Some rules on Champions MUSH

1. This MUSH is rated PG-13 as defined by the MPAA.

2. Sexually explicit/adult-only material is forbidden in public areas.

3. All OOC dealings between players MUST be as courteous and polite as possible. This includes channels, by page, OOC talk, etc.

4. Spoofing of other PCs, NPCs, or NPC-organizations (such as the police) is not allowed. You may only play your own character and puppets or emitted NPCs that YOU have created.

5. Players may not engage in any activity which is designed to break/damage or otherwise impair the code, server or the host machine.

6. You are responsible for all actions taken by your login character. Keep your password secure. Do not let others use your character to log in.

1. OOC and IC information MUST be kept separate. See NEWS IC RULES for more info.

2. @created objects are the property of their owners. You should not pick up objects left lying around by other players.

3. All PURCHASED objects (using Points) are the property of the Game, and therefore may be stolen. Don't leave your OAF lying around, it is ripe for the taking!

4. Characters are the property of their players. No player character may ever be killed without the consent of his player, no matter what the BODY score is (the exception to this is @nuke as a punishment for breaking the rules).

5. If a character does die, all deaths are PERMANENT. No resurrections, re-writing of continuity, etc. If you want the chance to come back, then have the "death" of the character be indeterminate (disappear in a shipwreck or something, so you're presumed dead, but can come back at a later time). If you are killed in combat and accept that when it happens, the character is gone forever.

6. You may NOT emit poses of other player-characters or their puppets. In addition, making up a puppet that is the spitting image of another player's character or puppets is forbidden.

7. You may not arbitrarily conduct Roleplay that will affect other characters in a substantial way without their players' consent.

8. If things don't go your way, or if you are tired of playing a particular character and want to start over, SUICIDE IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE WAY OF ACCOMPLISHING IT. There is practically no circumstance under which it is IC to commit suicide. In almost every case, the CHARACTER wouldn't do it; rather the PLAYER is taking a cheap, easy way out. If you kill yourself, that's going to be the end of the CM for you.

9. The CM Staff, and ONLY the CM staff, may emit, pose, or otherwise control the actions of law-enforcement officers, unless such officers are actual PCs themselves. In other words, you cannot emit policemen, firemen, UNTIL agents, etc. However, if your PC is, for example, a police officer in his secret identity, then of course, playing him AS a police officer and attempting to arrest villains, etc, is perfectly acceptable. It is only NPC officers which may not be emitted.

10. In all matters partaining to Teams, that team's Game Master has the final word. For any team (unless the GM is somehow in violation of the House Rules himself), the GM's word is Law. Period. (The only exception to this is Character Death, see NEWS CHAR RULES 2.)

We here at Champions MUSH have decided that we do not want individual adventures to wreak havoc with the world's continuity. Therefore, we have a very specific time travel policy. Please understand that this policy extends to every single person on the MUSH, and is NON-NEGOTIABLE. The following files will explain this policy.

The time travel rules we have adopted are based on what I call the Hogan Hypothesis. This was put forth as a reasonable time travel system by James P. Hogan (a nuclear physicist) in his book _The_Proteus_Operation_. You'll have to bear with me for a few files... this is a difficult concept to explain, and at first it will seem like I am not discussing time travel at all, but we will get to it eventually. Just hang in there.

According to the Hogan Hypothesis, the fact that the quantum mechanical wave-function does not collapse to a single solution, but rather results in a probability estimation, can have two different interpretations. In one (the one we currently use in the real world), this means that the most probable solution to the wave-function is the one that actually occurs in the real world, and the rest of them just... don't. The other interpretation, which we use here on CM, is that ALL of the possibilities occur -- each in its own separate universe.

Each time something happens which can have more than one possible outcome (we'll call it an "event"), each and every outcome will actually happen, but it will happen in a different universe. Let's take a simple example: It's Super Bowl Sunday. The Broncos are playing the Packers. The captains are on the field, and the referee says, "Call it while its in the air." Then he prepares to flip the coin. Now, at the instant he is about to flip it, there are two possible outcomes: the coin could come out Heads, or it could come out Tails. The referee tosses the coin, and the Broncos team captain calls out "Heads!" The coin lands. Now... to us, we can only see ONE solution: either the coin ended up landing with Heads facing up, or Tails facing up. The Hogan Hypothesis says, BOTH happen. At the instant the coin is tossed, two SEPARATE and COMPLETE universes are created, one in which the coin lands Heads up, the other in which the coin lands Tails up -- this is known as a Bifurcation (the timeline "splits" into two branches). The two universes that spring from this Event have identical histories up to the instant of the coin toss, but are completely divergent after that. In one, the Broncos will kick off. In the other, the Packers will. Perhaps this will affect the outcome of the game. In the universe in which the Packers won the toss, maybe the won by a landslide. This means that people who bet on the Broncos will lose money, which will cause all sorts of differences from the universe in which the Broncos won the toss, and won the game in a squeaker.

