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Guidelines

Code of Conduct

Our Code of Conduct and Social Contract of Roleplay: how we play together, and why.

Last updated 17 September 2026

Our goal is to create and provide a world where stories, grand and daily, can be fun, immersive, fair, and overall meaningful and memorable within the World of Darkness grit. We hope these stories bring people together, forge new friendships, and create a community and a home for the nights we share telling them.

By participating in this community, we expect each and every member of it to be a beacon of that hope, and as such have created the standards below. These standards are rules that we will be applying to all players, regardless of administrative rank, roles, factions, friend groups, whitelist status or time in the community. Our standard is one of fairness and consistency: any judgment or expectation applied to one community member should be reasonable, defensible, and equally applicable to any other member under comparable circumstances.

This list is not exhaustive. We know the creativity of many will spark new situations, and while this document will evolve in time, we will ensure all rules are visible, apparent, and changes evident. Administration will be able to take action when something violates the spirit of our rules, but know that Midnight Masquerade is run via a council of voices, allowing each major action to be overseen by a variety of eyes so that no one, single arbiter can influence a decision due to personal bias.

Below the glossary you will find a brief synopsis of both the Code of Conduct and the Social Contract of Roleplay, followed by each in detail. If you need help understanding any of these, the Midnight Masquerade Roleplay Primer covers every section in depth.

The Code at a Glance

Code of Conduct

  • CC.I · Respect the CommunityTreat every player with dignity and civility, and do not engage in discrimination, harassment, bullying, OOC threats, targeted hostility, consent violations, or IC/OOC retaliation.
  • CC.II · Roleplay to Tell Stories, Not to WinPlay collaboratively, accept legitimate failures and losses, and prioritize memorable shared stories over making your character unbeatable.
  • CC.III · Do Not MetagameNever use information your character could not reasonably know to influence their actions, decisions, or conversations.
  • CC.IV · Do Not PowergameDescribe what your character attempts rather than controlling another character’s reactions or outcomes unless mechanics, consent, or an authorized ruling permits it.
  • CC.V · Play Your Character and the Setting HonestlyRespect your character’s established abilities, knowledge, injuries, limitations, circumstances, and the credible reality of the World of Darkness.
  • CC.VI · Value Your Character’s LifeRespond credibly to threats against your character’s existence, freedom, identity, relationships, and ambitions instead of relying on OOC protections to behave recklessly. By the same token, avoid making reckless choices aggressively: let your character be afraid of consequences.
  • CC.VII · Let Escalation Fit the ConflictViolence and retaliation should arise from established circumstances, remain proportionate to what prompted them, and preserve meaningful opportunities for response and counterplay.
  • CC.VIII · Respect Emergency-Service RoleplayTreat police, medical, and rescue characters as fellow roleplayers rather than game mechanics to exploit, bypass, or rush through.
  • CC.IX · Do Not Exploit or GlitchNever knowingly use, preserve, conceal, reproduce, or distribute an advantage created by a bug, exploit, prohibited interaction, or deliberately abusive rules interpretation.
  • CC.X · Do Not Avoid ConsequencesNever use OOC information, technical systems, alternate characters, dishonest scheduling, disconnects, or character retirement to escape legitimate ongoing roleplay or consequences.
  • CC.XI · Keep Your Characters SeparateEach character must maintain independent knowledge, resources, relationships, objectives, and involvement without using alts to benefit or reinforce one another.
  • CC.XII · Separate OOC / Staff Knowledge from Character KnowledgePlayers, Staff, Storytellers, administrators, and actors must recuse themselves from conflicts involving their characters and never use privileged information or authority for personal character benefit.
  • CC.XIII · Respect Streams and Content CreatorsNever turn broadcasts, clips, VODs, chats, recordings, or spectator information into IC intelligence or use content creation to harass, interfere with, or gain advantages over others.

