Roleplay Guidelines

StarForgeRP supports collaborative storytelling in a persistent Star Wars: The Old Republic setting. Participants may roleplay through SWTOR, Discord, or another agreed format.

Players control their own characters while contributing to circumstances shared with others. Characters can disagree, misunderstand, compete, fail, succeed, and change. Their choices should give fellow participants something meaningful to respond to and leave room for consequences.

Leave Room for Character Responses

Describe your character’s intentions, speech, actions, and attempts. Leave another character’s significant decisions and reactions to their player, within the outcomes and methods the participants have agreed upon.

For example, attempting to restrain someone creates an opportunity for a response. Whether the attempt succeeds may depend on resistance, circumstances, negotiation between players, or an agreed resolution method. The same principle applies to persuasion, deception, investigation, and other contested interactions.

Players may agree on a result beforehand. Otherwise, avoid deciding another character’s thoughts, loyalties, injuries, surrender, or future development through your own narration.

Agency allows characters to face danger and setbacks while their players retain a meaningful role in what happens.

Establish How Uncertain Outcomes Are Resolved

Agree on any dice system, game mechanics, combat conventions, or predetermined outcomes before an important result depends on them.

When a Game Master (GM) facilitates a story, clarify their responsibilities: portraying supporting characters, describing circumstances, presenting challenges, and adjudicating outcomes within the agreed scope. Facilitating the scenario does not automatically confer control over player-characters.

Coordinate Significant Changes

Ordinary interaction can unfold without extensive planning. Discuss developments that would substantially affect someone else’s character, established material, or continuing story before treating them as settled.

• Death, permanent injury, prolonged captivity, or another lasting change to a character.

• Major relationship changes, betrayals, or disclosures involving another character.

• New claims about another character’s past actions, knowledge, promises, or experiences.

• Stories built around another participant’s family connections, private history, secrets, possessions, or controlled resources.

• Exceptional access to restricted places, operations, organizations, or information.

• Destruction or substantial alteration of an established place, organization, or shared resource.

• Consequences imposed on characters whose players are absent.

Agreement can establish what is possible while leaving the result undecided. Participants might accept the risk of capture without determining who will be captured or whether an escape will succeed.

Respect Boundaries Throughout Play

Discuss relevant limits on subject matter and detail, especially for romance, coercion, torture, severe injury, captivity, and death.

Respect requests to pause, stop, redirect, or reduce detail. Players need not explain a personal boundary, and they may change it after play begins. Earlier participation does not oblige continued participation. No fictional justification is required for leaving material out.

Separate Character Conflict from Player Conduct

Characters may be enemies while their players collaborate respectfully. Fictional hostility does not excuse mistreating another participant, and disagreements between players should be addressed outside the story rather than through retaliation against a character.

Give Conflict Meaningful Stakes

Characters can pursue incompatible goals without either player deciding the entire encounter. Establish what each character wants, what they can attempt, and what they risk. Leave space for resistance, compromise, retreat, cooperation, and unexpected choices.

A disagreement over payment, a contested discovery, or conflicting responsibilities can sustain a story as readily as combat. Success may resolve one problem while creating another.

Ground Capabilities in the Character

Unusual backgrounds and exceptional abilities can fit the setting when their origins and limits are credible. Explain how experience, preparation, equipment, resources, and assistance support what a character attempts.

Expertise does not answer every question. Rank does not establish unrestricted authority. Membership does not provide every institutional resource. Give other participants room to contribute even when characters differ greatly in experience or power.

Species, culture, faction, profession, and Force tradition influence a character without determining their personality or choices. A character’s importance to their crew, family, or community can provide ample reason for their story to matter.

Carry Consequences Forward

Let established outcomes affect later choices. Failure might leave a debt, damaged relationship, or unfinished task. Success might earn trust, create responsibilities, or open an opportunity the character must decide whether to pursue.

Establish What the Character Knows

StarForgeRP’s pages inform players. A character needs a believable route to the information they use, such as experience, observation, conversation, research, or access established through earlier roleplay.

Consider the reliability of that information. Hearing an accusation establishes that someone made it; it does not establish guilt. An authentic record may contain an error or deliberate deception.

Dossiers and story pages can reveal material that remains concealed within the fiction. Preserve those distinctions. Character Dossier Guidelines explains how to present public, private, rumored, and disputed character information.

Find a Credible Entry Point

Before joining an existing story, check its participation information and coordinate an introduction when needed. An ongoing story may have limited participation, and an invitation to play still needs a plausible way for the character to become involved.

A shared workplace, request for assistance, mutual acquaintance, or unresolved obligation can provide an opening. Reading about a hidden operation does not give a character its location or access.

Roleplay contributes to a setting that other stories also use. Before establishing a significant change, consider which characters, places, organizations, and earlier events it affects.

A local development can have lasting importance without changing galactic history. As the proposed consequences extend beyond the immediate participants, coordinate with the people whose established material would be affected. Preserve unresolved discoveries and future outcomes until play or an agreed continuity decision establishes them.

Use Current Setting for StarForgeRP’s shared present and adopted SWTOR story boundary. That page contains major story spoilers. For flashbacks, establish when the scene occurs and which experiences or information were available to the characters then.

Pause and clarify misunderstandings outside the fiction before building further events on them. Identify the disputed assumption and agree on a workable correction. Participants may clarify an action, revise an outcome, rewind part of the scene, or end it.

Record changes that help later participants understand the shared history. A character’s altered circumstances belong in their dossier; lasting effects on a place or organization belong with that subject. Keep the detailed account with the relevant story and connect the records where useful.

The Story Archive preserves concluded roleplay with continuing significance. A finished story may still leave unanswered questions, obligations, or relationships for another story to develop. Use the Timeline when the timing and sequence of events help explain their wider importance.

Distinguish established events from proposed developments, character beliefs, disputed accounts, and unresolved possibilities. Protect information whose disclosure would compromise an intended reveal. A public record marked “secret” remains readable by players.

• Do we understand when, where, and through which format we are playing?

• Does each character have a credible reason to participate?

• Are significant choices and responses left with the appropriate players?

• Have we agreed how contested outcomes will be handled?

• Are relevant boundaries understood and respected?

• Can each character reasonably know and access what the scene requires?

• Have affected participants agreed to significant shared developments?

• Does the scene respect established history and unresolved information?

• What lasting changes will future stories need to remember?