping the galaxy turning. We are not Shepard's crew. We are not Admiral Hackett. We are not even Nassana Dantius. Let your personality attract people to your character, not their artificial importance. Are you a member of C-SEC? Great! Are you the C-SEC Commissioner? Not so great.

2. Avoid bringing canon characters into your roleplay and backstory. Period. There are very few exceptions here. Shepard did not give you a black eye, Tali'Zorah is not your sister, you did not beat Captain Anderson in a drinking contest, and you did not beat Urdnot Wrex in an arm wrestling match. If you find yourself writing about how you interacted with a canon character when writing your backstory, stop writing it. Back up, think it over. Is it really that important? Will your character actually be lessened if you don't mention you did red sand with Jack this one time? Almost certainly not. Avoid it.

3. Avoid falling into Unique Snowflake Syndrome. Again, let your personality speak for itself. Handle how unique you are by playing your character well. You don't need to be the first quarian to be invited to the STG. Really. You don't.

4. Don't assume control of other peoples' characters and stories without their permission. If you want to do something like that, the forum has a PM feature you can use to contact other people on the forum. Ask nicely, and don't be offended if they don't want to roll with your idea.

5. Similarly, do not use world-building to gainsay another person's argument in IC discussion. By all means, draw from the Codex as well as official Cerberus Daily News articles, but when you make up a battle to claim that your opponent's experience with piracy is bunk, you become the kid in Cops and Robbers who claims he has a bulletproof vest. Nobody likes that. Don't be that kid.

6. Don't invoke Shepard. Avoid it as much as you possibly can. Sometimes the nature of discussions will mean that she has to come up, but try to avoid details beyond the bare minimum established by the site.

7. Money is a fun "carrot on a stick" for inspiring roleplay, but keep it reasonable. Lean more towards a Mass Effect 2 economy rather than a Mass Effect 1 economy. Meaning things like missions with your peers shouldn't be paying out millions of credits each. Shepard him/herself usually only made around 30000 credits per mission from his/her benefactors. We would consider that reasonable here on our forum.

8. Try to keep things PG-13. We're all adults here so we can handle some "dark" themes, but we really do not need to discuss rapes in detail or other things of that nature. Be reasonable.

9. Don't litter your posts with references to the 21st century. Obviously it's going to come up with historical discussions, but it's unlikely that someone alive in 2186 (or whatever year we're up to now) would have listened to Rebecca Black's Friday. It's also unlikely that you would be surfing TVTropes or Wikipedia. Mold yourself to the period. You can come up with period-appropriate equivalents to TVTropes, Wikipedia, or modern viral videos, but avoid straight up 21st century namedrops. Keep in mind, these new creations must be original. Creating an action hero series (like the Infiltrator) is fine. Making an action series starring an elcor named Ar'Nold Schwarz N'ejjar is right out.

10. Reapers, yahg, rachni, and any species not included in the Mass Effect canon are not allowed as player characters or NPCs. Geth are allowed under restrictions; check the Geth Characters subsection to learn how to create one.

11. Have an issue with something you see on the forum? Take it to the mods or the Admin directly. Please bear in mind this is not the be-all and end-all list of rules, and the moderators reserve the right to implement new rules if need be.

All of the explanations I've seen have some degree of contradictions: for instance, if it's all right to interact with the members of groups mentioned in the retrospectives (just not their leaders), then why was 'the Beast' retconned out of existence on the grounds that it was a story element neither mods nor players could interact with? Your interpretation seems to be the most reasonable one, but I'd really like some official clarification once and for all on this.

You are interpreting this to mean that the Beast was cut for a single reason. It was not. As stated multiple times now, the Beast was cut for a variety reasons, not just one.


Our stance on the retrospectives remains the same as it has been; that is, that it is perfectly fine for characters to be a part of and to interact with canon/retrospective organizations, but not the canon/retrospective leaders in themselves, as that would run against the law and spirit of Rule #2 of the boards.

The only real issue I have with that is a lot of the Retros have plot lines that, left unfished, doesn't make much sense and becomes a bit stagnant. I could be worrying about an issue that Is so far down the road as not to matter but, for example, the human retro leaves humanity in a state of civil unrest. Is that state never going to be resolved?

To clarify, I'm not intentionally trying to call out the moderators, but rather discuss/seek understanding on a descion that I don't get.

We don't plan on leaving the current timeline static, since that would be no different than the month leading up to the site's revamp. We're currently looking at the best solution, with the most community involvement while keeping with the site rules.

So what was it about the Beast storyline that made it different, then?

(This is not a loaded question - I'm genuinely curious).

Edit: And actually, now that I think about it, why would it have been in violation of Rule 1 for players to interact with the Beast's minions? You wouldn't have to encounter the Beast itself to use some of its forces in a story, unless I'm misreading the rules.

