Home by Nox

Wow. It is hard to believe that it had been over a year since I first joined Valucre. And let me tell you, it has been an interesting ride so far. Now I am the first to admit, I was brought to Valucre by a friend kicking, screaming and clawing at the floor if you really must know. I would in a very short time come to realize that my reticence was completely unwarranted, having come from a larger, much more commercial site with cutesie avatars, lots of items to purchase and a wide variety of role plays.

Sadly, over the years, even such variety proved to be lack luster. It was the same anime being played out again and again. Unfortunately my own efforts, not fitting nearly into the anime motif, went largely ignored, but for the occasional misguided cyber invite. Even my age, which is considerably greater than your average collaborative writer, was an issue. It was at this time that I found my drive to role play waning.

Ready to retire from collaborative writing altogether, my friend began pressing me to join this new sure that he had found. He swore that it was different, that the atmosphere was not one of pretentious back biting and characters that defy even the liberal parameters of suspended disbelief. This is a nurturing environment that values creativity as opposed to a stifling site that rejects anything that does not fit comfortably into preexisting molds.

I was of course, quite skeptical. But after perusing the site and jumping back into collaborative writing with both feet, I found his words to be quite true.

I have come to know Valucre to be a vivid and well organized and inviting world that has a place for almost any kind of character. Creativity abounds here without infantile judgments. If one cannot find a place in the main forums, there is an alternative forum were one can explore the outer reaches of one's imagination.

At last, I have found a place where my writing skills can develop and grow. At last I have come home.

Nox

Contact Us - PO Box

As Nette, the PR&M Team Leader, goes on to explain in the link provided below, Valucre has recently acquired a PO Box in Texas. We've done this for a number of reasons, including allowing alternate forms of contact aside from the Valucre Gmail and PM's to the staff members in particular, and to allow those that would like to donate but have no electronic means to do so.

This is the address:

Valucre
P.O. Box 86
Sutherland Springs, TX
78161

Any donations should be payable to Carlos Ramirez. Please DO NOT send cash or personal checks. Donations should be through money order.

Contact Us - PO Box

A letter from Valucre

Malum, Valucre's resident copywriter, has written a very engaging and very accurate portrayal of Valucre from a very surprising perspective. The follow post is in the style of correspondence, of a letter written from Valucre herself and addressed to all the players.

Welcome to Valucre

Tech Announcement

Tebo the Tech goes into a bit more detail in regards to what he has planned for the future of Valucre. This project in particular is in regards to a web app, and here you can glimpse some of the code and his comments on the matter.

If you're going to start something...don't

The FAQ's are coming to town

In an effort to get more qualitative information into the hands of the players, some of the board leaders have taken it upon themselves to do quick little write-ups of some of the more commonly and frequently asked questions. This will give players the opportunity to learn more about the nation in specific they might be roleplaying in or thinking about roleplaying in, while at the same time shaving down the amount of time they might have to spend picking through collective lore.

Terrenus FAQ

Genesaris FAQ

Iselyr FAQ

The Valucre Chatroom

Nette, who goes by the username Disco Lemonade on the forum, has made a thread recently to remind old members and to inform new members about Valucre's communal chatroom. The chatroom does not as yet have multi-room capabilities, though this is a functionality that administrations hopes to implement sometime soon. There is no established ETA on this, however. That said, the chatroom is still a great place to connect with other members of the forum day and night, and word on the grapevine is that Disco Lemonade will even hand out little prizes to members she spots talking about roleplay in the chatroom.

Since a user does not have to login to the chatroom to see what is going on, please note that she may be watching even if her name is not listed in the attendants' section.


Click here to view the thread

Thank you, trolls and troglodytes!

Disclaimer: I did not write this. A friend of mine posted this on my Facebook wall and I found the message contain within of utmost importance. I wanted to share it with the world.

My friends, if you are reading this it is probably because Trolls and Troglodytes have somehow negatively affected your life. (A Troglodyte is someone who is being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned with the intention to spite others). Through their callously immature whining and cajoling, they have merely pointed out an area in our psyche that needs refinement. For this, we must thank them. This area is the tendency to engage in pointless argument, and it is greatly harming our mental and physical health. Transcend it!

