Roleplay Guidelines
Roleplay Guidelines
Embedded Files
**Title**
Roleplay Guidelines
**Standard Text**
StarForgeRP is built around collaborative storytelling in a persistent SWTOR-era setting.
These guidelines establish the shared expectations that make that collaboration work. They are not intended to dictate how every scene must be written, require every character to behave cooperatively, or prevent conflict between characters. Characters can disagree, compete, deceive one another, make mistakes, fail, change loyalties, damage relationships, and suffer meaningful consequences.
The important distinction is between conflict within the story and cooperation between the players creating it.
A good StarForgeRP scene gives everyone involved room to make meaningful choices, respond to changing circumstances, and affect what happens next. The goal is not for every character to succeed. It is for everyone participating to have a reasonable opportunity to contribute to a story whose outcome is shaped through play.
**Heading**
The Core Principle
**Standard Text**
Collaborate with the other players even when your characters are working against one another.
Your character belongs to you. Other player-characters belong to their players. Shared organizations, locations, campaigns, and continuity belong to the wider setting rather than to one participant alone.
You are free to decide what your character attempts, believes, wants, says, notices, or chooses. Leave other players room to decide how their characters respond.
This principle applies whether the scene involves a friendly conversation, political argument, investigation, romance, duel, military operation, criminal scheme, betrayal, rivalry, or open conflict.
**Heading**
Respect Character Agency
**Standard Text**
Do not decide another player-character's thoughts, feelings, decisions, injuries, relationships, defeat, or other significant reactions for them unless that outcome has already been agreed upon.
You can establish what your character does.
You can describe circumstances your character creates.
You can introduce a problem, threat, offer, accusation, attack, opportunity, or complication.
The other player should normally determine what their character does in response.
**Subheading**
Actions Are Not Automatically Outcomes
**Standard Text**
There is an important difference between attempting something and establishing that it succeeded.
A character may fire a blaster, attempt to arrest someone, make an accusation, offer a bribe, set a trap, try to intimidate someone, search for evidence, or attempt to deceive another character.
That does not automatically establish that the shot lands, the arrest succeeds, the accusation is believed, the bribe is accepted, the trap works, the intimidation succeeds, the evidence is found, or the deception goes unnoticed.
Leave meaningful reactions and uncertain outcomes open to roleplay unless the participants have already agreed otherwise.
**Heading**
Communicate Before It Matters
**Standard Text**
Not every scene requires extensive planning.
Many interactions work best when players begin with a believable situation and allow the details to develop naturally. Unexpected choices, misunderstandings, failures, and complications are often what make collaborative roleplay interesting.
Communication becomes more important when a proposed development would significantly affect another player's character, an established story, or the wider shared continuity.
Out-of-character coordination does not require deciding exactly what will happen. It can be as simple as confirming that everyone is comfortable exploring a situation and understands what is at stake.
**Subheading**
Coordinate First When...
**List**
* a scene could result in the death, capture, imprisonment, permanent injury, or major alteration of another player-character* a proposed development would establish a major relationship, betrayal, revelation, or lasting change involving another player's character* you intend to use another character's private history, secrets, possessions, dependents, organization, or established relationships as a major part of a story* an action would substantially change or destroy an established location, organization, resource, or other part of shared continuity* a story depends on another character having done, known, promised, or agreed to something that has not previously been established* a character would gain unusual access to restricted information, private locations, sensitive operations, or closely guarded resources* a proposed outcome could substantially affect players or stories beyond the people currently participating* the subject matter or intended direction of a scene could reasonably benefit from confirming player boundaries beforehand
**Standard Text**
Coordination should create room for roleplay, not replace it.
Players can agree that an attempted capture is on the table without deciding whether it succeeds. They can agree that serious injury is possible without deciding who will be injured. They can agree to explore a betrayal without scripting every reaction that follows.
Establish the boundaries that matter, then leave room for the characters to surprise you.
**Heading**
Player Knowledge Is Not Character Knowledge
**Standard Text**
StarForgeRP is primarily a player-facing archive.