Social Contract of Roleplay

Glossary

  • FAFOF*** Around & Find Out. Things that can escalate quickly. Detailed in CC.VI.

Game time in Midnight Masquerade

  • ChronicleA month of time.
  • StoryA week of time.
  • NightA day of time.
  • SceneA roleplay scenario and all of the characters affecting each other actively within it. A scene can be as small as a room or a car, or in transit between a few characters. The scene you are at, the travel to another, and the destination would be three scenes, and a power that lasts “a scene” lasts the entirety of all three.

Code of Conduct

First, to open: we want to operate under a simple system. While administration is done by a team of Staff and the Council, our decisions should be akin to those that a reasonable player would make in the same scenario.

If a violation occurs that is wholly outside the scope of our rules and cannot be attributed to the standards, the offender will be warned and our standards adjusted, but the offender will not be held to the new standard retroactively unless the issue is egregious in nature and requires some administrative or punitive response.

CC.I · Community Standards of Respect

We expect all members of this community to treat each other with respect and dignity, both in and out of character, in all of our public spaces.

While every community will be made up of friends, sometimes those we dislike or are currently having turmoil with want to enjoy the same space at the same time. As such, we expect everyone here to maintain a level of civility to one another, remembering how we would like to be treated in return: from respecting one another’s time and issues, to giving leeway to someone suffering a technical issue and keeping it from breaching IC.

No discrimination, OOC threats, targeted IC hostility, bullying, harassment, or breaches of consent will be tolerated in this community. While some levels of hostility IC are to be expected, if these aggressions cannot be based in character-based logic and emotions, the issue becomes a violation of CC.I.

Your personal disagreements should never be brought into character. Our community will be filled with people from all walks of life who will feel for one another in different ways. None of these feelings should translate to our characters; however good or bad one’s day is, it should not flavor the roleplay. If someone has irked another member out of character, we expect to see no such retaliation in character. By the same token, if someone causes grievous harm or heartbreak to another in character, retaliation out of character would again be a violation of CC.I.

Finally, roleplay is a volatile and ever-changing beast, and our Storytellers and Staff will need to intervene on occasion. We expect all members of the community to follow reasonable instructions while in a scene from anyone wielding the authority of Staff or Storyteller, be it a story, rule, or community matter.

CC.II · Roleplay Integrity

Treat all roleplay as an opportunity to collaboratively tell a story rather than a video game meant to be won. Good roleplay is not about your character being the best, but about creating the most positively memorable and compelling scene available from the scenario and participants.

We expect all members of our community to contribute meaningfully to a shared story; while you are but one character among many, each player is responsible for understanding their character’s role in the narrative. Look at your favorite novels, television, movies or manga and notice what makes the most memorable moments: those are the goals. Unlike those stories, though, we have no main characters. Accept that your character may lose, be injured, robbed, humiliated, or quite possibly killed, and the story will go on, because this is the story of the City of Los Santos, not the story of any one character.

A few guidelines turn this from a roleplay suggestion into rules:

  • Do not intentionally disrupt the roleplay of others.
  • Allow for reasonable reactions and investigations by others for the actions you take.
  • Remain in character while within a scene, and give the active participants the grace to remain so when you need to step away, such as having your character take a phone call. Avoid “FiveM-coded language” such as listening to angels or thinking deeply about things. Step out of the scene in character and return when you are back at the keyboard.

CC.III · Metagaming

Metagaming, as we use the term, is the use of knowledge your character does not or cannot reasonably know in order to influence conversation or actions. If your character cannot reasonably know something, you are not allowed to act on it.

When someone is accused of metagaming, the team will usually ask the player where and how their character learned the information in question. We strongly advise that when you learn something provocative or dangerous, you note the source! It helps you stay in character and keeps the border between in character and out of character clear. If you cannot recall or acceptably explain the origin, the roleplay might need to be rolled back, and if it is found to violate CC.III, action may be taken.

