SITE RULES

GENERAL

If you ever have any SUGGESTIONS or COMPLAINTS please PM me and we can work through your ideas and thoughts!!

RATED M FOR MATURE
MDA is not your G-rated Disney fantasy land. This site contains violence, vulgarity, and other content not suitable for younger audiences. Mild sexual themes are allowed here, but keep any graphic sexual content away from the boards.

BEHAVIOR
Be respectful of everyone on this site whether it be another member, a staff member, or a guest. You do not have to like everyone here, but you do have to show common courtesy. Insults, biases, and just plain rude remarks are not tolerated from anyone.

DISCREPANCIES
When discrepancies arise, and they always do, the best thing one can do is REREAD the post where the discrepancy lies. Make sure you aren't tired, pissed, emotional, stressed, or otherwise in an emotional state that may carry dramatic baggage. This is to prevent unwanted and unneeded fights over something that is as simple as editing a post. Editing a post is a pain in the ass and can really piss people off sometimes, so you have to be prepared to occasionally get a negative reaction, which is why you should make sure that you can handle something like that with a clear head. If you feel that by not editing their app that person is breaking the rules or going against something that had been decided beforehand and they refuse to edit their post or cooperate with you, that is when you go to a staff member for help. Be prepared for them to talk to both you and the person whose post is in question to get both sides before making a judgement. Remember that staff don't see sides as 'sides'. If they do, then their judgement is compromised and they need to immediately back off the entire matter altogether. Staff make judgement and whether that judgement leans one way or the other, it cannot be seen as either UNLESS that staff member is being bias. If you are in suspicion of a staff member being bias, then take it directly to me (Reila). Keep in mind that it is always best to go to whoever posted and ask them what's up first before even going to a staff member. Only go to them if it can't be resolved between the two of you and only pass it along to another staff member if you think the one helping you initially is being bias.
KEEP DRAMA OUT OF THE CBOX. PM them, MSN them, etc. instead, please.

YOUR FIRST POST
Until your character has been accepted, you should only be posting in the Creation board. I'll make exceptions for OOC posting like introductions or hiatuses, games, and the like; but any in-character posts should not be made until your character is accepted. Also, before you even consider posting or making your character's history, I require you to read The Timeline.

DEATH
If you want death to be allowed in your topic, then have '[Death Allowed]' in your topic title. All mission topics must have this as their supposed to be a risk to your character. Also, deaths must be logical and there must be no way out, I'll also look over these deaths (or one of the other staff will) and see if it is viable, otherwise I'll discount it. If 'DEATH ALLOWED' is in any title of a thread and if your character gets in a fight and is cornered with no plausible escape, and without breaking any other rules, then your character is capable of dying. So make sure that you do not get into a situation like that!

Also no stupid methods like: Do not kill people in their sleep, do not kill people in the shower, etc.

CHATBOX CONDUCT
We don't want to see you acting all: "Oh, my character will kick your character's ass if he does this..." I understand about some of these arguments, but it's possible to really annoy somebody when you do this, and I've seen huge fights break out in a cbox because of something like this. We don't mind if it's OOC chat, such as "CHARACTER NAME HERE can use ABILITY NAME HERE and win with that." But if you're being arrogant or nasty about that ability in any way, including insulting the strength of weaker characters, we will take action. You don't just respect the players on MDA.

QUESTIONS
For all questions, first go HERE or forever be hated. ...Just kidding, but seriously D<



ACCOUNTS

USERNAMES
Your username must be your character's name and should not contain any symbols or foreign characters. "Jane Doe" is a-okay. "sparkle pony" and "jane {doe}" are not acceptable. Also I don't want to see terribly long names that no one will ever be able to remember to PM you. XD

ACCOUNT PER CHARACTER
Each of your characters should be on their own, separate account, not grouped together under the same one. There are no exceptions.

ACTIVITY
Once you create an account here, you have two weeks to post your character's profile. If you haven't posted by the end of two weeks, your account will be deleted. Members must post in the away board if they plan on being in-active for longer than one week. Activity checks will be held once a month for accepted characters. Unless you post an away topic, you are expected to participate.



CHARACTERS

CHARACTER LIMIT
There is a five character limit on MDA, any characters after that need to be approved by Reila Tsukino before they are made. The line is usually drawn at ten. Your first character is free, but each character after that costs a certain amount of points. Check out the Points thread for more information on that matter. The is no limit to canon characters (aside from there being a rule that a player can only have one Homunculus), and they are required to post at least once a week or you risk having them taken away.

CHARACTER LOGS
Once someone exceeds five characters, they are then required to make a character log to keep track of all their character's threads while maintaining a timeline that makes sense. You post your log here, using THIS Template. However, if you have less than five characters you can also post a log it just isn't required.

MARY SUE & GARY STU
I do not want to see characters whose faults are either minimal or non-existent compared to their strengths, and I do not want to see perfection personified. Give your characters depth and don't be afraid to make a Hephaestus instead of an Adonis.

CARBON COPIES
This only pertains to characters that have a face-claim from a copyrighted character. A carbon copy is a character who is identical (or at least highly similar) to their face-claim. I will ask you to revise your application if I think your character is too similar to their chosen face-claim.



GRAPHICS

FACE CLAIM
Only artwork is acceptable, not real people. You may use anime/manga characters, images you have drawn yourself, or artwork done by another with the artist's permission. You may not use celebrities, models, etc.