Reading information about a character, organization, location, campaign, or roleplay hook does not automatically mean that your character possesses the same information in-character.
A dossier may reveal private motivations. A campaign record may explain information that only some participants have discovered. A lore or organization page may contain context that an ordinary citizen would never know. Players can use this information to understand the setting without automatically giving it to their characters.
Ask what your character could reasonably know, observe, have been told, research, infer, or discover through roleplay.
The **Character Dossier Guidelines** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/character-dossier-guidelines) provide additional guidance for information recorded on character pages.
**Heading**
Conflict Should Create Story
**Standard Text**
Conflict is welcome within StarForgeRP.
Characters do not need to like one another, agree politically, serve the same faction, cooperate successfully, or resolve their disagreements peacefully. Rivalries, ideological disputes, competition, criminal activity, conflicting assignments, betrayals, investigations, feuds, and direct combat can all create valuable roleplay.
Conflict works best when it gives participants more meaningful decisions rather than taking those decisions away.
An antagonist can create obstacles without determining how everyone overcomes them. A rival can interfere without requiring the other character to lose. An investigation can uncover clues without dictating what conclusions must be reached. Combat can create danger without becoming a contest over whose character is written as more powerful.
**Subheading**
Competition, Combat & Opposition
**Standard Text**
When characters oppose one another, focus on credible actions and consequences rather than proving whose character is superior.
Allow competent characters to be competent, but leave room for resistance, mistakes, uncertainty, unfavorable circumstances, and failure.
Victory does not need to mean total domination. Defeat does not need to make a character irrelevant.
A confrontation might end in withdrawal, compromise, partial success, lost information, damaged equipment, an escaped target, an unwanted obligation, a ruined relationship, an unresolved rivalry, or a problem that becomes more complicated than it was before.
The most useful outcome is often the one that gives later roleplay something new to work with.
**Heading**
Power, Competence & Scope
**Standard Text**
Characters may be talented, experienced, dangerous, influential, wealthy, Force-sensitive, unusually knowledgeable, or otherwise exceptional when their background supports it.
Being exceptional should provide possibilities for roleplay rather than remove uncertainty from it.
A highly skilled character can still lack information. A powerful Sith can still misjudge another person. An experienced soldier can encounter an unfamiliar problem. A wealthy character may possess resources but lack trust, authority, access, or time. A Jedi may be capable in combat while struggling with political, personal, or moral circumstances that cannot be solved with a lightsaber.
Strengths become more interesting when circumstances allow them to matter without allowing them to answer every problem.
No single player-character needs to become the center of galactic history for their actions to matter. Characters can leave significant consequences within organizations, communities, relationships, campaigns, professions, settlements, or regions without replacing established SWTOR events or becoming responsible for every major development in the era.
Concepts involving unusually large authority, major established figures, galaxy-changing discoveries, or substantial alterations to established history should be checked against **Continuity & Canon** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/continuity-canon).
**Heading**
Let Consequences Matter
**Standard Text**
Characters should be able to succeed.
They should also be able to fail.
Plans may go wrong. Relationships may deteriorate. An investigation may produce the wrong conclusion. A mission may end without completing its objective. A character may make an enemy, lose an opportunity, damage their reputation, become indebted to someone, change allegiance, suffer an injury, discover something uncomfortable, or realize that a decision they made earlier created a larger problem.
Consequences do not need to be punishments.
They are simply ways in which what happened before continues to matter afterward.
Positive developments should persist as well. Friendships can strengthen. Trust can be earned. Careers can advance. Alliances can form. A successful mission may improve conditions somewhere. A character may gain responsibilities, contacts, resources, knowledge, influence, or a place within a community.
Persistent consequences allow individual scenes to become part of a continuing life rather than resetting once the roleplay ends.
**Heading**
Respect the Shared Continuity
**Standard Text**
StarForgeRP stories take place within a shared setting.
Actions that affect only the participating characters usually require little wider coordination. The broader the consequences become, however, the more important it is to consider existing continuity and the other players or records that may be affected.