The Hogan Hypothesis means that there is an INFINITE number of alternative universes out there, each with Earths similar in some ways to ours, and different in other ways. Every time any Event occurs, all possible outcomes are generated, each in its own separate and distinct universe.

It is important to remember that each universe has an identical history to the others that separate from it at the occurrence of an Event, up until the instant of that event, at which point the universes diverge.

What does this mean for Time Travel? Well, imagine you do indeed try to go back to 1940 and meet your grandfather. You enter a time machine and travel back to 1940. However, the instant you arrive in 1940 is an Event. The very act of you going back in time essentially generates a new alternative universe -- one in which you appeared in 1940. The history of that world up until the instant of your arrival is IDENTICAL to the history of your own world. But from the moment you step out of the time machine, from that instant in 1940, onward, it is a separate universe, and its timeline will diverge from that of your own. Therefore, if you go back and meet your grandfather in 1940 and kill him, he will be dead in an ALTERNATE unvierse, NOT in YOUR OWN past.

This means that it is IMPOSSIBLE to change your own history. Say you go back in time and assassinate Hitler in 1933, making it so that the 3rd Reich never rises. What this means is that you have gone back in time, and generated an entire alternative reality (by the very act of going back in time) in which there is no 3rd Reich, maybe even no World War II. But when you return to your own present, history will remain UNCHANGED. Similarly, while it is possible to travel into the future, you can only ensure that you have moved forward along the general timeline of the multi-verse... you CANNOT ever be sure that the universe you've landed in is your own (in fact, because there are an infinite number of alternative universes, and the probablility of entering any of them is about even, the chance you can ever reach your own timeline's future is vanishingly small).

These rules for time travel mean that you can travel to any time, past or future, that you want, but never into YOUR OWN past or future. We have decided on these time travel rules because they are the best we've seen in maintaining universe continuity, while they still allow you to travel into other, fun times and have enjoyable adventures.

The Hogan Hypothesis has implications for Extra-Dimensional Movement, of course. It is NOT POSSIBLE for you to use Extra-Dimensional Movement to enter your own past or future. Extra-Dimensional Movement is just that... it allows you to move into the past of another universe (i.e. another dimension). It can NEVER allow you to move into your own past or future.

In terms of Clairsentience, it is possible to VIEW your own past or future as long as the special effect includes only looking and does not include anything moving backward or forward in time physically (that is, if your Special Effect is sending a probe droid through time, then it follows the same rules as any other object traveling through time would -- namely, it ends up in the desired time, in another universe). HOWEVER, because there are so many alternative universes out there, Clairsentience will allow you to view forward to a possible future, but you cannot guarantee it will be your own. There's no way to know where your Timeline will end up ahead of time -- that is, you can't ever know ahead of time which of the various alternative possiblities will be the one that exists in your universe, and which ones will exist in others. For example, if you try to look forward just before the Refere e tosses the coin at the Super Bowl, you might end up looking at the universe where the coin lands heads-up, and you might end up looking at the universe where the coin lands tails-up, but until the coin has LANDED, there's no way to know which of those possible universes is the one that yours will end up.

Looking into the past is much more precise. This is because, by the nature of the Hogan Hypothesis, each universe has its own separate, distinct, completely linear and continuous time line. If you look back to 1940, you will see what happened during 1940 in your own universe... and nothing else. If you are trying to watch to see if some enemy of yours has gone back in time, you won't see him if you look into your own past -- because he'll have ended up in another universe somewhere.

Treating time travel in this way gives us lots of wonderful adventure opportunities. Since the Hogan Hypothesis basically states that anything that COULD have happened, DID happen, in one universe or another, GMs can take their teams on adventures in alternate universes where the Nazis won World War II, or the Cold War never ended, or the world is in Nuclear Winter, or the sun went SuperNova in 1863... The possibilities, like the number of unvierses out there, are endless.