Common examples of metagaming:

  • Using information from OOC Discord or voice chat, streams, or from an alternate character.
  • Watching another player’s stream to locate them in game.
  • Using someone’s character name or information in roleplay because you saw it out of RP or because the system showed it, when it wasn’t given in character (for example a text emote, or having seen their character sheet).
  • Passing information between characters through non-approved out-of-character channels when the characters have no way of knowing it in character. (Some Discord use, such as email or SchreckNet, will be viable! Just know which is and which isn’t.)
  • Using lore or game-system information in character without the ability dots, lore dots, or in-city experience to reflect that knowledge. (An Anarch who never dealt with a Praxis, with no knowledge dots or lore, would not know the ranks of the Praxis, for example!)

CC.IV · Powergaming

In our city, players can pursue strong outcomes through approved and potent capabilities. This does not allow anyone to take utter control of another participant’s actions through control or implied harm, bypass resolution methods, or invent an advantage the World of Darkness does not support. Winning potently and decisively with a valid ability is not automatically powergaming, and neither is possessing an ability that a particular opponent or group cannot resist. The violation is exceeding that power, or using ambiguity to claim power beyond the rules as written.

When acting against another player, describe what your character is attempting to do and stop where their character’s response begins. When dice mechanics, player consent, or an authorized ruling allows you to go further, you may! In a scene with multiple characters, player consent includes all active players in the scene, not simply the defender.

Never declare another character’s emotions, injuries, thoughts, surrender, and especially death without the authority to do so through agreement, mechanics, or an authorized ruling.

Players are preauthorized to use only the traits, equipment, abilities, powers, retainers, and preparations that exist on their sheet. If it cannot be tracked on the sheet, it requires Storyteller confirmation or player agreement. Screenshots showing the roleplay was done are not guaranteed to be enough; without logged dice mechanics or Storyteller approval, all participants would need to agree to accept it. Preparations that are invented, or only brought up after relevant information has been learned, are not allowed unless an ability explicitly allows it. You can, however, prepare in anticipation of what may occur and pursue rolls, scenes, and Storyteller arbitration to do so.

The user of a power must observe all activation conditions, costs, limitations, duration, visibility and resistances, and communicate these to the target in all cases. Failing to do so, or doing so inaccurately, can (but won’t always) result in ticketable action.

Even outside of abilities, avoid simultaneous actions from a single or coordinated source (sometimes this happens innocently, such as multiple Auspex attempts, and should be handled as well as possible), as well as exceptionally long, verbose, or complicated emotes that deny any reasonable response or response time.

Do not repeat rolls until successful without a roleplay action or a reasonable amount of time having passed (such as climbing back up to retry a jump, or letting an NPC cool off after a failed roll). Show the failure, observe which activities can and cannot be repeated per the system, and observe the difficulty increase for most repeated actions. For example, show your character pacing or reacting, or leaving a scene where a lock was scratched after a failed pick.

Approved mental, emotional, or other powers may constrain a character’s choices, but they do not give the user ownership of the target’s unrelated memories, personality, or future behavior.

A good example: “Sally attempts to pin Julie’s wrist against the wall,” leaving the action to resolve through the dice or Julie’s emote. “Sally pins the wrist and breaks it, using the pain to force a confession” goes too far in more than a few ways, and would not be acceptable at all.

CC.V · Fail RP

All roleplay should be consistent with the setting of the World of Darkness, the approved character that has been brought to play, and the scene in question. Realistic, in these terms, means credible within what can exist in our world, and within its probabilities and realities.

A great many things can happen when supernatural powers are in use, and we are challenged to maintain good roleplay without simply explaining odd things away as a mage having a hand in it or an ancient Kindred’s plan coming to fruition. Nor should we go to such grand lengths to explain away poor roleplay.

