If everyone is starting out at the same general level of experience does this include anyone who plays as an original teacher? Or are they an exception?

Heya Mirai!

Teachers and how to handle them is something I have not completely decided on. The initial plan is to run the Mistral Regional Tournament for a site-opening short event so lots of people have the opportunity to jump in on Haven/City of Mistral at once I unintentionally bought myself some time.

This is one of those things where I will probably honestly just kick to a public discussion board with how people wanted to do it with my suggestions because this is not one of the 'MUST HAVE' things for me personally. My concerns are thus:

1) Event finales. Students will not be able to realistically reach Huntsman-tier abilities for over a year. The power gap would be so wide that if they participated, it would ruin the fun of everyone who wasn't at that level of power IE everyone else because the enemies would either be steamrolled or strong enough to compete with them so instant murder for everyone else.

2) In regards to 1, taking all the spotlight. A separate thread could be made for teachers, sure, but I also don't want the site to turn into 'Rank claim PCs do all the cool stuff with handouts' if that makes sense. That's completely antithetical to what I want to do and the site dynamic I want to create.

3) On every site with teachers being stronger than students, people will always sign up for a teacher slot just to be more powerful than students. Very few of these people will ever run regular classes, and it was a huge recurring problem on my last site.

So, what is the initial plan?

My old site just turned the teachers into NPCs except those grandfathered in. NPCs did not gain any experience and could never progress, and whoever controlled those NPCs got experience credited to their OOC account and could distribute it to their PCs as they wished.

This isn't an idea that I'm really opposed to, and I'm doing that with my own teacher. They act as facilitators to the students and create an environment, but aren't the main stars if that makes sense. To avoid people making teachers just for the 'I wanna be strong' bit, I'm also initially in favor or not even statting out the teachers until it becomes relevant. The gap between a starter student and a Huntsman Tier character is so large that it's effectively impossible for the student to win because Huntsman Tier is supposed to be the level where people start hitting over a year into the roleplay even for the fastest and most active posters. I do not want PCs running around solving massive site-wide problems by virtue of being effective 12-15 months ahead of everyone else in terms of progression. I am hugely and completely opposed to rank claims for this reason.

We could also just make them as PCs, but give them the same starter abilities that students do. I've had this also tried, and honestly all it seemed to do was make people complain about teachers being weak even though nobody in over a year of roleplay ever fought with a teacher aside from predetermined threads where stats didn't matter at all because the student wanted to lose. It was a point of pointless friction and complaining from people who signed up to be stronger than everyone else and found that the mechanics meant that a 300 post student could smash a 15 post teacher. While it isn't ideal and I'd like to avoid repeating the system, that's what most of the complaining came down to because in real terms it's very very rare for a student to ever fight a teacher so the stats were pointless. It introduced a point of pain that made some people very angry that served no purpose.

My initial thought was to just leave slots for types of classes open, or even just let people app their own teacher NPCs alongside what they actually intended to do with their character. I, for example, have base prewrites of six to eight different missions depending on what types of things I port over. I'm not going to ask for that much, that would be too much to ask for someone at the start. But I want to ask for enough to make sure that they have a plan of attack and plan to run classes every X weeks or whatever in Y subject covering ABC so they have enough material to last a bit.

What I want to avoid at all costs is the thing that has happened many times in the past on sites that I've been on where people sign up to be teachers with no lesson plan, no classes in mind, and just take up a slot while never interacting with students until the next activity check rolls around. It's not like my standards would be high for activity, either. One class thread a month is A-OK with me, because it's consistent and as long as students can actively sign up to be part of that class it provides depth to a setting. Five people running one class a month is 5 classes a month that people can sign up for, and that's fantastic!

Until we grow as a site enough to support other factions like criminals or civilians or what have you, the focus will be on building up Haven Academy and its student body. The focus of the site and the spotlight has to be on the students if they are the largest faction with all the core members, and I don't want any method of including faculty to infringe on that especially because the fact of the matter is I'm running the first month-long event largely or even maybe completely solo in terms of DMing. Logistically I can't support faculty events as well as student ones, which would be another way to go about it if there was a lot of interest in making PC faculty. If PC faculty was ever a thing, though, it wouldn't be with ranked claims.

This sounds absolutely AMAZING! I've been looking for a RWBY site that focuses on teamwork and this certainly takes the cake. I'll be stalking this thread for updates!

Thank you! (:

Currently on track for a mid/late February public open. Still actively working on this!

Update here, the site's now made and the ad is located here on Pixel Perfect. I guess that concludes this thread, thanks to everyone who showed interest. (: