Dusty Pages - How To Play

The Forum
Dusty Pages is, as of the moment, hosted at the official game forum.

Narrative game vs System game
There are two ways of playing Dusty Pages. You can either choose to use the game system, relying on stats and dice rolling to determine the outcome of events (recommended for large, homogeneous groups of players), or you can play via narrative/storytelling: relying on your ability to write and convince others of your ideas and actions by keeping them sound and logical, without worrying about stats and math to decide the outcome of events.

It's important that you decide how you want to play, specially if you will be interacting with other players. Don't change the game system for others: people who have an organized, system-based session going on might not appreciate you jumping in and deciding you don't want to play by their rules!

Sessions
A session is an ongoing game in the world of Dusty Pages. Every session starts from a base setting of the world and is changed by the characters playing in it. Quests or events within a session affect other players sharing it. For example, if you kill a dragon plaguing a city in a session, that dragon won't be there if others were to visit the city.

However, the dragon will still be available in any other session where nobody has cleared this event yet.

You can start a new session or join an existing one. Keep in mind that when you join a session with players you should ask them what kind of rules or system they're going for. You will also want to keep track of what events have been cleared, and how much the world has been changed by their actions.

If you don't like the state of the world in a session, simply start a new one: you will get the world as it is on the "base" conditions of Dusty Pages.

Keep in mind characters cannot cross over from between sessions.

Threading
A thread in the forum serves as an envelope or contained for an specific series of events connected by some manner of logical bond. For example, "An Adventure at the Alps!" will cover all the events relating to said adventure.

If you want to make a derailment to another quest, or decide you want to make space for some interaction between specific characters in a certain town, you will want to make a new thread for it.

Game Master
Each session has a game master, usually picked by the players beforehand. The Game Master is someone who will serve as arbiter, judge and manager for the session, serving to clear doubts on events and to lead the session in case the players are following some ongoing plot thread. They also control the session, having the capacity to ban participants who don't stick to the rules, for example.

Game Masters must apply to the administrator of the forum in order to be recognized and given the proper privileges.