Edit 2: Again, I should probably clarify that I'm absolutely not trying to challenge the Beast's removal. As Skeleton With Magic Sword said on the previous page, if I really want a geth pirate NPC I'll ask about making one (on a much smaller scale, of course) myself.

Thanks, Overlord. That goes a long way to get an answer for that concern. :)

Your 'genuine curiosity' is about to remove any remaining chance of this ever being reinstated and run, which was not considerable to start with, but because we're supposed to do the whole full disclosure thing any time a user asks a question about anything, the reason the Admiralty was hesitant to engage with the Beast That Gnaws etc. was that they didn't fully understand what it was doing yet - they had access to information the rest of the galaxy lacked, which showed that statistically, attacks by the armada were focusing less on traditional pirate targets (element zero, ships, credits, valuable cargo) and more on schizophrenically attacking almost-random targets and only partially stripping them of their cargo. (this is struck-down element number one; assumption/dictation of motives and actions on the part of canon or 'recently canon by way of retrospective' characters; both the Beast and the Admiralty) Further investigation by board members over a period of several weeks, based on the manifests of the attacked ships and tracing their shipments back to manufacturers, would reveal a pattern in the attacks - all stolen material was produced by the reverse-engineering of Reaper technology acquired during the postwar period.

Subsequent surveillance of the armada, which would require clandestinely following the main dreadnought after a raid and cargo transfer, would bring the participating board members to an uncharted planet on the edge of the Far Rim, where it would become quickly obvious that all of the stolen tech was being stored, under the supervision of a Reaper capital ship (element two: reaper appearance implies Shepard appearance, which was again dictating canon).

At this point, stealth no longer being much of an option, direct conversational engagement with the main dreadnought (which was the Beast, not an individual geth as the public had been led to believe) would be necessary, and the motivations behind its actions would be explained via dialogue. (element three: ascribing motives is dictating canon, plus direct interaction with a canon character would be violating rules 1-2) As one of the first programs integrated with Reaper code during the Rannoch conflict (element four: conflation with canon events), it possessed a closer familiarity with Reaper technology than most organics, or even most geth, and the experience had led it to conclude in its newly-acquired individual capacity that organics weren't prepared to deal with the escalation in weapons technology and resources that Reaper tech engineering would inevitably (in the Beast's view) cause.

Everything beyond that point was open-ended, as there were several different options the players could choose - the one we predicted in the design document that you people would've gone with, was the one where everyone involved said "screw you, robot, technology has no inherent moral value regardless of its source". In that case, after having escaped from the armada (direct interaction again), there would be the option to inform the Citadel, at which point a Council-based coalition would have put together a fleet and destroyed the armada in a news piece. (This was element five: dictating canon by altering the status quo balance of power.)

It probably would've worked for a video game, but on closer examination, it has a lot of elements that simply don't work within the forum rules, which relegated us to leaving things static, which defeated the purpose of having the element around in the first place. In retrospect I really, really wish we hadn't come up with it because dealing with weeks of complaints thinly disguised as questions is drudgery on par with Demon's Souls 5-2.

Thank you for answering. That clears up all of my remaining questions, and I'm sorry if any of the mods have felt harassed over this.

I have a question regarding the geth. How would they reproduce? Can they reproduce at all, or is the current geth population essentially immortal until violent death but sterile?

~Geth$ cp geth.template geth.CFAA9302817AAB3892
1 File Copied...

~Geth$ geth.CFAA9302817AAB3892

geth version 283.c program executing...
detected first-run making memory file (geth.CFAA9302817AAB3892.mem)

program executing in background...

~Geth$ _

Question for the sake of a character concept I'm drafting: how much does the average galactic citizen (i.e. CDN character) know about the Prothean involvement in asari prehistory? I know that the existence of the beacon is now public knowledge, but would a character (asari or otherwise) know about what "the Goddess Athame" really was, for instance?

You can basically use this thread as a baseline - the people involved were talking about it with the mods as they were posting and for the most part it was accepted that the events were known, but Javik-specific details (like Athame) were not, not least because they might have been Javik fucking with Liara rather than an actual fact.

My account on the old site seems to have disappeared. I only joined CDN after the old forums had been locked, and created the account on them solely as a way to send PMs if necessary, so I'm worried that it was deleted during the spambot purge described here for having no posts.

Is there any way of restoring it? This was my only way of directly contacting the mods if I ever had to without joining the IRC (which I'd rather not do).

Forum rules on submitting articles to the Presslink News Aggregator have been amended, following the creation of a central Presslink account on the old forums. Now, instead of trying to send articles to five people, now you only have to send it to one.

I'm sorry if I may have broken rule #3 in the beginning. I'm kind of new. I'm also sorry if I get a little awkward. I have Asperger's and love crude humor, but I chose a Vorcha character because they seem to be the crude little goblins of Mass Effect.