New Player's Guide

Brand new to role-playing and wanting to learn how to play this glorious game brought to you? This page will teach you the ropes!

What is role-playing?
Wikipedia defines role-playing as "the changing of one's behavior to assume a role consciously to act out an adopted role." The page goes on to say how in role-playing games that "participants assume the roles of characters and collaboratively create stories.  Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines. Within the rules, they may improvise freely, their choices shape the direction and outcome of the games."

Role-playing may be regarded as being similar in many ways to improvisational acting, whereby you have no rehearsed script by which to determine your own character's actions and responses. It may also be regarded as collaborative story-writing. A group of RPers whose characters have similar goals and enact a group storyline may even wish to draft a story outlining their experiences. It is not uncommon for experiences like this to spur standalone written works, examples of which can be seen throughout the fantasy and fiction genres.

You may find that some will talk about "good RP" versus "bad RP" as you meet other RPers. Generally speaking, this is more a matter of opinion than it is an assessment of one's skill at playing make-pretend. The only real requirement for "good RP" that is pretty universal would be an ability to communicate your scene/story/character in an effective or enjoyable manner. Different RPers will have different styles, and these at times may conflict with one another. The most important thing is to be respectful to other RPers and tolerant of their style while also maintaining your own. No one should ever demand that you participate in any type of RP that you don't enjoy. You can always politely walk away from it, with the exception of combat oriented RP in which, if a problem arises, you may contact the administration team through the “GM Help” command on the game.

Simple examples of Role-playing:
 * Uchiha, Sasuke glances about precariously before making a steady streamline of creaking steps towards the restroom. Along the way, he hears what can only be described as muffled whispers through the confines of his parents’ doorway. They seem to be arguing, but the door is preventing anything from being discernable.


 * Uzumaki, Naruto approaches the Academy for the day, finally ready to embark on the first step to becoming a Shinobi of Konohagakure. It was to be a long road ahead, but he knew in his heart that he was prepared to step into the shoes of those before him. It was finally time for him to embrace the future and all that it had to offer him. Konoha was going to soon believe alongside himself that he’d be the next Hokage.


 * Haruno, Sakura gathers around with the rest of the genin as they’re ordered to line up. She looks to either side of herself and notices that neither of them are people she’s met before and falls into a reserved silence while patiently waiting for the announcement to be given. These were squad assignments. It meant that regardless of how she felt about anybody around her, she would have to learn to work alongside them cohesively over the next several years. Hopefully, the person she admires so greatly is who she’s put together with. It’d be the perfect opportunity to get to know him better.

Character Creation
When you first open the game, you’re met with a screen that says “New” and “Load”. You’ll want to press ‘New’ when beginning a new character. The next screen that will show up will have several input boxes. In the first box, you type in your character’s first name. Below that is an option to tick a box and type in a surname. Do not do this if you wish to create into one of the many clans that are available in the game. The clans available are those commonly seen in the canon series, as well as some new ones that will be in Amegakure as options upon making it passed this initial screen.

When you’ve decided upon a name, the next choice is your age. Seeing as this is a role-playing game, your character will get older the longer they live for. Due to this, it’s suggested that new characters, as well as most Death Rewards, are created around the ages of Twelve to Fifteen. These ages are the prime, as they were in the original series, for rising through the ranks and absorbing the knowledge that your character will be offered. Keep in mind that age will not be relevant to your progression through the Academy unless you’re over the age of twenty or under the age of nine and still attempting to enroll.

Now that you’ve chosen your name and age, the next step is to decide upon your village. The two choices that you’ll have to pick from will be Konohagakure, the village that most players will recognize as Naruto Uzumaki’s native village and Amegakure, a village referred to as the village hidden in the rain. Konohagakure is known for being home to some of the most powerful clans in the world, such as the Hyuuga, Uchiha, Inuzuka, and Senju. Amegakure is known for having families just as powerful such as the Kaguya, Yuki, Hozuki, and Hoshigaki. After choosing your nationality and surname/clan, you will be prompted for basic customization options, vesting you to choose between a variety of hairstyles and colors, as well as a skin color. Fear not, you can adjust these later if you don’t like what you started out with.

Upon finishing your initial character creation you’ll be introduced to the tutorial island. It is highly suggested that you read through what each of the NPCs along the way has to tell you, as they provide very vital information when it comes to participating in this game. To interact with the NPCs, you can double click on them and an informational box will pop-up, alerting you to what it has to say. After reading each of the informational bits, you will come to a final NPC that will ask you if you’re prepared to start your journey in this vast world. Stating so will send you to the in-game world where you may now interact with everybody else who is enjoying the game!