So remember... traveling through time is completely acceptable, but you MAY NEVER travel into your OWN past, and you can never be sure you've traveled into your own future (in fact, it's almost certain you won't, just based on the odds).

There are several reasons for this. First of all, if the entire world setting is like this, then this forces everyone who makes up a super-character to basically take the 'reputation' disadvantage -- while again this is a perfectly valid world/theme choice, we feel this is too restrictive on the creative process for our players.

Secondly, while some people certainly enjoy stories about the misunderstood and hunted hero, others perfer their heroes to be nice and shiny, loved by the masses, awarded keys to the city, etc... something not likely to happen very easily in a Marvel-esque universe. We don't think it's fair to encumber these people with the superhuman hatred/mutant bigotry that is part of the foundation of such a theme, and therefore, we have opted not to use this as part of our world setting.

In the world of Champions MUSH, people are judged by their ACTIONS, not by whether they have super powers or not. Yes, we realize that this is idealized and not entirely realistic -- in the real world, lots of folks are victims of bigotry for being a lot less different from the rest of us than having super powers. However, our goal here is to create a world in which every stripe of character can be played -- both the glowing golden super hero, and the angst-ridden, hunted mutant. Our goal is NOT to replicate reality (indeed, most of us get more than enough of reality every day; no need to reproduce the most unpleasant parts of it here, right?).

Therefore, if your character is a good samaritan and saves lives, and people witness this, the character is considered a hero. The general public will like him, people will applaud when he appears to save the day, kids will want his autograph, and the authorities will probably (after they get to know him a little) give him a fair bit of lee-way in collaring criminals. There are lots of villains out there that even UNTIL can't bring down without help from a private citizen superhero, so if the hero helps them without violating the law (and without trying to kill the villain), then UNTIL isn't going to come after the hero for "reckless endangerment" or "property damage," etc.

Keep in mind that this is dependent on the hero doing his absolute best to keep "collateral damage" (property damage, innocents hurt, etc) down to a minimum, and to bring in villains who might be unconscious but are more or less unharmed. A "hero" who ignores innocents in danger to collar the perp, picks up trucks and smashes them over the head of a villain, or shows up at UNTIL HQ with a captured villain whose ribs have been shattered and whose head is cracked open, will NOT be viewed with kindness by the authorities. But, if your character ACTS like a hero, he will be treated as such.

Similarly, if your character is a nasty guy, who steals from banks, breaks into cars, and kills an innocent bystander or two, then he will be considered a villain. The general public will hate and fear him; people will throw rocks at him (unless he's so powerful they're afraid to); the police and UNTIL will hunt him down and try to throw him in Stronghold. This type of character is clearly a bad guy and the general public will view him as such.

Finally, if the character is in-between, then the reaction of people would be in-between. Batman is a good example. Most crooks fear him, but a lot of general folks are a little fearful of him too, and while some police are willing to work with him (Comissioner Gordon), other police think of him as a "vigilante" and think he's taking the law too much into his own hands.

Therefore, the characters will generally be judged by their actions. Now, this is not to say that no one at all hates superhumans just because they are super human -- surely, there are some bigots in the world. But the GENERAL PUBLIC, over all, will judge each character by his actions.

Some might fear that this means it is impossible to set up, say, an X-men team, and have them be misunderstood, hunted, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. Individual teams are more than welcome to be misunderstood by the general populace -- a GM might indeed set up an X-men team and have people misunderstand them. What he is NOT allowed to do is have the X-men be misunderstood because they have super powers, or just because they were born with their powers. In the first place, there's no realistic way for the general public to know if you're born with your powers or not. And in the second place, characters are NOT hated in the CM world just because they HAVE powers. So the GM would have to find some other reason for the X-men to be hated.

Please try to keep the world outlook in mind while you role-play. Do NOT try to role-play that everyone hates you just because you have superpowers. If you want to be hated, find another reason why you are hated or misunderstood. There are tons of others out there.