AVATARS & SIGS
Avatars should be 150x200 pixels in size, no more and no less. Signatures must not stretch the board or be obnoxiously tall (Preferably 500x150, lengthwise). Avatar and signature content must abide by the ToS of the site. If your character has a faceclaim, their avatar must be said faceclaim.

GRAPHICS HELP?
Sometimes it can be a little difficult finding a face to match your character, or finding/making graphics. If you want help, just ask in the cbox or post in Discussions.



POSTING

WORD LIMIT
All members are expected to type posts of AT LEAST 150 words long. You can copy-paste your post into a word document or something similar, and find the 'word count' option in the tool menu to check. I'd also like to warn you that, specifically, I WILL BE CHECKING. Every week from now on I'll go around and read all of the posts on the site, and harass you if you're not following the rule.

SPELLING & GRAMMAR
If you use Firefox, there should already be a spell-check built into your browser. If not, you can always copy-paste it into a word document to fix it. Use this and also re-read your posts before you finally send them off for us to read. I'm not a grammar or spelling nazi and will let things slide pretty easily, but when a post is littered with errors or difficult to understand because of poor spelling/grammar, I will ask you to edit things. (After all, how many times have he read the word 'beign' and thought you said 'begin' when you meant 'being', yes?)

DECORATION
A lot of people like making their posts pretty in one way or another. This is perfectly fine. There are just a few things I'd rather not see. First, don't center or right-align IC posts. Next, I'm fine with people making small headers for their posts, but you may not use images or other obnoxious headers. And finally italicizing dialogue from other character's posts is standard as well as thoughts. Coloring or bolding/italicizing/underlining entire posts is not fine. Use normal-sized font when posting in character.

It's required that all dialogue is colored (any color) to match the language your character speaks, which should be in your signature at all times. Example signature: Fluent in Amestrian, Xingese, and Aerugese.

Example: "Hey Frank!" Frank raised an eyebrow in response to Joe's loud greeting.
"Yo what's up, Joe?"


THREADS
You can be in multiple threads at the same time, but I ask that you please be wary of your character's timeline, hence the character logs mentioned above.


ROLEPLAY FOULS

POWER-PLAYING
The act of controlling another person's character or NPC they've created without the player's permission. Some people are more lenient than others about this roleplay foul, and some people plan ahead of time to have certain actions take place, in which case it is alright for a character to momentarily take the wheel. However, unless a player has deemed it okay for you to do so, I don't want to see this happening.

GOD-MODDING
The act of making your character unstoppable and/or ridiculously powerful. This, in my experience, tends to be the most often roleplaying sin committed. People don't want their characters to lose, and so pull ridiculous material out of thin air to keep them on top. This isn't fair. Your character, just like everyone else's characters, is capable of losing and failing. They are not all-powerful. They are not The One. They are mortal and have their own strengths and weaknesses, which should affect them and not just be tossed aside during a time when such weakness will actually hinder them.

METAGAMING
The act of using knowledge that is not available to your character in order to change the way you play him or her. Just because the information is there (character profiles, for example), doesn't make it okay for your character to know all of it. That information is for the players, not the characters. Knowing a character's name the first time your character sees them is not good role playing. You can't know a character without meeting a character. Yes, sometimes players create relationships between characters before ever actually roleplaying, and that is perfectly fine... as long as both parties agree to it.


COUNTRY-SPECIFIED AND CUSTOM WEAPONRY

If you want to incorporate your character or the soldiers under your character's command, etc. using any large, country-based hardware, I ask that you first ask the country's leader of which that item is from/based/made by. If you think about it logically during a war, if the Cretans are fighting the Drachmans, how and why would a Drachman get access to a Cretan artillery, aircrafts, gunships, tanks, etc.? It wouldn't necessarily be possible unless some things happened behind the scenes. While this site promotes creativity, some things like presupposing your character somehow got access to another countries tanks, can easy piss someone off (specifically the country's leader whom you presumably duped without permission). An example of such is this: You're a Drachman RIOTE Militant and you want a replica of a Lockheed AC-130U, which is a Cretan gunship to attack Xing with. This isn't just possible automatically because it implies that multiple Cretan AC-130Us were obtained intact by RIOTE Militants in order to remake it into a usable device, and that's not possible unless they were specifically used in one of the MDA Missions, (which they were not). Therefore, this rule states that you must talk to that country's leader (in this case Dietrich) and ask for permission to use that. In some cases, you will have to work out a deal, possibly also contacting your country's leader so they can trade blueprints or something of the sort. We're all friends here. If the Xingese can carry around AK-47s then there's always a way to make things work. Just be wary and take caution with assuming your character has access to everything. And know, that it's a lot easier in some instances to just invent your own weapon like in Custom Weaponry. But please note that this rule doesn't apply to small weapons that can be obtained underhandedly; it more so stands for larger equipment that people actually care about. All in all, it doesn't really hurt to ask nicely. =3

Note: This rule also really sheds light on the fact that COUNTRY LEADERS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. If you run a country, you need to be around to be contacted by people. IE all people whose names are mentioned on this List. And more specifically, if you wanted the blueprint of a Fort Briggs aircraft and you ask Hans, the Chancellor of Amestris, for permission, then he cannot necessarily hand it over without consulting Reila about it. Make sense? Okay good.