Player's Guide

User types
PTP recognizes 3 categories of users - anonymous, free and paid. (And admins, but that's out of scope for this topic. They've got superpowers.)
Anonymous users are those that haven't logged on at all. They can read the comic and view the vote boxes, but cannot do anything. They do not see the shoutbox.
Free users are those that have logged on, but don't have a paid PTP subscription. They can do all the same things that anonymous users can do, plus:
*Create a character
*Vote for existing options in the vote boxes
*See and use the shoutbox
They have the following limitations:
*They cannot join a family;
*They cannot have a spouse;
*They cannot have children;
*They cannot enter new options in the vote boxes;
*They will not be featured in the comic pages, or (on the rare occasion that they are) will be faceless.
Paid users are the highest tier and require an active subscription. They can do all the things that the free users can do, minus the limitations.
Note: If a user was paid, and then his subscription was canceled, he will not be removed from his family/spouse/children. They will stay there, until he leaves the family or divorces. At that point he won't be able to re-join. We recommend to renew the subscription though.
Characters
Each user can have at most 1 active character at a time. The user can have other characters, but they will be in one of the inactive states. A user cannot switch among his characters himself and the admin will help to do so only under extreme circumstances.
If you are a long-time PTP player and used to have a character, you can also reactivate that character and continue playing it. You can however create a completely new character too. The characters that you don't choose to reactivate won't be lost, they will be available again when you have to create a new character again (for example, your previous character dies).
A character's name must be unique, including uniqueness among children, NPCs, and dead characters. Also, it should be worldsetting-appropriate. Imagine how it would be for someone to really have that name! Use common sense.
A character's avatar should be a square (but may be non-square too) and can be of any size. The system will resize it as necessary. However, very large files (in bytes) might be blocked by website upload limitations, so better keep them beneath 2MB. The supported file formats are JPG, PNG and GIF (without animation).
You can change the description and avatar of your currently active character, but their appearance in the comic will remain the same as the first time they've been drawn.
Families, spouses & kids
Currently there is no automated way for creating/entering/leaving families & marriages, and for creating kids. These kinds of interactions must be done through an admin. An interface for that will be created in the following months.
Since there is no automated interface, there are also no hard rules, but one principle that will be hard to talk around is that a child can only be created between characters that are married, of the same race, of opposing genders, and neither of them already has a child. In order to be married, the characters must be in the same family.
To join a family you must get the approval of the family head; the admin will not join you otherwise.
Voting system
Voting happens in "turns" where each "turn" corresponds to one page (exceptions are possible, but very rare, and you will be notified about it). Voting can be locked/unlocked by the admin separately for each archive. During a lockdown nobody can enter new votes or choices. The standard cycle is this:
#A page is uploaded in the archive;
#Voting is unlocked;
#After a few days, voting is locked and votes are gathered;
#The next page is produced;
#The cycle starts anew.
Both free and paid users have 1 vote per archive per turn. Paid users can also enter 1 choice per archive per turn. Both votes and choices are tied to characters, not users, so to use the voting boxes you must have an active character.
Entering a choice disables voting, because it counts as if you've voted for your own choice. As long as nobody else has voted on your choice, you can edit or remove your choice. After there is at least 1 vote by someone else, the voting box becomes essentially read-only for the choice-submitter until the next turn.
A choice text is currently limited to 75 characters. Use them wisely.
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Vilx-
:Summoner
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:Posts: 215
:Joined: 15 Dec 2009, 13:52
:Clan: Valley'gurl
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