What is Civitas Roleplay?

Civitas is the name of the world setting of our roleplay in Community. As a nation in Civitas, you can roleplay with other nations through diplomacy, trade, and even warfare! It allows you to take more control of your nation and get more in-depth with the details of your nation. We strive for a realistic roleplay experience that is available for all levels of roleplayers to participate.

How does it work?

Once you become a Party member, you are able to request an initial land claim on the Civitas map. After your claim is approved, you can start roleplaying with other nations. We recommend opening an embassy or starting to write your nation’s factbook to flesh out the details of your nation. The roleplay exists between the game and our Discord server. You can create dispatches, factbooks, and lodge messages on the RMB on our region page in NationStates. To get more in-depth, you should open things like embassies and longer, more detailed roleplay scenarios in topics on our Discord server in the roleplay channels. You can join the Discord here if you haven’t yet: https://discord.gg/7gAr5RWRgB

I am on the map, but how should I start roleplaying?

The first thing you should do is start figuring out how your nation works. For example: What is the political system? Who leads the country? What is your nation’s population? What are the historical events in your nation? How was it founded originally? For some good tips on how to approach this, read this guide: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=533982

You don’t need to figure everything out before you make your first post in roleplay, but you must have a good idea of some major details of your nation so you know how you want to interact with other nations in Civitas. Create a factbook for your nation. If you want, there are nice wiki-style templates that people have made to help you organize the information: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=419360

While you can base these details off of your stats in NationStates, you should not mimic everything since your NationStates stats will not be realistic. Eventually you will have several billion population and unrealistic economic numbers on your nation. It’s usually better to not base these things off of your NationStates stats, instead research real-world countries that are a similar size to your roleplay nation.

Once you’ve thought of some details for your nation, you can start by posting about news and recent happenings in your nation. Some people like starting by opening an embassy post on Discord where other nations can request formal relations. If you are having trouble starting, reach out to the Roleplay Council and we’ll help you!

What is OOC and IC?

OOC stands for Out of Character and IC stands for In Character. All roleplay posts made about your nation in Civitas should be In Character. Out of Character topics such as Community related topics (our regional government, events, etc.), real-world events, or casual chatting should never be alongside In Character posts and topics. Additionally, you should never use information you learned Out of Character in your roleplay. You must think about what your nation knows about in the scenario, not what you personally are aware of and roleplay it that way. There will be OOC areas on the Discord where you can chat and discuss the roleplay.

The following rules should be observed when you intend to make a roleplay post, whether it is on Discord or on the region's RMB. These exist to maintain a good level of realism and quality roleplay in the region. The rules are subject to be changed as needed by the Roleplay Council.

1. Keep it PG-13. Avoid explicit sexual content or excessive violence. References to these are acceptable.

2. No godmodding/RPing on behalf of other nations. You may have encountered this before - you're RPing on the NS forums or elsewhere, and your opponent says something like “my missile killed 2,500 of your soldiers”, or “your missile missed and none of my soldiers were affected”. This is to be avoided. RP should be a collective storytelling method, not a win/lose game.

3. Be respectful of others.

4. Keep “in-character” and “out-of-character” separate. Prioritize posting in an OOC thread rather than making OOC comments in the middle of an IC thread

5. Do not glorify bigoted extremist ideologies such as fascism, racism, homophobia, etc. These can and often are present in a nation, but your RP shouldn't give people the impression racism or bigotry is justified.

6. Do not gatekeep technology from others beyond normal differences between highly developed and less developed nations. Remember that in the modern world, developing countries have bigger problems with infrastructure/supply problems than missing technology per se.

7. Do not RP world altering events such as nuclear war, pandemic, international economic crashes, etc. without buy-in and discussion with other nations

Follow these guidelines about the world of Civitas to have success and avoid running into trouble when roleplaying:

• The tech level in Civitas is modern-era. Your nation should not have extremely advanced technology that nations of similar status do not have in real life. Conversely, your nation shouldn't be languishing in the Middle Ages. Though there are more and less developed nations in real life, this is often as a result of poor infrastructure rather than an entire country not having a certain technology. For instance, a developing nation may have trouble administering vaccines to its children due to poor roads or low medical staffing, but its professional class understands the importance of vaccines conceptually. When determining technology level, take this globalized technological society into account

• Discord, by its nature, encourages rapid fire RP between players that are available to quickly post for an hour or so. This can exclude anyone else not looking at Discord or not able to post at that moment, and at times entire conferences can happen over the course of a couple hours. When participating in Discord RP, give everyone participating a chance to respond and focus on quality, not quantity. Describe your characters thoughts, actions, and appearance as if you were writing a story.

• Avoid the use of real world names for languages, religion, etc. Your nation “Testlandia” shouldn't speak “German”, it should speak “Testlandian”, even if OOC Testlandian appears identical to German. The lingua franca/common language in Civitas, our “English”, is known as Sabir. Sabir is a language developed by traders from various nations to facilitate communication, and was adopted as the general language of diplomacy.

• For religion names and details, and other needs that may arise to determine international ideologies and facts, we will have a later OOC conference to nail this down.