[Xanth]

I'll try to keep this short.

I hold myself to the same, if not stricter, standards that I hold all of EF to, so I had to retire Dazadi because I couldn't sustain her activity levels in the long-term. She's just reached a point in her life where she's essentially doing the exact same things over and over, so it's become difficult to RP her as often as I'd need to in order to keep her off the missing list.

However, she's also a key figure in the IC world as the last and only Aide still working, so I'd like to take her out of the activity equation altogether by making her a PC-NPC.

"PC-NPC" is basically a full character held to the same standards as PCs (has its own account, requires a full profile, any skills/powers/items/etc need to be purchased, that sort of thing), but it can be shelved until it's needed (as opposed to a plain old NPC which has a communcal account, a much shorter profile, isn't held to any activity rules so they can come and go as they please, and so on).

I operate Xanth on a PC-NPC basis so she's always considered active and available even if she hasn't made an IC post for months, whereas if I retired her I'd need to reactivate her every time someone wanted to RP with her which would limit her availability.

So much for keeping things short. But the bottom line is that I don't want to do this with Dazadi unless you guys say it's okay. Where Xanth has always been managed in this PC-NPC way and was never intended to be a full-on PC, Daz was so changing the rules for her now without consulting you would be unfair.

For the record, I'm only considering this because she does have such an important role, but I want it to be okay with you.

Thank you for voting.

[Zephyr]

I think that making a character a PC-NPC should be an option available to all members. Like, if a character exists for a long time (say a year or two) of reasonably consistent activity then they become part of EF's world to a massive degree. But, as a writer i know it's extremely difficult to RP the same character forever, but you don't want to get rid of them either.

Maybe make it an option of retirement, like, after RPing the character for X years (or X posts)you retire the character and pay X amount of money and POOF your character becomes a PC-NPC so long as you have at least one active regular PC

[Euphenia]

I know I'm one of the newbies around here, but I wanted to say that I think Russ's suggestion makes a lot of sense.

This is one of the wonderful things about a living role-play world, such as EF. People who have characters who stick around for months to years have the opportunity to affect the RP world to such a degree that the disappearance of those characters could have a detrimental effect to that RP world. Why would they just "poof", anyway? Sure, that person OOCly may not feel inspired about the character for a long while, but that doesn't mean that the character wouldn't continue to exist. This way the character's influence in the world is maintained, and what they've added to EF's story can be preserved and even put to use towards future plot lines.

[Xanth]

Ooh, I like this idea a lot.

Hmm. I'm not sure if charging people for the privilege would be a good idea. I don't want too many PC-NPCs (I'd much prefer to have fully active characters), but I'd rather have semi-active than fully retired, if you see what I mean. I don't want to discourage people from keeping their characters going by charging too much and making retirement easier. At the same time, though, this is basically about PC-NPCs not needing to adhere to the activity rules, which is a pretty big free pass, so I think there does need to be some kind of charge for it.

I definitely think a minimum requirement is needed, either way, but a person can have been a member for three years and still have only made 15 posts on one character, so post count is probably the best measuring stick to use. There again, though, I'm torn between wanting to make this a privilege for long-term members, and also keeping as many characters active as possible.

So how does 250 posts sound? It can take a while for a character to get that far, but it isn't an unreachable or even distant goal, and I wouldn't think most characters could have made too much of an impact to the world (as opposed to individual characters) by then.

And perhaps ζ500 wouldn't be too much to ask for the right to circumvent the activity rules?

Thanks for your feedback and votes, guys.

P.S. While I'm here, can anyone think of a friendlier name than "PC-NPC"? It sounds a bit technical, really, so I'd rather have something a bit more accessible to stick in our sidebars. How about "Semi-Retired" or perhaps "Sequestered"?