A character can establish a personal enemy much more easily than they can declare an entire government hostile to someone.
A group can damage its own hideout more easily than it can destroy a major established city.
A campaign can create an important local conflict without needing to rewrite the outcome of a major SWTOR war.
Community-created stories are encouraged to add people, problems, relationships, discoveries, organizations, locations, and consequences to the galaxy. The goal is to build upon the setting rather than overwrite the foundations that allow everyone to share it.
For the site's continuity hierarchy and treatment of established SWTOR lore, Legends material, community continuity, and interpretation, see **Continuity & Canon** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/continuity-canon).
**Heading**
Joining Existing Roleplay
**Standard Text**
A shared setting does not mean every active story is automatically open to every character.
Some roleplay actively welcomes additional participants. Some stories have room only for particular connections. Others are currently focused on an established group or circumstances that would make an unexpected arrival difficult to justify.
Look for a believable reason your character would become involved, and check the participation information associated with the story when it is available.
Do not assume that reading about a secret operation gives your character access to it, that knowing where another character is located gives you an in-character reason to appear there, or that involvement in the same faction automatically grants access to every story taking place within it.
When coordination is appropriate, contact the participants and work out an entry point that makes sense for everyone involved.
The **RP Hooks** (https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay/rp-hooks) page is specifically intended to help players find open situations and believable points of connection. You can also explore the wider **Roleplay** (https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay) section for ongoing and archived stories.
**Heading**
Player Boundaries & Scene Comfort
**Standard Text**
Collaborative roleplay depends on the people participating being willing to participate.
Players may have subjects, types of conflict, or levels of detail they do not want to roleplay. Respect those boundaries.
This is particularly important when a story may involve intense personal material, severe injury, captivity, torture, coercion, character death, romance, or other developments that can substantially change the direction or tone of a character's story.
No player should need to accept a major unwanted development simply because another character could theoretically attempt it.
If someone asks to avoid a subject, reduce detail, change direction, or stop a particular interaction, respect the request and find another way for the story to proceed where possible.
A boundary concerning the roleplay is not automatically an in-character decision. Players can decide that something will not be part of a scene without requiring their characters to explain that decision within the fiction.
**Heading**
Keep In-Character and Out-of-Character Conflict Separate
**Standard Text**
Characters may dislike one another without their players disliking one another.
A character can insult, betray, oppose, deceive, threaten, arrest, investigate, or fight another character as part of an agreed roleplay situation. Those actions should not be treated as permission for hostility toward the other player.
The reverse is equally important.
Out-of-character disagreements should not be settled through in-character retaliation.
If confusion develops, clarify what each participant understood to be happening rather than escalating the scene to prove a point. Many problems come from different assumptions about knowledge, intent, consequences, or what had already been established.
Clear communication protects the story as much as it protects the players.
**Heading**
Allow Characters to Change
**Standard Text**
A dossier describes a character. It should not imprison them.
Characters may reconsider beliefs, change loyalties, develop relationships, abandon goals, discover new ambitions, gain confidence, become more cautious, suffer setbacks, make compromises, or become people their players did not originally expect.
Do not feel obligated to protect a character from every development that would make an older biography inaccurate.
Update the biography.
StarForgeRP is designed to preserve an evolving continuity. The most interesting difference between a new character and the same character years later may be everything that happened between those two points.
For guidance on maintaining that record, see the **Character Dossier Guidelines** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/character-dossier-guidelines).
**Heading**
Preserve What Changes
**Standard Text**
Not every roleplay scene needs an archive entry.
Preserve developments when later stories may reasonably need to remember them.
A new friendship may become part of two character dossiers. A betrayal may alter a relationship. An injury may affect a character's current status. A completed mission may remain relevant to a campaign. An organization may gain a new enemy. A location may be damaged, discovered, occupied, abandoned, or given new significance.
Larger developments may eventually belong on the **Timeline** (https://www.starforgerp.com/timeline), while completed stories can remain available through the **Story Archive** (https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay/story-archive).
The purpose of the archive is not to document every conversation.
It is to remember the things future roleplay should not have to forget.
