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First off, let me start by saying that this idea is somewhere between an RP and a game. And it is, in case you cannot tell from the title, a murder mystery game. I'm not sure if I'll get enough interest for this, but I'm hopeful that I can make this work. Anyhow, this is how the game will work:
- There will be a minimum of 10 characters for this, and a maximum of 20. For now, there is one character per writer. Once I see how much interest there is, if we do not have enough characters, I will open it up to two per writer.
- I will not have a character- I am in control of the game. I will still, however, be writing, as will be explained later. It is possible that, if we do get enough interest, my sister may join this site in order to help me run this. Y'all should hope she agrees to this, 'cause she's easily a better writer than I am. This is a nostalgic thing for me, 'cause quite a while ago she and I used to run a game sort of like this on a different site, and I'm hoping to get something going again.
- Out of the group, one character at random will be chosen to be the killer (I'll be using a random number generator to do this). The rest will be ordinary citizens. If your character is chosen, you cannot decline the role. By participating you agree to take on either role. The killer and I will be the only ones who know that they are the killer.
- The killer will get to chose a character, whichever one they so desire, to kill. Yes, that means there is a chance that your character will get murdered. You are agreeing to this by joining the game.
- I will write a post describing the murder. Yes, this is where the violence comes in. Now, during this post I will write as either the killer or the victim, or as a third-person narrator. Yes, this means I may write as your character for this post. Why am I the one writing it, rather than the killer? Well, for two reasons. One, the whole point of these posts is to give subtle hints at the killer's identity. They have to be there, but they cannot be obvious, or the game will be very short. So I want to control this to make sure the delicate balance is right. Two, different writers have distinct writing styles. Should the writer of the killer be the one writing the posts, it might be possible to figure out who it is not from the clues in the story, but by comparing the writing styles to known works on-site written by the authors participating. But if I am writing the stories, then writing style won't give anything away.
- Once the murder occurs, that's when the real fun begins. Because it is then up to all of the surviving characters to try and figure out who the killer is based on the clues included in the story. You will all have a chance to discuss your thoughts on this, and then you will all vote on who you think the killer is. The person with the most votes will be executed by the town for their supposed crimes. Yes, another death. I did warn you there would be violence.
- Should you successfully vote for the correct killer, the game will end there, with the killer losing and the rest of you winning. However, should you vote for the wrong character, the killer gets to chose another victim, and the cycle of the story and the voting repeats, until either you vote for the correct character, or the killer is the last character remaining.
- Of course, this is an RP site, and there will be an in-character section for you guys to write with each other and get to know each other's characters.
- The setting for this is not very specific. It allows fantasy, and technology will be limited to early guns and other such technology. The world is not earth. Fantasy races are allowed. It is in a small village. Other than that, there are no specific rules, so feel free to use your imagination, or to use any pre-existing characters you may have laying around that fit.
- Anonymous characters are allowed, but you must send me a message with both the character and main account in the conversation. This is so I make sure no writer has more characters than allowed. This would throw off the balance of the game, as an author with more characters will thus have more votes, since the voting is one vote per character, not per writer. I will not share the information of who writes what character with anyone else. Thank you in advance for your understanding on this.
- I will be creating a group for this to make things easier. That way I can have a forum for my posts and voting, one for in-character writing, and one for out-of-character discussions.
- Technically, for the math on this to work right, this game has to start with an even number of characters. However, there is of course the possibility that we will only get an odd number of characters interested. This isn't a huge deal, though. If this does occur, for the first murder, instead of one of your characters being killed, an npc will be the one killed in order to make the numbers work. Just a heads-up.