  • Ignoring your injuries, fear, exhaustion, restraints, knowledge (or lack thereof), or ability to resist a scenario without a valid explanation qualifies as Fail RP.
  • Treating a serious encounter as a disposable or annoying interruption, or as though death is not possible because of meta rules on permadeath or otherwise (see CC.VI).
  • Using video game physics, animations, menus, respawn systems, or mannerisms particular to FiveM as substitutes for plausible action without roleplay.
  • Creating throwaway characters simply to attack, transfer assets, test defenses, gain information, or disrupt play.
  • Crashing scheduled events without alerting the owner of the event and/or venue. Events aren’t above attack, but if you can’t reach the owner, approach the Storytellers, who can alert them if needed.
  • Turning every encounter into threats, jokes, or performance not intended to progress roleplay. Exceptions exist for characters built for it, such as a mime or a clown, but it still needs to fit.

“This is what my character would do” is no justification for toxic behavior. We should all be arbiters of good roleplay and good faith; your character is not a shield for bad decisions or a toxic atmosphere, and hiding behind it can result in a legitimate accusation of Fail RP.

CC.VI · Self-Preservation and Foreseeable Consequences (NVL / FAFO)

All characters should respond credibly to threats against their continued existence, freedom, identity, relationships and ambitions. For the supernatural this extends further, to the threat of capture, exposure, their double life, and the destruction of major ambitions.

FAFO (F*** Around & Find Out) is inviting risk through your behavior in a conflict, or going somewhere a reasonable observer would expect to carry great risk. Because of the offending action, great risk may become a great consequence: a human breaching an unlocked Elysium door, or a vampire walking into an MC’s drug lab.

Characters should judge danger using what they reasonably know about their own capabilities and the threat. Someone in the know might feel safer because they know what they bring to the scenario. The unknown gains an advantage but is not wholly defeated: the supernatural may know they have unseen means of attack, but this is not blanket immunity, as a mortal weapon could still kill or incapacitate, leading to death or exposure.

Resistance, sandbagging, flight, bargaining, deception, surrender, corruption or betrayal can all be credible responses to a threat of bodily harm, but they require consideration of the potency and immediacy of the threat. A gun pointed at your head and an armed robber who has a gun are vastly different.

Treat the situation as a scale, not a switch. Supernatural defenses might justify confidence and greater resistance, but they don’t justify indifference to all threats (“I have enough Fortitude and Stamina to soak a bullet to the head, but if that’s an incendiary round I could die!”). High Courage, fanaticism, loyalty to a threatened cause or person, or desperation can also motivate riskier actions, but they do not invalidate NVL.

Repeated reckless behavior should have reasons behind it. Consequences of NVL can follow, giving those involved in the scene cause to open a ticket and an investigation to ensue. Do not threaten others while relying on the OOC protections of the NVL/FAFO rules to make retaliation or resistance impossible.

FAFO applies in any situation where a reasonable person could expect to die for breaching trust, supernatural or otherwise: a house robbery, breaching a base, and sometimes inciting retaliation in an NVL scenario like a hostage situation or mouthing off to a crime lord, the Primogen, or the Prince in court. FAFO binds both parties. Provocation can justify consequences, but it does not suspend proportional response, combat rules and initiative (for counter-actions), or permanent-death procedures.

An insult may justify an insult, exclusion, a court ruling, a demand for an apology, or a developing feud, but it doesn’t inherently allow for an execution. By the same token, threatening a rival’s existence should be expected to bring a more serious response than a social faux pas.

CC.VII · Violence, Escalation, and Narrative Weight

Violence should arise from established circumstances and opportunities for interaction, as well as consequences of prior events.

A timer is a good yardstick for how roleplay leads up to violence, but sometimes action begets action, such as a car break-in resulting in a gun being drawn. Prior scenes and reputation with known groups can provide substantial context.