Whenever you engage a Troll and Troglodyte (hereafter, TnT) in argument, you lose, they win.

Know what is at the root of all TnT behavior: fear. They are afraid of being ignored, passed by, overlooked, rejected, and they desperately crave your attention. If they make you angry or upset in any way, they win. They will do anything to press your buttons and get a reaction, including lying, slander, name-calling, crafty video editing and photo-shopping, etc. etc. etc. And they will also occasionally pretend to be nice and agree with you, just to keep you interested.

Whenever you post and discuss their videos and/or pictures, you give them power and energy. This presents them with exactly the attention and acknowledgement they ache for. They win.

Especially if you take apart their arguments line by line and point out all their mistakes, flaws, lies, and so on. Doing this means that you are devoting your time and energy to careful consideration of their twisted thoughts.

You lose, they win.

Perhaps in your youth, like most of us, you were teased by children at school, and/or your sibling(s) at the dinner table, and/or your parent(s) at the sports field. You felt hurt, ashamed, alone, and you wanted to fight back. Sometimes you may have, or maybe you never did. Your ego took a beating, and the need for revenge still burns within you, yet to be soothed.

Conceivably, you may also feel an extra impetus to ‘fight back’ because you think you should defend some particular philosophical idea, method, system, or Movement. Maybe you think you need to defend some person, or some people, within said Movement.

You don’t.

Remember: It is TnTs character flaws that inspire their actions. Do you think you can somehow enhance their level of communication and understanding, or advance your Movement by taking a morally superior and logically correct position? Can you help spread the truth by engaging TnTs in lengthy explanations and the presentation of scientific evidence?

You can’t.

Maybe you are under the delusion that you can offer them some much needed counseling service, and heal their wounded soul. Maybe you think if you just give them one more try, accept their ‘friendship’ request just one more time, they may come around and see that you were right all along. Possibly you feel that you are doing them some good, by helping them see the errors of their ways.

You aren’t.

The only way you can win with TnTs, THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN WIN is to completely ignore them. Completely. Delete their posts on your Wall. Remove them from your Friend list. Refuse to watch and discuss their videos. Ignore their cries for attention and character defamations. Completely. They will wither and shiver alone and frustrated in their cold, dark bedrooms, clenching their angry fists and wondering why nobody is paying attention to them. And they will band together in clumps and clusters of squirming and slithering TnT hate groups, constantly re-infesting each other’s thoughtforms with cancerous memes. Let them.

TnTs are of no concern to psychologically healthy people. Our mental attitude is vitally important to our health and wellbeing, and our psychological state must remain positively in the light. Clean up and dust off the altar of your mind. Update your files and delete all programming that slows down your processing. Re-claim your power and re-focus your creativity. Thank the TnT’s for their reminder, and ignore them. Completely.

With love and respect,
Crispy

What is Valucre?

Valucre is a play-by-post roleplaying forum. What does this mean exactly? It means that one "plays a role", primarily but not solely through the perspective of a single character (some play a number of characters, such as armies and battalions, some play out the passage of setting).

The "game" of roleplaying here is that you play a character, having thought out their personal history, personality, attitudes/perspectives/biases, and the content of your writing will be that character's reaction to other characters, to settings, detailing their emotions and personal growth, making new relationships with the characters played by other people. One can have the character move through political office, acquire unique weaponry and armor, or maybe their life is already too full of mystery and intrigue and they open up a café.

These are the factors that make up our game. In all honesty, it's pretty fun. Some people consider the act of roleplaying to be pretty nerdy, and rightly so. The elements that run rampant on any roleplay message board can be found in media that, for a long time, appealed to a very small niche. From the elves and dragons of D&D and DragonLance to the spaceships and lightsabers of Star Wars and Starship Troopers and everywhere in-between.