Specializations and Perks
Specializations (Specs) are the same thing as Classes are in Dungeons & Dragons. As your character gets stronger and you grow, you’ll notice many different options become available to you. Some of these might include, as examples, medical, elemental, and physical/close quarters combat. There are approximately 20+ different specs you can choose from currently.

Each of the specs is augmented further by things called perks. These perks are essentially half of what makeup and craft just what your character is capable of in the world. Those available at the start vary from learning how to manipulate fire to smelting and forging weaponry. With hundreds of perks to choose from, it ensures that there aren’t ever two characters that will be exactly the same. The combinations and different styles of play available to you with our system are endless, ensuring that despite two characters maybe being equal in strength, it won’t ever be a simple stalemate.

Something to note is that, as any progressive system of gaming, certain abilities (jutsu/perks) require attributes to be at a specific level. For example, if you want to learn the fireball technique “Katon: Goukakyuu”, it’s going to require you to not only have the proper fire perk of Fire Proficiency II, but also the correct control attribute of grade C and 15 progression points. NOTE: Those may not be the real requirements of said technique, but simply used for explanation purposes. To understand how to gain progression points, please refer to Progression and How it Works below.

For further clarity, the aforementioned word “jutsu” is Japanese for the English word “art”. This is the term you will most commonly see, asides from technique, when referring to the physical abilities that a person will perform while acting out special actions, such as elemental or illusionary techniques. The technique's/capabilities tab that players have access to in-game will be split by the terms “Perks” and “Jutsu”.

Progression and How It Works
So now that we’ve told you about the attributes and specializations, you’re probably curious as to how it is that you get stronger. Thanks to the wonderful programming in RoS, this system is mostly automated. As you role-play and contribute to the story, you receive points that you allocate into the different attributes, as well as a separate point (given to you at the same time as the attribute point) that you can save up to eventually buy perks and progress your spec with. These points, called Progression Points, or “PP”, are awarded through various means, such as role-playing actively and taking part in special events.

How RoS has handled the progression system is as players play the game, they’ll get stronger. The more you role-play and interact with the world around you, the more points you will receive. Many games have adopted this system, but where our’s is different is that rather than being given a single, or perhaps two, points a day, you can also gain fractional points that are awarded throughout. This is to help ensure that people who are the most active will be rewarded accordingly for their activity and pull ahead of the less active/more lazy players.

Events
Now, it doesn’t stop there either. As we’ve taken the time to select a specific, yet ever expanding, staff in regards to this game, we’ve also taken steps to help solidify just who is partaking at any given time with Event based Admins (eventmins) who will spur things throughout the week that all players will be encouraged to participate with. The things these admins can/will do may vary anywhere from a simple gust of wind that knocks a light-pole over to a villain making a presence and needing to be stopped. When you participate in these events, there’s a chance that the administration team will reward you accordingly for your efforts and give you a reward for helping progress the role-play.

Risk versus Reward
In addition to being active and participating in events, another thing that is taken into account prior to rewarding players is their risk versus reward. If you’re a character who is doing more risky actions on a regular basis, you’re going to be given compensation as such. In life, the people who strive for greatness won’t sit on the sidelines and be an average Joe. This game works the same. If you’re, for example, putting your character’s life on the line regularly with combative scenarios, you’re going to gain more experience than your peers who simply partake when it is required of them. Please do not expect a boost from one or two simple things. For you to acquire this gain in power, it’s not a one time thing that takes you out of your boundary. Consistency plays a big role in how this will progress you.

Milestones
We, as an administrative team, are aware that we can not keep track of these things constantly and so certain situations may be missed. We look to ease this issue by having something known as a Milestones, which can be accessed from the interface. In this sheet, you will fill out VERY important events that you have partaken that really push your character forward. Please note that being a stereotypical evil character that just murders other players is not what is sought after here. The idea is that conflict can/will exist, as it should, but your power will not grow just by slaughtering other players. If the reason was justified and the fight was of reasonable difficulty, then by all means add it to your Milestones sheet, but do not senselessly kill a random person just in hopes of yourself becoming stronger. We want conducive story being written, not player enjoyment being prevented. This milestone sheet is checked on an every week basis by the administration team. Players should not expect to gain PP every week unless their milestones are extremely influential or dangerous.