What matters is how the event begins and the responses given. In most cases there should be no immediate mechanical combat without prior conversation, warning, or precipitation. Our dice and sheet system can provide that precipitation, for example by asking people leaving a scene to DM a Perception + Alertness roll against a sense of danger or wrongness. This lets ambushes exist while giving abilities and skills a chance to help a character evade danger before or after it starts.

Meaningful response does not mean precognition or advance warning of every ambush or change in aggression. It means the onset of violence follows established rules and preserves a chance for reactions and defenses, as well as investigation and aftermath.

Combat follows a 50% rule of Supporting Contributors to Active Contributors. Planned hostile activity defaults to 4 per side, escalating to 6 per side when arranged or reacting (such as reinforcements, or criminals under pursuit by law enforcement). Major assaults, blood hunts, and mass supernatural confrontations are Storyteller-supervised with explicit limits and stakes. If an attack occurs at a larger social gathering with no precipitation, everyone already present may defend or escape, but reinforcements may not join unless outnumbered.

Drivers, lookouts, radio coordinators, remote supernatural support, and tactical rescuers count as Supporting Contributors. A Supporting Contributor may come under fire from an active source and must flee unless their side is below maximum engagement.

Supernatural combatants may engage in dice combat once they have been incapacitated at least once in a scene involving mechanical combat; if all parties agree, dice combat may be used from the start instead. We recommend holding gunfire until the end of a gunfight to support good roleplay by outside parties, and outside parties should be aware that people standing still may be in dice combat and gauge their responses accordingly.

Police have their own engagement numbers, but they are held to the same standard even where their procedures differ. The method of a fight may not be changed mid-combat once chosen amicably OOC, so that a rule switch can’t be used to rescue a fight that is going poorly.

CC.VIII · Emergency Services Roleplay

Police, medical, and rescue characters are participants with their own stories and responsibilities. Give them meaningful room to exist within your story, and expect to interact with them and be investigated, whether at the hospital, the police station or in the field. Do not treat them as mechanics to dodge, such as revives or punishment, but as the people they are.

When the relevant services are not available, use creativity to explain why they aren’t an option. It isn’t that the hospital is closed or the police don’t exist; do not break the scene or justify odd behavior with population numbers.

Supernatural healing exists, so not every supernatural being has to go in for medical treatment when it is reasonable they shouldn’t. Distinguish valid healing from bypassing an established scene, for yourself or others.

Describe observable symptoms and any relevant flaws or conditions honestly, within the bounds of the rules and setting. Include relevant injuries truthfully in emotes or factual channels: your character can lie, you as the player cannot!

  • Do not demand an instant revive or faster processing just to rush back to a scene, and do not return to the same combat scene after being handled by emergency services. Combat is short; treatment and arrest take time in character.
  • Do not use game systems, NPC services, or healing convenience items to erase an active medical issue or condition.
  • If there is no active response, establish a fallback: you couldn’t commit the crime because the dispatcher was busy, you went to the hospital yourself because the 911 operator said the ambulance had a flat, and so on.
  • Responders should explain treatment and behave in character to give patients and suspects a chance to participate in deeper roleplay. Not everyone needs to be an expert, but we should strive for excellent roleplay!
  • Medical staff may establish findings within approved procedures, including recovery tasks and behavior, but should not unilaterally or unrealistically impose permanent disability, death, or knowledge of a patient’s supernatural status without proper channels, investigation and the ability to sense it. If an investigation is needed, go through the Storytellers or call one to the scene.
  • Personal belongings and approved loot may be taken from police during justifiable scenes, with FAFO meaningful response.
  • Supernatural commands do not bypass restrictions on government assets, and those restrictions are not unexplained IC immunity to valid powers. Storytellers will resolve the interaction.

Corruption should follow an arc, with scope and Storyteller handling so evidence and logging can occur (and so honest mistakes can be tracked properly). Consider its scope: stolen supplies, leaked information, false records, favors, criminal or supernatural support. There will be discoverable consequences, though not guaranteed ones, with independent oversight assigned. A supernatural character’s work schedule, identity, secrecy, use of powers on the job, obligations and professional access can all be investigated within the proper scope.