**Heading**
If Something Goes Wrong
**Standard Text**
Roleplay occasionally produces misunderstandings.
A player may interpret an action differently from how it was intended. Someone may assume information was public when it was private. Two participants may have different expectations about the severity of a conflict. A scene may develop in a direction that one participant did not realize was being proposed.
Address the misunderstanding out of character before trying to solve it through the characters.
Clarify what each person intended, identify which assumptions differed, and adjust the scene where necessary. Revising an unclear action or reconsidering an outcome is preferable to preserving a misunderstanding simply because it has already been written.
If a scene is no longer workable for the participants, it can stop. No story benefits from forcing an outcome after collaboration has broken down.
**Heading**
Quick Roleplay Check
**Standard Text**
Before or during a scene, these questions can help identify most common problems.
**List**
* Does my character have a believable reason to be involved?* Am I deciding what my character does rather than what another character must do?* Does my character actually know the information I am using?* Am I leaving meaningful room for other characters to respond?* If this could significantly alter another character, have the relevant players coordinated?* If this affects an established organization, location, campaign, or wider continuity, have I checked the existing context?* Am I allowing uncertainty, setbacks, and consequences rather than assuming success?* Are the players comfortable with the direction and subject matter of the scene?* If something important changes, is there a StarForgeRP record that should eventually be updated?
**Heading**
In Short
**Standard Text**
Give your character goals without guaranteeing their success.
Give other characters problems without deciding their responses.
Create conflict without turning collaboration into competition between players.
Use lore to give stories context rather than to prevent characters from being individuals.
Allow victories to matter, failures to matter, and choices to leave consequences.
Communicate when a story begins affecting another player's agency or the wider shared setting.
Above all, leave room for the story to become something none of the participants could have written alone.
**Button / Link Text**
**Button Name:** Explore Roleplay
**Link Page Name:** Roleplay
**Page URL:** https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay
**Button / Link Text**
**Button Name:** Getting Started
**Link Page Name:** Getting Started
**Page URL:** https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/getting-started
Roleplay Guidelines
**Standard Text**
StarForgeRP is built around collaborative storytelling in a persistent SWTOR-era setting.
These guidelines establish the shared expectations that make that collaboration work. They are not intended to dictate how every scene must be written, require every character to behave cooperatively, or prevent conflict between characters. Characters can disagree, compete, deceive one another, make mistakes, fail, change loyalties, damage relationships, and suffer meaningful consequences.
The important distinction is between conflict within the story and cooperation between the players creating it.
A good StarForgeRP scene gives everyone involved room to make meaningful choices, respond to changing circumstances, and affect what happens next. The goal is not for every character to succeed. It is for everyone participating to have a reasonable opportunity to contribute to a story whose outcome is shaped through play.
**Heading**
The Core Principle
**Standard Text**
Collaborate with the other players even when your characters are working against one another.
Your character belongs to you. Other player-characters belong to their players. Shared organizations, locations, campaigns, and continuity belong to the wider setting rather than to one participant alone.
You are free to decide what your character attempts, believes, wants, says, notices, or chooses. Leave other players room to decide how their characters respond.
This principle applies whether the scene involves a friendly conversation, political argument, investigation, romance, duel, military operation, criminal scheme, betrayal, rivalry, or open conflict.
**Heading**
Respect Character Agency
**Standard Text**
Do not decide another player-character's thoughts, feelings, decisions, injuries, relationships, defeat, or other significant reactions for them unless that outcome has already been agreed upon.
You can establish what your character does.
You can describe circumstances your character creates.
You can introduce a problem, threat, offer, accusation, attack, opportunity, or complication.
The other player should normally determine what their character does in response.
**Subheading**
Actions Are Not Automatically Outcomes
**Standard Text**
There is an important difference between attempting something and establishing that it succeeded.
A character may fire a blaster, attempt to arrest someone, make an accusation, offer a bribe, set a trap, try to intimidate someone, search for evidence, or attempt to deceive another character.
