Writing Responses

Overview

The New Player team are charged with going through the backgrounds of new characters to check for consistency and to tag them possible plot links.

Permissions

Anyone who is a member of the plot team, god team or ref team can read backgrounds - but only the New Player team can write a response or tag a background. If you want the ability to tag backgrounds or write responses, then please talk to Clare Evans.

Searching Backgrounds

You can search the character backgrounds after logging in to the PD website.

You can search for backgrounds that have been are Read, Response Sent or Confirmed using the drop down box on the character search page. If you select a specific status then it will only return characters with a background with that current status.

Submitted

You can select a status of Submitted in the search options. The system will return every character that has submitted a background, regardless of whether it is Read, Response Sent, or Confirmed. This is how you search for characters who have any background on the system.

No Response

You can select a status of No Response in the search options. The system will return every character that has submitted a background, but nobody from the New Player team has created a response yet. This is how you search for characters who have outstanding backgrounds that nobody has looked at yet.

Background Status

The background status is the status of any response set by a member of the New Player team. Since there is no default response - there is no default background status.

When you create a background response for the player, you must assign a status to their background - either Read, Response Sent or Confirmed. These should be used as follows.

• Read - you have read the background but taken no action. This is the status to use when there are problems with a background but you are not ready to send a response to the player - perhaps because it is still being discussed.

• Response sent - indicates that a response has been sent to the player. In theory there is nothing further to be done with this background until the player responds in turn.

• Confirmed - indicating that we have now confirmed the background is approved. Effectively the sign-off from us.

Background Responses

A background response is a special type of character note that is added to a character. Other types of character note will be added later. When you create a background response you must set the note and a background status. If you set Response Sent then the note will be visible to the player (not yet active). Otherwise the note is only visible to crew reading the background details.

There is no way to delete or edit background responses. This is by design to preserve a data trail. The system automatically reads all the background responses and assumes that the most recent response is the current valid one. In effect it assumes that each new background response replaces the one that went before it.

So when you create a new background response - if you set the status to Confirmed then the background becomes Confirmed. If someone later creates a new background response with a status of Read, then that background becomes Read.