"Appworthiness"

Hello Headrush! I'm unsure if another mod has seen this or answered these questions for you elsewhere, but allow me to answer these so they're here for all to see.

1) NPCs should be just that, non-player characters. They should really only be used in conjunction with the character they're designed for, and only as a means of branching out the main character's world or helping move the plot along. These aren't necessarily characters that will be moving around outside a story specifically catered to their base character. For example, my OC, Nevermore, has his mother, Serena, and his friend, Hayley, as characters that only appear in his threads to expand his life and world as a native New Earther. Sometimes they're used as excuses to enhance or even start a plot. Another example of this would be the gang I designed for Red Hood, primarily to showcase his influence in the city, but the real reason they came to be was because I had a player character that was injured and needed a hospital. BOOM, now we have a doctor for that thread that works for Red Hood.

NPCs should really be there to enhance your main characters and make the story process easier, pretty much salt and pepper to add to the meat of your apped character. Once you start playing them as more than that, and away from the main character they were designed for, they lose the title of "non-player" and just become a PC. We'd prefer players to play with each other and not just a bunch of solos among their own characters, so please try to avoid this where you can. An NPC is just an enhancement to a story, not the star.

As far as their powers are concerned, this is a little iffy. But if you're playing them as described above, it should be less of a problem. Having an unregistered character strike out on their own without an approved application to refer back to isn't fair to other players who come up against them. All powered NPCs must be looked at by a mod before including them, and again, they should only be used in conjunction with the character they were designed to be part of. Personally, I wouldn't go too crazy on NPC abilities, otherwise you might as well just app another character. We do NOT want the NPC template to be abused as a means of creating and playing more than your allotted amount of characters. Try to play fair - we're all here to write and enjoy new stories together, not game the system.

2) The way we have canon characters, or vagrants as we call them, work here, you can absolutely tweak them as needed to fit the vision of the character you want to play. They all come from varying and different version of the Detective and Marvel universes. However, they should still hold true to their foundation, the skeleton of the character needs to still BE that character. For example, I wanted to run Red Hood specifically from the Rocksteady Arkham games, but I still wanted him to be Red Hood, not the Arkham Knight. So like the game version, he was kidnapped and tortured by the Joker, and escaped Arkham with the assistance of Deathstroke. Instead of going down the game's route that he took over the Gotham underground and became the Arkham Knight, I instead had him working at the start of that plot with Deathstroke, which is how he received his iconic helmet.

I wanted to basically run my own version of "Under the Red Hood" with this site's Batman, and had him arrive in New Earth before he would have appeared in the Arkham Knight video game. But anyone would still tell you that despite starting at a different point of the timeline and tweaking around bits and pieces to better fit the version of the character I wanted to play, this is still unmistakably Jason Todd. If you're going to change things, be sure to make it work and still be in character for what we may be expecting from them. If the character is changed too much to the point of unrecognizable, don't bother with that canon and app an OC instead.

3) The general rule is that you can play any universe version of a character, so long as a version of that character is not already in use. And by version, I mean specifically the person underneath the mask. As of this writing, Peter Parker is already apped, so every version of Peter is now cut from the list, and only that player can run other iterations of him. However, Miguel O'Hara is still available, and he's also Spider-Man, just a different one from a different time. Same mantle, different character. You'd also be able to run Ben Reilly, to go with the clone example.

However, if you're considering fanon characters that are connected to your main vagrant that are relatives, absolutely not. New Earth works in such a way that canons are dropped from their world into this one and left to fend for themselves alone. Your OCs and NPCs cannot be from the canon DC and Marvel dimensions and must be native to New Earth.