New Player's Guide
From Magical Hogwarts Wiki
Contents |
Introduction
Welcome to Magical Hogwarts, an online Role Playing community centred around the Harry Potter universe. This is a guide to help you get settled in and hopefully clarify anything you might be confused about regarding the board. We know it's rather large and can be intimidating, but this thread should help you find most things you could possibly need.
Magical Hogwarts is a forum based role playing community. This means the participants of this game create fictional characters, which interact with each other. To interact with other characters, participants of the game post messages to each other written from the point of view of their fictional character. As you can see this form of role playing will require some writing skill, but even more so an active imagination. To help keeping your interactions interesting the administration will help create story lines for your character to participate in. So, if you are looking for an MMORPG, an arcade style game or amazing three dimensional graphics this place may not be for you.
Provided, that you are comfortable with our text based format read on. Before you register, please carefully study the General Rules. There are quite a number of them and many are really just common sense, but please make sure you understand them regardless. You will also be able to find an up-to-date list of the Administrators in that thread, and who to contact when you have a problem. If you've got a lot of time on your hands, there are more detailed Backgrounds for you to read, that will likely answer any further questions on how the board is run, however it is not required to read all of these before registration.
In order to register you will need a valid email address. Your account had to be manually approved by the Magical Hogwarts staff and you will be required to activate your Magical Hogwarts account via email, so please ensure the email address you provide works. Once you have registered, approval of your account can take anything from a few minutes to a full day. Please have some patience for the approval to go through. Accounts are approved manually by the Magical Hogwarts Staff to protect the community from spammers and undesirable individuals, therefore it can sometimes take a little bit of time. Once your account is approved you will receive an email from us prompting you to activate your account. Should you not receive this email within 24 hours, please feel free to contact the Main Administrator of Magical Hogwarts (webmaster@magical-hogwarts.org).
Once you have activated your account you will be able to log in. Usually you will also receive a personal message from one of our staff members welcoming you to MH and offering you their assistanc, as well as a number of useful links, one of which is to this guide. Please do not feel shy to ask for any further assistance either in The Sandbox or in the Questions & Answers area.
Setting
We are currently playing the school year 1997/98 (book 7) and we work hard to keep as much canon as is possible, the need to keep the game fun for all and active requires us to differ from canon in some areas merely for convenience. You'll notice that some of the professors teaching at Hogwarts are not canon characters. The reason for this is that those members who are interested in RPing professors for those classes wish to have original characters rather than the canon ones. In an effort to keep the school active as well as the classes, we've allowed this change. Other areas of the board still follow canon as closely as possible (i.e. our Quidditch system). Until the seventh book is released and we know what happens, we aren't going to progress the canon characters, in case we're all completely off the mark and totally wrong. Every three weeks (real time) the playtime month changes. We have events and plots that reflect the current playtime month; all of which you can find in the Playtime, Plots & Events thread. Occasionally for board events playtime is frozen, which means it doesn't change until the event ends. Again, this announcement is made in that thread as well.
There are also a number of additions that have been made to Harry Potter canon to fill in some of the blanks. As such background information for the schools of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons has been written by the Magical Hogwarts community. There are also original creatures and items as well as magical abilities you can encounter on Magical Hogwarts. All of these additions have been made to supplement and enhance the Magical Hogwarts roleplaying world in an effort to make our roleplaying environment both unique and original.
Character Creation
Now that you are set up it is time to start creating your first role playing character. There are a number of places which you will find helpful at this stage. The Beauxbatons Guide, Durmstrang Guide, Hogwarts Guide and Adult Characters Guide will provide you with background information on what types of characters you are allowed to play. These guides however, are not exhaustive and there are other kinds of characters that can be played, as long as such characters are encountered in Harry Potter canon. Examples of such characters would be ghosts, centaurs, or any adult profession not listed in the guides. Note that some character types might be considered special on Magical Hogwarts, because they are very powerful. As such they are not available to players who are just starting the game. To read more about this type of character you can consult the Special Features Guide.
Once you have decided what type of character you would like to play it is a good idea to check out the Character Creation Guide. It will provide you with a lot of in depth information on how to tackle writing your first character. However, we will present a short outline for you here. The first thing you should do is decide on a name. Due to a lot of people using the same names, we've had to create a Banned & Rejected Names List, so make sure not to use one of these names. Also, please ensure that your character name matches the type of character you wish to play. The school guides each contain more detailed information on which names will be acceptable for each school respectively.
Once you've gotten yourself settled in and decided on a name, and the type of character you'd like to create, you can find links to the respective character sheet templates in the Character Creation Guide. Adults please follow the links to the schools they graduated from. Each Sorting area will provide general advice on how to submit your character sheet and a number of different sheet templates, depending on which type of character you are attempting to make. Ensure that you start working with the correct template and understood the general information on how to post your sheet. The template should be filled out exactly as we have set it up, as we find that most easy for us to read over. Please be sure to include as many details about your character as you can. This is always hard when you create your first character, but the more details you include, the easier it will be for us to approve you. The spine itself must be filled out completely in order for an administrator to approve or sort you, and you are not allowed to post around the board until you have been sorted. In order to help you grasp what a character sheet should look like we have provided a number of Character Sheet Examples for you to draw inspiration from.