That does not automatically establish that the shot lands, the arrest succeeds, the accusation is believed, the bribe is accepted, the trap works, the intimidation succeeds, the evidence is found, or the deception goes unnoticed.
Leave meaningful reactions and uncertain outcomes open to roleplay unless the participants have already agreed otherwise.
**Heading**
Communicate Before It Matters
**Standard Text**
Not every scene requires extensive planning.
Many interactions work best when players begin with a believable situation and allow the details to develop naturally. Unexpected choices, misunderstandings, failures, and complications are often what make collaborative roleplay interesting.
Communication becomes more important when a proposed development would significantly affect another player's character, an established story, or the wider shared continuity.
Out-of-character coordination does not require deciding exactly what will happen. It can be as simple as confirming that everyone is comfortable exploring a situation and understands what is at stake.
**Subheading**
Coordinate First When...
**List**
* a scene could result in the death, capture, imprisonment, permanent injury, or major alteration of another player-character* a proposed development would establish a major relationship, betrayal, revelation, or lasting change involving another player's character* you intend to use another character's private history, secrets, possessions, dependents, organization, or established relationships as a major part of a story* an action would substantially change or destroy an established location, organization, resource, or other part of shared continuity* a story depends on another character having done, known, promised, or agreed to something that has not previously been established* a character would gain unusual access to restricted information, private locations, sensitive operations, or closely guarded resources* a proposed outcome could substantially affect players or stories beyond the people currently participating* the subject matter or intended direction of a scene could reasonably benefit from confirming player boundaries beforehand
**Standard Text**
Coordination should create room for roleplay, not replace it.
Players can agree that an attempted capture is on the table without deciding whether it succeeds. They can agree that serious injury is possible without deciding who will be injured. They can agree to explore a betrayal without scripting every reaction that follows.
Establish the boundaries that matter, then leave room for the characters to surprise you.
**Heading**
Player Knowledge Is Not Character Knowledge
**Standard Text**
StarForgeRP is primarily a player-facing archive.
Reading information about a character, organization, location, campaign, or roleplay hook does not automatically mean that your character possesses the same information in-character.
A dossier may reveal private motivations. A campaign record may explain information that only some participants have discovered. A lore or organization page may contain context that an ordinary citizen would never know. Players can use this information to understand the setting without automatically giving it to their characters.
Ask what your character could reasonably know, observe, have been told, research, infer, or discover through roleplay.
The **Character Dossier Guidelines** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/character-dossier-guidelines) provide additional guidance for information recorded on character pages.
**Heading**
Conflict Should Create Story
**Standard Text**
Conflict is welcome within StarForgeRP.
Characters do not need to like one another, agree politically, serve the same faction, cooperate successfully, or resolve their disagreements peacefully. Rivalries, ideological disputes, competition, criminal activity, conflicting assignments, betrayals, investigations, feuds, and direct combat can all create valuable roleplay.
Conflict works best when it gives participants more meaningful decisions rather than taking those decisions away.
An antagonist can create obstacles without determining how everyone overcomes them. A rival can interfere without requiring the other character to lose. An investigation can uncover clues without dictating what conclusions must be reached. Combat can create danger without becoming a contest over whose character is written as more powerful.
**Subheading**
Competition, Combat & Opposition
**Standard Text**
When characters oppose one another, focus on credible actions and consequences rather than proving whose character is superior.
Allow competent characters to be competent, but leave room for resistance, mistakes, uncertainty, unfavorable circumstances, and failure.
Victory does not need to mean total domination. Defeat does not need to make a character irrelevant.
A confrontation might end in withdrawal, compromise, partial success, lost information, damaged equipment, an escaped target, an unwanted obligation, a ruined relationship, an unresolved rivalry, or a problem that becomes more complicated than it was before.
The most useful outcome is often the one that gives later roleplay something new to work with.
**Heading**
Power, Competence & Scope
**Standard Text**
Characters may be talented, experienced, dangerous, influential, wealthy, Force-sensitive, unusually knowledgeable, or otherwise exceptional when their background supports it.
Being exceptional should provide possibilities for roleplay rather than remove uncertainty from it.
A highly skilled character can still lack information. A powerful Sith can still misjudge another person. An experienced soldier can encounter an unfamiliar problem. A wealthy character may possess resources but lack trust, authority, access, or time. A Jedi may be capable in combat while struggling with political, personal, or moral circumstances that cannot be solved with a lightsaber.
Strengths become more interesting when circumstances allow them to matter without allowing them to answer every problem.
No single player-character needs to become the center of galactic history for their actions to matter. Characters can leave significant consequences within organizations, communities, relationships, campaigns, professions, settlements, or regions without replacing established SWTOR events or becoming responsible for every major development in the era.
Concepts involving unusually large authority, major established figures, galaxy-changing discoveries, or substantial alterations to established history should be checked against **Continuity & Canon** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/continuity-canon).
**Heading**
Let Consequences Matter
**Standard Text**
Characters should be able to succeed.
They should also be able to fail.
Plans may go wrong. Relationships may deteriorate. An investigation may produce the wrong conclusion. A mission may end without completing its objective. A character may make an enemy, lose an opportunity, damage their reputation, become indebted to someone, change allegiance, suffer an injury, discover something uncomfortable, or realize that a decision they made earlier created a larger problem.
Consequences do not need to be punishments.
They are simply ways in which what happened before continues to matter afterward.
Positive developments should persist as well. Friendships can strengthen. Trust can be earned. Careers can advance. Alliances can form. A successful mission may improve conditions somewhere. A character may gain responsibilities, contacts, resources, knowledge, influence, or a place within a community.
Persistent consequences allow individual scenes to become part of a continuing life rather than resetting once the roleplay ends.
**Heading**
Respect the Shared Continuity
**Standard Text**
StarForgeRP stories take place within a shared setting.
Actions that affect only the participating characters usually require little wider coordination. The broader the consequences become, however, the more important it is to consider existing continuity and the other players or records that may be affected.
A character can establish a personal enemy much more easily than they can declare an entire government hostile to someone.
A group can damage its own hideout more easily than it can destroy a major established city.
A campaign can create an important local conflict without needing to rewrite the outcome of a major SWTOR war.
Community-created stories are encouraged to add people, problems, relationships, discoveries, organizations, locations, and consequences to the galaxy. The goal is to build upon the setting rather than overwrite the foundations that allow everyone to share it.
For the site's continuity hierarchy and treatment of established SWTOR lore, Legends material, community continuity, and interpretation, see **Continuity & Canon** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/continuity-canon).
**Heading**
Joining Existing Roleplay
**Standard Text**
A shared setting does not mean every active story is automatically open to every character.
Some roleplay actively welcomes additional participants. Some stories have room only for particular connections. Others are currently focused on an established group or circumstances that would make an unexpected arrival difficult to justify.
Look for a believable reason your character would become involved, and check the participation information associated with the story when it is available.
Do not assume that reading about a secret operation gives your character access to it, that knowing where another character is located gives you an in-character reason to appear there, or that involvement in the same faction automatically grants access to every story taking place within it.
When coordination is appropriate, contact the participants and work out an entry point that makes sense for everyone involved.
The **RP Hooks** (https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay/rp-hooks) page is specifically intended to help players find open situations and believable points of connection. You can also explore the wider **Roleplay** (https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay) section for ongoing and archived stories.
**Heading**
Player Boundaries & Scene Comfort
**Standard Text**
Collaborative roleplay depends on the people participating being willing to participate.
Players may have subjects, types of conflict, or levels of detail they do not want to roleplay. Respect those boundaries.
This is particularly important when a story may involve intense personal material, severe injury, captivity, torture, coercion, character death, romance, or other developments that can substantially change the direction or tone of a character's story.
No player should need to accept a major unwanted development simply because another character could theoretically attempt it.
If someone asks to avoid a subject, reduce detail, change direction, or stop a particular interaction, respect the request and find another way for the story to proceed where possible.
A boundary concerning the roleplay is not automatically an in-character decision. Players can decide that something will not be part of a scene without requiring their characters to explain that decision within the fiction.