CC.IX · Exploiting / Glitching

Do not knowingly obtain, preserve, or distribute any advantage or item produced by a defect or prohibited interaction.

This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Duplication, invalid transactions, broken storage or weight limits, unintended access, and resource farming.
  • Terrain, collision, camera, animation, or invulnerability windows and defects.
  • Disconnecting or resetting to remove costs, conditions, restraints or cooldowns.
  • Combining systems to gain extra actions or avoid costs that apply once.
  • Knowingly receiving exploited goods through friends or intermediaries.
  • Using powers, rituals, backgrounds or cross-splat interactions beyond approved interpretations.

A rule that is unclear in the tabletop books is not automatically an exploit. Good-faith interpretation and self-storytelling will need some leaps of faith and adjudication. What is problematic is knowingly using a broken or stronger variation of a rule or errata, concealing a known problem, continuing with something after a ruling, or constructing an obviously unintended loop or reading. Substantial interpretations will be published in the errata so the same rules apply to everyone.

If you find an exploit: stop benefiting as soon as possible, preserve enough information for a private report, and follow any restoration instructions you are given. Do not reproduce a serious exploit on the live server to “prove” it works without prior instruction, and do not share it with anyone outside the report chain.

Loopholes are not supernatural powers. They are questions for staff to answer.

CC.X · Scene / Consequence Avoidance

Do not use information gained OOC, technical systems, alternate characters, or dishonest scheduling to prevent legitimate stories from reaching you.

Examples include, but are not limited to: combat logging; switching characters; using respawn systems; entering inaccessible areas to escape an active scene; moving assets through alts or intermediaries to defeat pending consequences without proper roleplay and opportunity for investigation; watching streams or player activity to avoid pursuers; repeatedly promising to continue while deliberately making scheduling impossible; using retirement, deletion, or a replacement character to keep benefits while abandoning story and liability; or manufacturing total unreachability through disputed rules machinations.

Absence is not proof of avoidance: people stop playing, take breaks, or have limited availability. However, if you begin a conflict, such as causing mayhem in a district, you should have the time and willingness to see through the fallout and the scenes that follow. Using time away as a defense is not allowed; the scene can be paused, but the consequences will follow when it continues. If your character has done something dire enough to get them hunted, we recommend planning a leave of absence in advance (details aren’t always needed), so that if your LOA is announced before the hunt, your time can be respected. Taking a break in response to a hunt, however, will very likely be seen as avoidance.

When an ongoing scene needs resolution, offer scheduling, intermediary roleplay to explain the absence, an agreed summary, or neutral adjudication with the help of staff and Storytellers. Hiding in character in the city is perfectly valid in most situations, through the available mechanics and by responding to all queries from hunters and Storytellers.

Counterplay requires a legitimate path for the story to continue, not a universal defensive roll every character can benefit from. It may mean preparation, escape, an ally, a specialist, indirect investigation, resource pressure, or a later consequence such as a dark secret being taken. Some characters may have no effective immediate counter.

Honor explicit immunities, but do not extend a narrow immunity into protection from unrelated investigation or consequences. Resolve ambiguous wording by agreement with those in the scene, or get Storyteller adjudication (and an addition to the errata).

CC.XI · Character Separation / Alts

Each character must have an independent identity, information history, and position within our story. You should not be playing the family of your other characters, or the long-lost twin of the one who just died. Drawing inspiration from yourself is natural, but keep a clear separation: your character’s betrayals, humiliations, defeats and death are not reflections of you as the player.

Playing alts with the same friends is allowed. But do not share assets, secrets, favors, or strategic objectives across characters. Do not use intermediaries to accomplish prohibited actions. Do not influence the same conflict from multiple characters. Do not duplicate votes, corroborating witnesses or opinions, investigators, scapegoats, or political pressure; stay disengaged on any character beyond the first in a situation, and limit time with overlap.

