Sheridanne Kelley on Role Play

Dear Elder Valla and Elder Rumil,  Following on from the previous letter, one reason we set the parameters on the creativity of our role play was based on what Mara experienced every day as an admin/ leader in Aglarond.

There despite having pages and pages of rules and guidelines, anything could change and the rules proved to be unenforceable and frustrating because frequent exceptions for primarily political reasons were made.

Therefore, our land’s role play has a tiebreaker:  “If it is not in the first seven chapters, and within our timeline (based on the birth of Feanor’s sons), or one of the specific allowances (wings on Valar, clan hair colour, etc.) then it is not within our role play”.  This is intended to prevent/ minimise chaos and discontent so prevalent in other virtual lands.

It is more to be:  ‘I have an opinion about what The Silmarillion says’ and ‘you have an opinion about what The Silmarillion says’ and then The Silmarillion says!  In an argument or discussion, our reference for truth is always Tolkien’s book, The Silmarillion.

We hold The Silmarillion the authority and a set reference point that should help minimise/ eliminate political actions and/ or “making an exception this one time”…which breaks hearts, slows participation and creates friction and resistance to involvement and confusion to those newly arrived.  This worked for about six of our years without a glitch.

We must return to basics.  Nevertheless, your combined learned thoughts will help me and are invaluable because people no longer seem as willing to listen to me.  They will to you Rumil and Valla and also to Elea, Torgo and Anaire.

Then there are a few who are simply increasingly discontent, like white ants, who would rather force a change to the goal posts just to see if they can or they threaten to take their ball and go to another field where there are no goal posts.

Because I no longer have the luxury of being in as much we need more individuals sold out to the original ideas, who are strong enough to hold the goals posts in line!

For now, we need to re-establish the goal posts!