Finally, a word on "mutant" vs. "gen active" vs. "meta human" vs. "non-mutant" vs "whatever other term you care to use." By tradition, in Champions, anyone who has something defined as a Power that has a Special Effect that puts it outside the realm of the real (or "normal") world, is considered "superhuman." Period. There are no other terms for it. Superman and Magneto therefore have identical superhuman status in this world. One got his powers by being an alien, one by being born with them. Both are considered "superhuman." While individual characters can refer to/think of themselves any way they want, in the media, in official government documents, etc, they are referred to only as superhumans. There are several logical reasons for this, but the biggest is that there is NO WAY for someone to tell if you are born with your powers, got them from being bitten by a radioactive cockroach, or are from another planet, unless you tell them. Therefore, all super-powered individuals in Champions MUSH will be referred to as "superhumans."

Characters

Names

1. Any name that would violate the Ground Rules (i.e. naming yourself a four-letter word or a pornographic name, etc).

2. Any name that would reasonably be considered offensive to a reasonable person (calling yourself "Hitler" might be offensive to Jewish people, for instance; calling yourself "Christ" might be offensive to Christians -- you get the idea).

3. Any name that is a slight variation on the name of a character who is already in play, or is an alias for a character already in play (for instance, calling yourself "The Dark Knight" when Batman is being played by someone else is unacceptable). Please be careful with this one. We suggest you use +FINGER to check all possible aliases if you choose to play an established comic book character.

4. You MAY NOT take the name of an NPC character. Make sure you +list/villains, +list/heroes, and +list/npcs to check the names of all established characters.

Backgrounds

1. Your BG cannot mention any other approved character, NPC, or organization without the approval of the owner of the character (in the case of organizations and NPCs, this is equal to the approval of the Theme staff or the GM who owns/created the character). There are several exceptions: Any PC may choose a large (> 40 person) organization as a Hunted and may include a reason for that Hunted in his BG. Acceptable organizations include: Viper, Demon, UNTIL, OSI, or any other listed in EVENTS AGENCIES.

Please note: It is NOT acceptable to use the Overlords without express permission from Steven. It is also NOT acceptable to use any villain group without prior permission from the Themestaff.

2. Your BG may not include any information which conflicts with the history of Colonial Bay specifically, or the history of the MUSH in general. For example, you can't say in your BG that World War III occurred in 1959 of this world -- since there has been no World War III in our world (yet). If you need to have an alternative history or timeline, we suggest you use another UNIVERSE for your history, and have some mechanism for your character to be transported to the world of the MUSH.

3. Your BG may not include any form of time travel that conflicts with the rules listed in EVENTS TIME TRAVEL. That is, you may not have anything in your BG that requires you to have moved forward or backward in time along your own universe's timeline. Moving backward and forward in time is acceptable otherwise -- as long as your character has moved into different universes along with traveling through time.

4. Your BG may not include information which conflicts with rules listed in EVENTS OUTLOOK. In other words, you cannot say that your character is a mutant who is hated and hunted down just because he is a mutant. Things do not work that way in our world, and your character would NOT be hunted down for such a reason. You may, of course, be hated by the general public for any other reason (being framed for murder, for example), and you may also state in your BG that your character comes from an alternate universe in which mutants are hated and hunted. You just can't say they are hated and hunted here. This is true for all aspects of EVENTS OUTLOOK -- mutants are just an example.

5. Your BG may not include anything that requires the creation of multiple entities (such as a completely novel villain group) without the consent of your GameMaster (who will then be forced to make up such villains, so he has to have time and agree to do it). Unless a GM has agreed to make up extra NPCs for your character, you may only include KNOWN PCs or NPCs (with the permission of the owner). The only NPC a player may invent for his own personal background is one associated with the Dependent NPC (DNPC) disadvantage. All others MUST be approved by the GM or by Themestaff.

6. Your BG MUST include the following:
a. An explanation of why you have every disadvantage that is not inherently obvious. Inherently obvious includes such things as a metalic person taking 2x STUN from Magnetics, and always includes the Secret Identity Disadvantage. Anything else MUST be explained in your BG.
b. How and why your character has ended up living in Colonial Bay. He might have been born there, or perhaps moved there for some reason. One way or another you need a reason to be in the city.
c. Any Power or Characteristic that is superhuman (i.e. could not be possessed by a normal human being in the real world) MUST be explained in your BG. This includes super-normal tech, powers, etc.
d. All Skills and Talents must be accounted for in your BG.

Basically, before you submit your character for approval, make sure anything that puts you outside the realm of a normal human being is accounted for in your Background.

Continuity

First, we will deal with the comic-book aspects of continuity.

