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.

Special Character Concepts: How to play as a restricted concept

With the shifting nature of the galaxy in the post-Mass Effect 3 period, the availability of several character options has changed. If you're interested in playing a restricted character concept - limited to geth at the moment - please read the steps detailed below in order to receive moderator approval before playing.

Geth

Because geth are such new characters (both on the board and in the polite Mass Effect universe in general), geth characters will be restricted for the first few months until the board has found its footing. If you wish to play a geth character, submit a write-up to the mods detailing your character's history, origins, mindset and general competency level. Keep in mind that the rules on other characters apply to geth as well - hypercompetency or unrealistic characters will not be tolerated for geth.

Your proof of concept submission should answer the following questions:

1. Briefly summarize your geth character concept.

2. What do you aim to accomplish with your geth PC or NPC?

3. Most importantly, why should your geth be approved? In other words, what traits, narrative concepts, or distinguishing elements make it uniquely qualified to have its story told on the boards? You should be looking to make a very good case for yourself with this one.

The mod team will review your submission and provide a response within several days. All moderator rulings on geth approval are non-negotiable. If you are approved, you may begin using your geth character immediately. If you are not approved, you may adjust your character, but keep in mind the mods have the right to refuse any character concept regardless of how many revisions a character may have gone through. Ignoring this rule will lead to immediate banning.

Raloi

Unless you already have a raloi character (one that was previously defined on the old forums), you cannot make one. Turvess has shut itself off from the universe at large; in fact, many people are beginning to wonder if the Raloi survived at all. No new raloi characters.

Cerberus

There are no restrictions to Cerberus characters, aside from the fact that they must abide by Rule #7 to a stronger extent than other characters.

Elaborating on the subject:

Because of TIM’s current status as Che on a T-Shirt in Hot Topic, anyone may claim the title of Cerberus, regardless of race, species, creed or function. However, they do not have The Illusive Man’s endless supply of resources or intelligence, as The Illusive Man was noted to be a master of tying Humanity’s most powerful economic and intelligence powers behind the scenes. This unifying power no longer exists. Thus, there are likely to be a lot of splinter groups, none of which have much pulling power, as they will likely be fighting each other as much as they are fighting for “Humanity’s Best Interests”/money/power/whatever else may drive the splinter group.

Once again: If you must say you’re a member of Cerberus, you can be a member of Cerberus. However, this does not prevent Disaffected Youth Dropout from Scott #36028, Time Cube politicians or a batarian-staffed PMC from doing the same. Similarly, you cannot simply use them as an NPC boogeyman with stores of troopers waiting in the wings, because now they have to pay for them instead of sending a blank check to TIM.

Submitting Front Page Articles

The Presslink News Aggregator is the “official” news account as it is regulated by the forum moderators. News stories released by the Presslink News Aggregator are the only stories which will be displayed as headline articles on the front page. Any member of the forum may submit an article for the Aggregator; however, moderators have ultimate authority over which articles will be released.

Articles may be submitted to the Presslink News Aggregator by sending a copy to the moderator accounts on the old forums via Personal Message. Once again, their accounts on the old forums are Weishaupt, Marduk, Stormbringer, Putnam, Morrigan and Eisenherz to its account on the old forums. If you do not have an account on the old forum, let Overlord set one up for you and use the PM function as necessary, bearing in mind that regular posting on the old forum is disabled.

The mod team will review your submission and provide a reply within a reasonable time period; generally, the more moderators you send a copy of your story to, the faster they will be in contacting you. If your story is approved, you will receive a reply stating as such and it will be moved into the queue for posting. Stories will be generally posted on a first-come, first-serve basis; however, special consideration may be given, based on the story’s content. If your story is not approved, you will receive a reply to this effect as well.

Players whose stories are not approved may adjust and submit them for reconsideration. Keep in mind that the mods have the prerogative to refuse any story, regardless of how many revisions it may have gone through.

Please note that not every article needs to be (nor should they be) vehicles for character RP threads. Additionally, avoid putting your own characters or groups into Presslink articles to avoid running afoul of Rule #1.


Infraction/Suspension Policy

After three board warnings from the moderators, you will receive a one week suspension on all characters. Note that this rule applies to warnings where a moderator posts in your thread or PMs you to inform you that you have broken the rules; points of clarification or requests to change minor details do not count against your three warnings.

After you return from suspension, further infractions may result in additional suspensions, or in the case of repeat offenders, banning at the discretion of the mod team. Particularly major offenses (OOC hate speech, stalking board members, defaming the good name of the elcor) will go straight to bans.

Please note that offenses from pre-timeskip will carry over for the purposes of the suspension policy.

As the Report Buttons are not (yet) a part of the forums, we have implemented a simple (if slightly tedious) means of reporting rule-breaking (until they are).

If you see someone posting in a way that is against the rules, please use the old forum to send a PM to at least one of the mods of the infraction. Please include a link to the thread, the screen name of the offender, and the nature of the infraction, and we will respond to it as soon as possible.