Learning and Teaching
We’ve covered active roleplaying, risk and reward, weekly checks and how participating in events can help you grow stronger, so now let’s talk about learning new things from a mentor. In RoS, you will have people who will want to teach you in order help you learn new things. How this will work is that when a mentor understands and accepts you for their training, you will both start to post the training as a markdown note in your progressive sheet after it occurs. Ensure that you keep ample note on what was done during the training. Simply watching somebody perform a technique a single time does not constitute as a learning prerogative. It will take time to learn anything, with higher skilled techniques taking longer. These will operate out of your regular learning schedule and do not take away from your personal progress.

Functionally speaking, the old learn/teach system is gone. The replacement is a much less abusable setup that still helps you RP in character. This is a mentor system. A mentor, someone who knows jutsu to be learned, can take on a mentee (1 or 2 at most unless the mentor does almost nothing but teach these students in a 1on1 situation each.) and over a period of time they can RP teaching them the ins and outs of using the jutsu. This period of time is not short, it's not a single day OOC. As you develop this mentor/mentee relationship, you both will Milestone log that this is going on. At the end of the mentoring, you can AHelp to reap the rewards of your RP investments.

Time-Skips
Last, but not least to progression, there are very rare events that will arise called “time-skips”. These are exactly what the word sounds like, where a skip of time occurs and all players are put into a temporary limbo while the story is progressed over the span of anywhere between a few months to multiple years. When this happens, all players will be given a boost in points (both attributes and for perks/techniques) and a new update to the story will be posted, explaining just what happened over the span of time that was forwarded. These are generally very rare and only take place when something major in story has happened.

Creating Jutsu/Perks
As you advance throughout the game and learn new perks and abilities, your character will become capable of creating new techniques and perks. Most perks will specify when and what rank of jutsu each player can create, but we'll accept any submission for review. Players are welcome to be creative in making unique techniques, but admins will have the final call on how strong they are due to balancing purposes. The google document to create jutsu and perks can be found in game or down below.

Jutsu and Perk Creation

Death
As with all life, eventually, it comes to an end. The unfortunate circumstances that may have lead to this point can vary from an opponent winning your fight and deciding they should slay you, to a house collapsing on you and crushing your entire body, to old-age finally biting you in the rump. Causes of death vary and can be extremely upsetting, gruesome and occasionally unfair. Unfortunately, by playing this game, there has to be an understanding that death can and will occur with nearly every character to be created. It’s commonly not a fun experience and all of that hard work you put into becoming the A-Rank Jounin Commander is just down the drain, leaving you with two options. You can either make a new character and continue to enjoy the game by crafting a new story with new experiences or simply quit.

Since we understand that neither option sounds as great as continuing your original character, we’ve incentivized deaths to a certain extent that make them less painful. When you die, your entire character will be looked at from start to finish. All of the activity, events, and overall role-play that you invested into will be sifted through and judged by the administration team accordingly. The result of that scrutiny nets you something known as a death-reward (DR). A DR is generally a boost to your new character, whether it be a unique technique, statistical jump, or other special circumstances. You will start with less power than when you died, but with something new to augment this next character. Keep in mind that DRs generally scale directly in strength with a comparison to your original and all of the contribution it had. Meaning, if two Shinobi of the same rank die, the one who was more active and conducive to the role-play will receive a better reward.

Strangers & Contacts
In the current system of the game, everybody starts out with something called a “stranger description.” This is to hide your real name from the players and prevent metagaming should you ever be in need of, or simply like, doing so. Most commonly, the names that people will apply to this section for themselves will be along the lines of, “A blue-haired girl” or “The spiky, yellow-haired, teen.” When you learn the name of somebody, you simply click on their name in the text box at the bottom of the screen and an input pop-up will appear. You type in the name that you wish to apply to them and it will change for you. This can be redone at any time you wish as well by repeating the process of clicking the name in the text box. Every player that you apply a new name to will show up in the contacts tab of your game, which you can locate in the top-right of your screen near the commands tab.

The contacts tab can also be utilized to change the character’s name again, or assigning a relationship value to them in order to aid you in remembering how you met them, as well as if you considered them a friend, foe, or simply just another guy you met while skipping rocks at the pond. It’s encouraged to utilize this system in order to cut down on how much memory is required of you, as a person, out of the game.