Do not pick an alt because it has the access or powers your other characters lack to address the same interest or situation. You can cross paths with people you know, but the more overlap an alt has with your other characters, the less time it should spend in their vicinity. If that has to change, the overlap should be disclosed and documented, and roleplay adjusted as needed, potentially including recusal from situations or positions to avoid impropriety.

A good guide: could both of my characters be asked about this event as witnesses? Not merely exist as a name someone else knows, but actually be witnesses. If the answer is yes, get out of the situation immediately!

CC.XII · Separating Staff Knowledge from Character Knowledge

Storytellers, administrators, and actors must recuse themselves wherever something is substantially designed or controlled by them, or where they hold material privileged information relevant to their character.

  • Avoid any case where your participation as an actor, Storyteller, or admin lets you award your own character stats, rank, favorable NPC treatment, or prestige. Items, their locations, or clues should not fall into your character’s hands unless they pass through a player (ideally several) unaffiliated with yours. For example, if a player brings you an item to identify because of your expertise, or you later slay someone who earned an item through your plot, that item might end up with you. It should never come directly from your own actions.
  • Never direct an NPC to validate your own character. As a Storyteller or actor there is almost no situation where you should even mention your other characters; let others bring them up, or remain aloof when they do. Never steer allies based on information learned through staff access. You may petition an on-scene Storyteller to let you roll to learn it IC, but do not tell other players its purpose in public chats!
  • Never get involved in scenes directly or apparently tied to your own character. For example, if your character is being blood hunted by a Brujah hit squad, do not target Brujah combatants while on an actor who might also be hunting your main character. That would be immediately problematic.
  • If secondary stories grow out of your other characters or your work helping staff or actors, contact a Storyteller and find the information legitimately in character. With Storyteller approval the scene may continue, but you must accept the responding Storyteller’s verdict. They will review any material conflict; a blanket ban would be untenable, so you may get a split verdict limiting what you can do. Follow it.

CC.XIII · Streaming / Content Creation

Do not locate, pursue, avoid, intercept, identify, or prepare against characters using broadcasts, clips, VODs, chat, or spectator reports. Out-of-character information must never turn into in-character information, even through hunches or random guesses. Do not use a third party to relay stream intelligence, and do not seek proximity to streamers or artists simply for exposure. Do not deliberately introduce prohibited content, disruptive audio, or private information to harm a broadcast or a creator’s standing in their community.

Creators must not direct their audience toward harassment or interference, and receive the same consequences and protections as everyone else. Administrative discussions and restricted-content scenes, such as adult content, must be treated as non-broadcast material.

Footage may be used for staff reports, appeals, or OOC learning, by the creator or anyone with a legitimate way to view it. The restriction is on using it in any IC manner.

If you record with personal software, you may use clips for staff reports or appeals, but a recording cannot exist in character without an IC camera, what it could capture, and a way for others to obtain it. Instant, secure, unhackable cloud storage isn’t viable; a server that can be interacted with is viable but not the norm. Ordinary citizens don’t usually wear body or helmet cameras, but dash cams, business cameras and ATM cameras exist, and we can adjust for reasonableness, angle, and in some cases supernatural interference.

Character Creation

We use the standard V20 array for Kindred; Hunters and Mortals get 7/5/3 or 6/4/3, with standard experience costs, with these exceptions: new merits at character creation cost 2× their value when bought with expenditures such as age experience. After character creation, merits cost 5× their value in experience, and buying off flaws costs 2.5× their value. Merits may also appear in Storyteller stories as discounts or prizes. Backgrounds can be purchased at 3 points for a new line and 2× the current rating to increase, but all background increases require documented roleplay.