If you're trying to get your student into a specific house, such as Slytherin, Klyk Vampira or Papillonlisse, it would be wise to make your character have the dominant traits of these houses. You can find such information in the character creation guide, or at the respective school guides. Keep in mind that we will not always give you the house of your choice, but we do take it into consideration when sorting you. If you're planning to play an adult, you are free to pick the house you graduated from yourself. Still, it is your responsibility to ensure that your characters personality will match the house you graduated from. Also, each adult character needs an occupation. Being a Death Eater or a member of the Order of the Pheonix is not considered an occupation. Your character will need an actual day job and you should explain how your adult manages to provide for himself.
Once you completed your character sheet and got approval, you might want to try and get a special feature. Special features are rare abilities that not everyone possesses. A good example of a special feature is the ability to turn into an animal - or, being an animagus. The same applies for parseltongue. New members do not automatically get these features, as we like to make sure our members can properly play them before giving them out. All information regarding special features and the rules for them can be found at the Special Features forum.
If you would like to have a special feature, and meet the requirements for them, submit a detailed explanation of what it is you're asking for, how your character got it, why we should allow you to have it, how it fits your character, and then wait. Administrators vote on whether or not people get a special feature, and admittedly, we have a tendency to be rather strict on this. Do not be discouraged if you are declined for a feature the first time you apply for it. If you would like to know how you can improve it, contact the administrator in charge of special features (Maia Riddle) and ask. Most of the time, the staff is happy to help you improve your application.
Another thing you might want to have is a magical item. An example of this would be an invisibility cloak, or a knife like the one Sirius gave to Harry, that opens all doors. If you're interested in trying to obtain such an item, please check the Magical Item's Background Information. This is the rules regarding all magical items. Please note that canon characters retain all the items they have in the books; you needn't apply for those.
Classes and Graduating
Classes at Magical Hogwarts (in every school) are not mandatory; they are a system implemented to allow characters to age and advance. Each student is allowed to attend as many or as few classes as he or she wishes.
To advance at Magical Hogwarts all three schools use the same system, it is based on your character's post count. Posts are only counted when they occur in classroom boards and some study related areas such as the school libraries. The following numbers will tell you how many posts are required to advance to the next year of school and eventually into adulthood and graduation.
0 posts = first year |
To begin participating in classes in any of the three school is very simple. Look at the respective Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons boards to see what subjects are available in your character’s school (and which subjects you are interested in taking). Once you have decided on the classes your character will be attending, note that each class comes with its own background and set of rules supplied by the professor who teaches it. Some teachers may require you to sign up for their class for administrative purposes. If this is the case simply leave your name in the designated topic. After doing so you can join any ongoing lesson immediately. Professors will update their class roster at their leisure, and it is not required for you to wait for this. Once your name is in the topic, consider yourself signed up.
Avatars and Signatures
If you're new, you will probably wonder about Avatars and Signatures. The picture that appears at the side of your post is an avatar. The picture or text (or both) beneath it is a signature. You can find the size and content regulations for these in the Graphics Rules. If you're not much for graphics, there is also a forum titled "Avatars & Signatures" in which you can buy graphics using board currency Sickles. Please read the Gringotts Guide and Rules to learn how sickles work. Once you've attained a signature, you can find out how to put it up here.
Now, once you've got yourself an avatar and signature (if you want one) and gotten your character developed and approved, you might wish to make a thread to introduce yourself and your characters, as well as meet new people around the board before starting to RP. We have an entire forum for this called Shippers for Life. Every individual member of Magical Hogwarts (multicharacters not included) is allowed one thread, in which you can post the profiles of all your characters and some information about yourself, for other people to get to know you. You will also be able to find out information about other people by viewing the existing threads there, so we highly advise checking it out!
Making RP Topics
Before making threads, you might want to check out how to make things bold, underlined, or italicized, as well as other things. To help you with this we have provided a handy BBC tutorial. You should also pay attention to tags. Tags are little things in square brackets informing you about the details of a role play topic. If someone marks their topic [closed] or [private] you should not join it. If you do anyway, be prepared for a very unfriendly welcome. Best thing it to join topics that are labelled [open] or topics that have no markings at all. There are no written and official rules to making tags and what they can say, their use is rather flexible, but try paying attention to them or you will might irritate your fellow role players.
Technical Problems and Tutorials
In addition to this, we have provided some technical tutorials for you. Your can also report errors here, should you encounter technical problems with Magical Hogwarts.
The Wiki
As an alternative to the board format, all of the information that you would need to get you up and about can be located in the Magical Hogwarts Wiki. All articles are identical to their forum equivalent and are organized for easy access. A list of all the topics covered in our Wiki can be found in the Article Overview.
Further Questions?
This should cover most questions that new people have. If you still have one, please check the Basic Rules & Regulations again and contact the administrator in charge of whatever you are confused about, and they will try and help you as best they can. Of course there is also the Questions & Answers and The Sandbox, which will usually provide you with faster answers than questions addressed to a specific individual. That being said, once again, welcome to Magical Hogwarts, and have a good time here!