**Heading**
Keep In-Character and Out-of-Character Conflict Separate
**Standard Text**
Characters may dislike one another without their players disliking one another.
A character can insult, betray, oppose, deceive, threaten, arrest, investigate, or fight another character as part of an agreed roleplay situation. Those actions should not be treated as permission for hostility toward the other player.
The reverse is equally important.
Out-of-character disagreements should not be settled through in-character retaliation.
If confusion develops, clarify what each participant understood to be happening rather than escalating the scene to prove a point. Many problems come from different assumptions about knowledge, intent, consequences, or what had already been established.
Clear communication protects the story as much as it protects the players.
**Heading**
Allow Characters to Change
**Standard Text**
A dossier describes a character. It should not imprison them.
Characters may reconsider beliefs, change loyalties, develop relationships, abandon goals, discover new ambitions, gain confidence, become more cautious, suffer setbacks, make compromises, or become people their players did not originally expect.
Do not feel obligated to protect a character from every development that would make an older biography inaccurate.
Update the biography.
StarForgeRP is designed to preserve an evolving continuity. The most interesting difference between a new character and the same character years later may be everything that happened between those two points.
For guidance on maintaining that record, see the **Character Dossier Guidelines** (https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/character-dossier-guidelines).
**Heading**
Preserve What Changes
**Standard Text**
Not every roleplay scene needs an archive entry.
Preserve developments when later stories may reasonably need to remember them.
A new friendship may become part of two character dossiers. A betrayal may alter a relationship. An injury may affect a character's current status. A completed mission may remain relevant to a campaign. An organization may gain a new enemy. A location may be damaged, discovered, occupied, abandoned, or given new significance.
Larger developments may eventually belong on the **Timeline** (https://www.starforgerp.com/timeline), while completed stories can remain available through the **Story Archive** (https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay/story-archive).
The purpose of the archive is not to document every conversation.
It is to remember the things future roleplay should not have to forget.
**Heading**
If Something Goes Wrong
**Standard Text**
Roleplay occasionally produces misunderstandings.
A player may interpret an action differently from how it was intended. Someone may assume information was public when it was private. Two participants may have different expectations about the severity of a conflict. A scene may develop in a direction that one participant did not realize was being proposed.
Address the misunderstanding out of character before trying to solve it through the characters.
Clarify what each person intended, identify which assumptions differed, and adjust the scene where necessary. Revising an unclear action or reconsidering an outcome is preferable to preserving a misunderstanding simply because it has already been written.
If a scene is no longer workable for the participants, it can stop. No story benefits from forcing an outcome after collaboration has broken down.
**Heading**
Quick Roleplay Check
**Standard Text**
Before or during a scene, these questions can help identify most common problems.
**List**
* Does my character have a believable reason to be involved?* Am I deciding what my character does rather than what another character must do?* Does my character actually know the information I am using?* Am I leaving meaningful room for other characters to respond?* If this could significantly alter another character, have the relevant players coordinated?* If this affects an established organization, location, campaign, or wider continuity, have I checked the existing context?* Am I allowing uncertainty, setbacks, and consequences rather than assuming success?* Are the players comfortable with the direction and subject matter of the scene?* If something important changes, is there a StarForgeRP record that should eventually be updated?
**Heading**
In Short
**Standard Text**
Give your character goals without guaranteeing their success.
Give other characters problems without deciding their responses.
Create conflict without turning collaboration into competition between players.
Use lore to give stories context rather than to prevent characters from being individuals.
Allow victories to matter, failures to matter, and choices to leave consequences.
Communicate when a story begins affecting another player's agency or the wider shared setting.
Above all, leave room for the story to become something none of the participants could have written alone.
**Button / Link Text**
**Button Name:** Explore Roleplay
**Link Page Name:** Roleplay
**Page URL:** https://www.starforgerp.com/roleplay
**Button / Link Text**
**Button Name:** Getting Started
**Link Page Name:** Getting Started
**Page URL:** https://www.starforgerp.com/guide/getting-started
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