Please keep in mind that on the previous forum, the mods names were Weishaupt, Marduk, Stormbringer, Putnam, Morrigan and Eisenherz.

Alternatively, if you are on IRC, there is usually at least one moderator in the main chatroom (#CDN) whom you can usually alert if there is an issue.

We thank you for your support.

This needs to have Cerberus under it.

Done.

More of a general question than anything I'd ever consider doing myself, but I'm curious: what exactly are the rules as far as the major storylines set up in the retrospectives (the salarian shadow war or the geth pirate with the overly long name, for instance) go? Are they available for PC interaction at all? Is mod approval required to use them? Are there any plans to "advance" them in the future? Etc.

The retrospectives as they stand are like Codex entries in that they describe issues that are currently at a stalemate. You are allowed to create threads and RPs about these activities, but characters explicitly mentioned by the Retrospectives fall within jurisdiction of Rules 1 and 2. To clarify, you may not interact with The Beast itself, but you may be a part of its fleet – much like quarians are allowed to be a part of the Migrant Fleet (or post-timeskip Rannoch), but are not allowed to work directly for Admiral Xen.

How exactly do I go about contacting the mods? I'm not a member of the old site, and I can't find any sort of PM feature here.

I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this, but I don't know where the right one would be.

Creating new accounts is still allowed on the old site; it is merely posting there that isn't. Simply register on the old site, and contact either Weishaupt, Marduk, Stormbringer, Putnam, Morrigan or Eisernherz using the PM system at the top of the (again, old) site - the more moderators you contact about your issue, the faster we tend to answer your issue.

Again, new website PMs are on their way. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I'd tried registering on the old site since originally posting this, but I wasn't sure if I'd get a response. Thank you for clearing that up.

There's no chance we could see the queue of Presslink stories?

That would defeat the purpose of releasing them periodically.

In regards to this recent change:


If I may ask, why exactly was it necessary to remove the entirety of "The Beast Problem" from existence? I'm still not sure what this Admiral Xen DLC is, but as far as I know it wouldn't invalidate "The Beast Problem" completely - from what I remember of it, Xen was not necessary for the basic concept of "there is a geth pirate with a verbose name on the loose". The Beast was a cool idea, and I'm not sure why it had to be completely retconned out of existence.

Explaining the rationale behind it is going to be a long-winded story, bear with me here.

This was kind of a loosely-connected two birds with one stone thing. I logged on the other day to discover that Kittens had announced that Xen was apparently going to die in an upcoming DLC, and based on that, the rest of the mod team had voted to remove references to her in the current news articles. (This part had happened before I logged on so I don't know any details.) We talked about it further and it stood to reason that we needed to get rid of the rest of the references.

The Beast That Gnaws Etc was a separate problem altogether. The original intent, when Echelon and I came up with him, was to provide a jumping-off point for an eventual board storyline revolving around that area of space and the motivations behind his actions. (They were probably not what you think they were.) When we presented the outline draft to the rest of the staff, however, we were outvoted on the basis that running the Beast story would have been 'dictating canon' to the users.

This alone wouldn't have been enough to warrant removing him altogether, but it interacted poorly with another part of the rules; at some point everybody else had apparently decided that he was important enough to mean players couldn't interact with him in any way whatsoever (in fact, he was namedropped in the original version of Rule #1 before we put the final draft of the rules up). Yes, that means any of you who were planning on fighting, being chased by, or secretly working for the Beast armada would have been suspended once you actually posted anything involving interaction with him in any way. Essentially, we had a feature that players couldn't interact with normally, and that moderators apparently couldn't interact with in order to let players interact with him. Much love to the rest of the team, but that was kind of silly.

I raised the question of whether we should cut it along with the rest of the Xen stuff, and the motion carried. Overall the effect is more positive for the boards - we don't run the risk of having to moderate users for wanting to interact with universe elements, and everything is now unconditional sunshine and rainbows for the quarians. It's unfortunate that sometimes theoretically-useful board elements can become problematic in this way, and we'll be taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.

In the meantime, if you're really till-death-do-us-part sold on the idea of a geth pirate, you can always submit a PC/NPC concept application to the moderators and see if it passes muster.

Thank you for the clarification. Personally, I actually think that kind of larger-scale storyline could be nice (there's a lot less canon to step on the toes of post-ME3), but I can see the other point of view.

By the way, can you provide a link to this supposed upcoming DLC? I haven't heard anything about it, although it reminds me of something from the old leaked script.

Neither have I. :P If anyone who was present for Internet Nostradamus's Vague Prophecy could field this one for me, I would be appreciative.

Thanks for explaining that, Swords. Still seems like a bit of a hasty decision (and I'm worried about what kind of precedant that sets), but at least now we know where it was coming from :p

There's been another question about canon policy as related to the Retrospectives and Beast retcon.

And actually, on that note, how does this post from earlier in this thread (which even specifically cited The Beast) fit in with current policy?

Dude, it's explained in this thread about three posts up, not to mention twice in the thread you linked.