Game Rules
General Rules
- Players must be aged 15 years of age, or above. This is due to content within, so please do not apply if you are under 15.
- Wydan University has a general rating of PG-13. This means that there may be some mild violence/swearing, but no sexual content. Take these matters to your private/instant messages if you must. Otherwise, tone it down, and/or fade to black.
- Proper grammar/spelling rules apply. We understand that typos happen, but continual spelling errors are not acceptable. Please use a spellchecker on your posts before hitting ’send’ to try and catch as many as possible. If you fail to comply with basic spelling/grammar rules, you will be warned.
- Run serious/offensive plotlines by the mods before enacting them. As this site has a PG-13 rating, and has members who may be sensitive to some plotlines, it is best to check things out before going on ahead with them. Examples include (but are not restricted to): drug use, rape/sexual violence, pregnancy, and mental illness. And remember, research is your friend.
- No Copying/Plagiarism! Plagiarism in any form will not be condoned here at Wydan University. This extends to characters lifted directly from other worlds, characters copied from books/movies etc. as well as the character ideas of other players. You would be surprised how many people think that they can get away with ‘borrowing’ another player’s hard work and ideas, but it is not condoned here, and action will be taken against copy-cats.
- Be Courteous. Simply put, treat others the way you would like to be treated, a.k.a respect others. OOC attacks will not be tolerated, and will be responded to with swift action by the moderators.
- Respect the IC/OOC Divide. No matter what happens, please remember that what goes on In Character (IC) does not equate to what goes on Out Of Character (OOC). So even though someone’s character may dislike yours, it does not mean that player does - and thus don’t have all your characters turn on those player’s characters.
Image Rules
- Signatures are to be no more than 400 pixels in width, and 150 in height. They may be less, but the total size should not exceed those dimensions. This is to prevent the skin stretching, and because some people are on dial-up, so static images and text only. Please, think of the dial-up users when making your sigs, so no uncompressed files like bitmaps or massive animated gifs.
- Avatars are to be 100×100 pixels. If they are not, please use a graphics program (such as the GIMP) to shrink them down, or ask for help on our boards. Again, please think of the dial-up users.
- Do not use the actors from the Harry Potter movies as the PB for your character. As Wydan University is set in the world of Harry Potter, albeit it in the current year, by using one of the actor’s faces, you are in essence saying that your character looks like the canon character. So no.
- Use PBs appropriate to the character. Especially with regards to age. The majority of characters in this game will most likely be students, teenagers, and so we request that you try and make your PB choices reflect that. Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp etc. are no longer 14, so please don’t try and use recent images for your 14 year old character. If you are having trouble finding a PB, ask. We are glad to help, and do have a lot of suggestions, or suggestions of where to ask for help.
Character Rules
- Original characters only! This is the big rule of Wydan University. All characters must be original i.e. not from any of the Harry Potter books, or from any other published work. This means that you cannot take Eragon from the Inheritance Trilogy, for example, and ‘transform’ him into a character in the Harry Potter world.
- No Half-Breeds: Witches and wizards only. Your character cannot be part: fairy, goblin, veela, unicorn, centaur, giant, Pokémon, nymph or Saiyan. Also, no werewolves, sorry.
- Register with first and last names only. If your character goes by another name more commonly - such as a nickname or middle name - then use that one. Two names (unless, say, there is a hyphen in there) only.
- No Mary-Sues or Gary-Stus. For more detailed reading on what a Mary-Sue is, and why it should never exist, googling the term. Wikipedia has another good explanation. But basically, a Sue is a character who is brilliant at everything she does, beautiful, smart, adored by everyone, and absolutely two-dimensional in every respect. Attempting to counter a character’s perfect nature with a tragic past is not helpful in anyway, and will not assist you in gaining entry to the game.
- Canon Powers Only! Wydan University, in case you have forgotten, is a Harry Potter game, meaning that all of the rules of the world apply. Powers such as Parseltongue and Metamorphmagus status will be limited, if not stricken altogether. And if you want things like pyrokinesis and the like, go join an X-Men game.
Roleplaying Rules
- No Godmoding! Godding, godmoding, god-moding, whatever you call it, is not welcome here, and for those who do not understand the concept, godmoding (as I call it, after the ‘god mode’ of video games such as Doom). Do not force another person’s character to do/say something without their permission unless you wish to be painfully decapitated by the RPer who owns the character, the mods, and anyone else who sees it. Just don’t. It defeats the purpose of Role Playing, which is to say, interaction between characters.
- Make posts a reasonable length. Now, we at Wydan University do not have a hard-and-fast rule when it comes to minimum word counts; instead, we ask that people post enough that they contribute to the thread, working with what people have posted, and leaving things for other people to work with in return.
- Make sense. There is nothing worse than reading a post where someone contradicts, backtracks or just says something purely strange that doesn’t make sense. READ posts before you do, make sure you have all the facts right. Do not assume that, because something has not been stated exactly to the letter, you cannot say or do something which may affect another’s words/actions etc, however insignificant. That would still be considered godmoding.
