Managing community characters

/communitychars builds and maintains the shared pool that players draw from.

You need community admin. Listing and creating need bit 3, editing needs bit 4 and deleting needs bit 5. See permission bits.

What it does

The pool is a set of characters the server owns rather than a player. Anybody who qualifies can select one, play it, and hand it back. Nothing a player does to one is saved, so the pool only ever changes when you change it.

Players see the pool through community characters. This page is the other side of that.

Creating one in the wizard

1. Press ESC to open the menu bar.
2. Select Character, then Manage.
3. Select COMMUNITY.
4. Select CREATE COMMUNITY CHARACTER.
5. Fill in the form, then select CREATE.

The wizard takes 8 fields: ID, Name, a model through SELECT MODEL, an Aquatic checkbox, Scale, Second language, Surface offset and XP. Only ID and Name are required. Hearing is set to normal and cannot be changed here, and the model falls back to gran/default.

XP is the pool of points that character has to spend on Force powers and skills, and it defaults to 50. Everybody who plays the character shares it, which is why /givexp refuses community characters.

Pronouns, species and homeworld are not on the wizard. Set them afterwards with /communitychars set.

Creating one from the console

Leave the name off and the id is used as the name. The id follows the same rules as a player character id: 1 to 20 characters, letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, unique across the whole server.

A character made this way gets defaults for everything the wizard would have asked.

Listing the pool

Add lastused and the listing sorts by when each character was last played, with never-played ones first. It swaps the saber columns for a single date column:

This is the listing to use when pruning. A character that has never been played, or was last played a year ago, is the safe one to delete.

Editing one

11 fields are settable, and a wrong name prints the list back at you:

languagesknown is an accepted alias for languages.

model, name, scale, hearing, surfaceoffset and xp reach a player who is using the character at that moment, without them reselecting. The identity fields do not, so pronouns, species, homeworld, languages and aquatic take effect on the next /character select.

Deleting one

Deletion is permanent, so it takes 2 commands. The first arms it and starts a 60-second window:

The second finishes the job:

Let the window lapse and the arming is thrown away:

Things to note

• The pool holds 150 characters. Creating the 151st answers "Community pool is full (150/150)."
• The pool has to be initialised first. Without it every subcommand answers "Community character pool not initialised."
• Community character ids share the namespace with player characters. An id somebody has already taken for their own character is refused, and the other way round.
• The 3 permission bits are separate. An admin can be able to create a character and still be refused when deleting one, so grant bit 5 deliberately.
• The confirmation is per admin, per character. Confirming with a different id answers "No pending delete for ''."
• Editing somebody mid-scene is allowed. Changing model or scale on a character in play changes it under the player at once, so do it between takes.
• A community character cannot be given XP with /givexp, so set the pool through /communitychars set <id> xp.
• Run /communitychars on its own for the built-in help. It lists list, create, set and delete, but not the internal createx verb the wizard uses.

Next

• Community characters: what a player can and cannot do with one
• Permission bits: granting bits 3, 4 and 5 to the right rank