These things, their parallels, and their constant reference by people like Urkel and the cast of Revenge of the Nerds has caused some roleplayers to consider roleplaying a dirty little secret. They're cool and not at all nerdy in their day to day life, so they don't want to fess up to the love of writing.

For the purposes of something easily defined, I'd like to use boxing as an example. Consider the gang of childhood friends that like to go to the local gym, put on the gloves every now and then and mess each other up for the hell of it. Fine and dandy. Now consider the boxer that trains at the gym every day and competes constantly in amateur circuits. Both are boxers but one engages in the act as a transient hobbyist while the other dedicates him or herself to honing the craft.

I'll refer to one as "rpers" and the other as "roleplayers", the first being your leisurely hobbyists and the other being the committed enthusiast.

RPers are welcome by the bus load. Valucre is the gym and the doors are open to any and all. But it is important to know that Valucre is here for the roleplayers, for the people that want to flourish, that want to sweat and flex their brain in connecting storylines, making plots, testing the limits of your characters, refining your writing skills, and taking part in the closest thing to immediate satisfaction that one can achieve in the literary realm.

Witness: Diner Coffee

For those of you that weren't already aware, I like to listen to rap and hip-hop. To be honest, I have a hard time differentiating the two when talking to your average man, but the common consensus seems to be that hip-hop is more serious and lyrical. Confusing as I've also been told that rap means Rhyme And Poetry.

Whatever the case, Witness was my very first foray into what is commonly termed "underground" or "conscious" rap. Up until that point my only knowledge of rap was what you heard on the radio. Now granted, as I was born in the late 80's, this meant that my first few tastes of rap were legitimate artists. Tupac and Biggie, et al. Ludacris. Xzibit. Eminem. And so on and so forth.

But Witness introduced me to a new kind of rap. He's an amazing lyricist with a smooth voice that delivers his punchlines, or sets up intricate metaphors as you'll see in this song, and provides one with plenty of food for thought.

Give it a listen.

Science can answer moral questions

"Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life."

Do I agree with the video across all points? No, not at all. There are some indiscretions here and there, moreover with the use of "science" in the title of his work as most people understand "science" to be the modern scientific view and not "science" as a process, which is in a state of constant change. This can lead to confusion.

But that aside I myself live by a doctrine of "virtue is logic", and that many of the "gray areas" or "sticky situations" in terms of morals or ethics, I find can be reasoned through or put through a rigorous filter of simple logic and an answer be arrived at. Not only morally feasible, but optimal in all regards.

Harris is eloquent, decisive, and keen in his word use and analogies. It's a brilliant dissertation.

The American Dream

I posted this on the forum, but I wanted to reiterate it on the blog so that it gets maximum exposure. I find this video to be very well thought out. It's fun, very amusing and entertaining, but undoubtedly informative. It's the kind of video that I feel everyone should one, both the ones that are completely uneducated in the subject and the ones that have already heard the information a hundred times. It's that good.

Newsletter: January 1st, 2011

The first newsletter of the new year!

Valucre Forum Roleplay Newsletter

This newsletter covers the Classifieds, Rosinder's update, the Status's coming back, attention is brought to the Forms we have available and a recently added division to Valucre staff known as Outreach posted in Valucre Jobs. This newsletter has both a roleplay spotlight and an MVP.

Leave comments!

User status

One of the mods we had installed on Valucre earlier allowed for the users to give themselves a "status", that would be visible both on their profile and in the side panel display of their profile with every post made. After we updated the VBulletin core this mod wouldn't work anymore.

We found a new one that works with the updated version.

Valucre Status Updates

BBCodes

BBCode (Bulletin Board Code) is a markup language that message boards use to format posts. The tags are done in square brackets [like these] and then parsed (the text is analyzed basically) before being translated into a markup language that the browsers understand, which for Valucre is HTML.

BBCodes are how you bold and italicize, how you implant images and videos, and some other neat stuff. Now that you know what a BBCode is, in detail, you're probably wondering the kind of BBCodes available on Valucre. We have some pretty nifty ones, and the following link will detail most of them. Expect more to be added.

Valucre BBCodes

Rosinder

For a while Rosinder's option in the Lore drop-down menu has been empty, and consequently leads users that click on it back to the homepage. Well just earlier today we (Damon and I, but mostly Damon) put together two comprehensive informational pages for the users at large. Below you'll find both the link and the introduction to Rosinder as a whole.

Valucre's Rosinder

Introduction

Rosinder was built with high and heroic fantasy, sword and sorcery in mind. It can be described as primarily medieval, its citizens engaged in a struggle to keep outside socioeconomic and magitechnological advances from intruding on their vaunted traditions.

Its place in the world, at the center of Tellus Mater, is particularly rich in arable land, which accounts for how common outside forces have attempted to invade Rosinder, which has only suffered from drought or famine from mismanagement of resources; its climate has no dry season. Most of the lands are politically divided into baronies, counties and duchies.

The nation is currently ruled by the House of Lords by both divine right of their lineage and popular vote, but the House of Commons allows for the first time a chance of direct compromise between nobles and the proletariat. However, the Republic is in its infancy and has yet to establish checks and balances against the accumulation of power.

With the House of Lords unanimously voting to restructure the military for aggressive expansion, Rosinder seeks to expand its empire across all of Valucre; the primary concern of its imperial march is to spare the world from its destruction by relieving people of their erroneous ways and showing them the glory of God.

How to: Ignore user

This is a guide for anyone that doesn't know how to add a user to their ignore list. The ignore list is a handy feature that can solve a lot of inter-personal problems, as a person annoying you can go on your list and you  never have to worry about reading their posts again. Ignore the trolls and leeches. Happy ignoring, Valucre!

Writing With Eachother - A Template for Successful Roleplay

As one of the official Chosen Tournament judges, I've overseen a fair share of T1 matches. One of the most difficult things to do when issuing a judgment is trying to figure out what's actually going on. This is due to the contradictions and paradoxes that occur when two players are writing against each other, something I'll get into in a moment. Because of the difficulty in understanding fights, we often ask the participants to supply us with a detailed list of actions that have occurred up to the contested point. Oftentimes, we find that the timelines don't even match. Why is this and what is going wrong?

This doesn't just happen in T1. A trend I've noticed among certain roleplayers is that they tend to write against each other as opposed to with. This, I think, is due to two reasons:

1. Ego - players want to be at the center of plots, so they're constantly fighting to be the center of attention. This also leads to a lack of accommodation, which can cause a clash of style.
2. Minimal Communication - This is especially noticeable in T1 matches. Players who frequently communicate seem to have the best synergy. If you know where the plot is headed and have a good idea of everything that is going on, you can make your post better integrate with the plot.

I know many people pride themselves on their writing and look at roleplay as a sort of writing exercise. This is good and a sentiment that should be facilitated and supported by the community. The problem lies in the fact that most threads read like a broken mash-up of events that seem to make little or no sense.

How is it fixed?

I don't have a sure-fire way to address the problem presented above, but I do have a few tips that may help those that wish to improve their literary relationship with other writers.

My first recommendation is to obviously drop the ego and communicate with your partners more. This should come as no surprise given the fact that I mentioned both of this issues above.

My second recommendation is to agree on the flow of time between posts with your partner. My intention here is to address the several temporal paradoxes that seem to arise when players fail to take time into consideration. If you're not involved in competitive roleplaying, it is advisable to give each player a certain amount of "IC" time with which they can play. Their post should be focused on their character's actions, but it can also address certain things that your character is doing.

The final idea I wanted to share has to do with the distribution of responsibilities. What I mean by this is that, in any given thread, you'll often find that a certain player takes on the responsibility of painting the setting, while another might describe major non-player actions. I feel that, for the flow of the thread, that it's important to share these responsibilities. The first post should always set the scene, but there is always more that can be described. Additionally, players can take turns controlling NPCs so to optimize the flow of dialogue and action. This, in my opinion, will provide the largest increase in synergy.

Leave some comments and tell me what you think!