1. Events that ICly happen on Champions MUSH will not be "revised" or "edited" retroactively. Because of our timeline rules (see EVENTS TIME TRAVEL), when something happens, that's it. It's happened. It cannot be un-done. If your character's Secret Identity is plastered all over the evening news, then that's it. His Secret ID is gone. Period. You can't get on the public channel the next day and ask people to pretend they never saw it. It's too late.

2. Character death is never required of any player -- you own the character. You decide if he lives or dies. However, if your character dies due to loss of BODY and you consent to it -- that is, if his BODY score reaches the game definition of character death (see NEWS DYING), the character is DEAD, permanently, and may not EVER return to game play. We aren't talking about plot devices or BG's that say you're an undead vampire here -- those are of course always acceptable. But once your character is dead in game terms, it is gone. It will be @decompiled and then @nuked after a reasonable period of time. You will have to make up a new character if you want to keep playing here.

3. There can be only one version of any event or character in Champions MUSH's history/continuity. For example, there can be only ONE Batman character on the MUSH. It is possible for characters from similar events in similar universes to meet in our universe (e.g Batman from several different earths). However, this may only occur with direct supervision of a GameMaster, and in almost all cases only ONE such character will be a player (the rest will be NPCs). Such situations may only occur for the duration of an adventure (i.e. temporarily) and may never be permanent.

Now, we will look at the rules concerning continuity for specific characters (that is, what happens to characters when their owner stops logging in).

4. Players always own their own characters. Any player who wishes to have the creation that he owns destroyed upon his departure from the MUSH (or at any other time) may do so at his own discretion. However, be warned -- if your character is @nuked (i.e. deleted from the database at your request), this is equivalent to GAME DEATH (see the EVENTS files before this one under CONTINUITY). That is, @nuked characters are considered dead, and will be gone forever. If you wish this, you must specifically request it of your GameMaster. IF YOU STOP LOGGING INTO THE CHARACTER IT WILL NOT BE @NUKED BY DEFAULT. Any character whose player stops logging in will be @nuked ONLY if the player had previously requested it of his GM. However, such requests will always be honored.

5. Any character whose player has not specifically requested to have it destroyed upon his departure, and whose player stops logging in regularly for any reason, becomes the property of the staff of Champions MUSH. This means that, if you stop playing the character, it becomes an NPC under the control of the GameMasters. It is then treated as any other NPC in the game. The character will be copied onto an NPC object owned by Hero Maker or Villain Master, and will then be @destroyed. Once it becomes an NPC, you are no longer the owner of the character and any rights you had with regard to the character's use are gone. If you do not want the GMs to take control of your character, then you should request that we @nuke the character BEFORE you stop logging into it. Once the character becomes an NPC, it is a normal NPC in every way, and acts like every other NPC in every way. This means that other players may apply to play the character, just as they may apply to play any NPC -- provided the character fits in with their own GM's requirements for points, etc.

The point of the last two rules is this: you own your character, but you may not use your ownership of a character to damage the continuity of the MUSH in any way. Continuity is damaged when characters are active for a while and then vanish, and no one knows what happened to them. Their boyfriends or girlfriends suddenly don't have a date anymore; their team mates don't have someone to practice with in the Danger Room, and so on. If your ownership of a character matters enough to you that you don't want a GM to play it as an NPC to maintain continuity, then your only out is to remove the character from game play in a final, permanent fashion . This is called "retiring" a character -- making it so that the character can't be played ever again by anyone (including you), and also making it so that all of the loose ends are tied up (this happens by definition when the character dies. We don't want this to make the MUSH a bloody death-trap where characters die constantly. However, we do want to make sure there are no characters left "hangning out in the breeze," as it were. Therefore, characters must either be formally retired, or they become NPCs. It is acceptable to retire characters in a way other than killing them. Any other form of retirement must be worked out between the player and his GameMaster (for example, a superhero might lose all of his powers).

How do I get an Alt?
Anyone can have two characters. The only criterion for awarding an Alt is that it MUST be of a completely different character type than your first character. Thus, if you play a super-strong "brick", you cannot have another character whose main power is also STR. The point of an alt is to give you a different experience from your main character. Indeed, many people like playing one hero and one villain. This is allowed but not required. You can also play 2 villains or 2 heroes. Note that while you do not have to tell the other PLAYERS on the MUSH who your alt is, you MUST tell the admins. All alternate characters must be registered with the admins.