Inheritance Bank: when a character is permanently retired or killed and the player is in good standing with the community, you may approach a Storyteller for Inheritance Experience, equal to half your Granted Experience (your total experience minus the experience granted at character creation). This bank only accrues when a character is permanently ended, and may be used on one new character, which depletes it.

Ownership

  • Game and settingAll GTA assets and World of Darkness material remain the rights of their respective creators, as do any licensed products created by FiveM creators.
  • Server workServer code, maps, artwork and branding remain the property of their creator, or of the server where the creator has agreed to that in writing, with reasonable measures and time for extraction or amendment if a creator departs.
  • Storyteller events and NPCsThese remain the creative property of their creators; the server will seek written permission to continue, adapt, archive and run them after contributors leave.
  • Player charactersPlayer-created characters and backstories keep their creator’s rights, but players recognize the community’s use of their presence in joint storytelling and recordings, and future references to the character once played.
  • Streams and videosRecording and editing rights follow the normal FiveM platform terms, the rights of the people involved, and applicable law.
  • Promotional clipsThese belong to their creator but must be made with the permission of the people shown and server Administration. Midnight Masquerade will seek written permission for joint ownership of promotional material made for free; paid productions will be arranged by agreement.
  • Server canonMidnight Masquerade retains all authority over server canon. This is separate from the rights to the characters in it: the story is collaborative, but the Administration Council has the final say on what is and isn’t canon here.

Social Contract of Roleplay

By joining this chronicle, we agree to help one another tell stories worth remembering. Our characters may deceive, compete, betray, and destroy; as players, we remain partners in making those experiences meaningful.

We accept that our characters will encounter uncertainty, opposition, loss, and consequences. We also accept responsibility for giving others room to participate, respecting their boundaries, and keeping personal grievances out of the fiction.

These commitments apply to players, actors, Storytellers, and administrators alike. Questions and requests for guidance are welcome, and our Roleplay Primer explains these principles through examples and practical advice.

RPC.I · We Are Here to Tell Stories

Every character you see in our city is the source of a possible scene; a story. It doesn’t matter how strong they are in combat, their status, their faction, or the experience noted on their sheet.

Power is useful when it creates decisions and events for others: obligations to fulfill, temptations to be our worst selves, and relationships that make us our best selves. A powerful character who employs, bargains with, fears, teaches, or depends on others contributes more than one who simply defeats every situation and always wins the fight.

Not every scene needs to advance a grand or even important plot. Ordinary work, gatherings of friends, silly conversations, awkward romance attempts, quiet failures and parties of any sort all give larger events meaning, and a chance to reflect, from the grand events to the small. Seek the outcomes that leave someone with something interesting to look forward to.

Be someone else’s opportunity for a scene.

RPC.II · Do Not Play to Win

Your character can, and likely will, desperately want victory in all things. As players and authors, we need to remain willing to portray failure honestly.

Losing can mean you trusted the wrong person, misread the situation, owed a boon, missed something, made a mistake and got arrested, or discovered that something you believed is horribly wrong. It need not always mean you were physically defeated or outclassed.

Do not make every loss about a rules setback or a stroke of luck. Do not fixate on recovering the lost advantage or item, and never push that a loss “does not count” for any OOC reason. By the same token, do not accept cheating or foul play, and you don’t need to narrate your character as deliberately incompetent. Make a legitimate attempt and honor the legitimate result.

Play a character who wants to win, but be the player who can make losing worthwhile storytelling.

RPC.III · Give Other Players Roleplay “Handholds”

Make your character and actions things others can discover, understand or engage with. Have known strengths and resilience, but make sure your character can be affected by others.

Handholds might be habits, loyalties, public appearances, unfinished business, visible ambition, addictions, mistakes, or areas of incompetence. A secure haven can remain secure, but its owner may need to negotiate for supplies, leave for court, care about someone outside the Praxis, employ someone unreliable, or pursue something she shouldn’t outside of it.

Show your flaws in play, and attempt things your character wants to do despite lacking the expertise. Let other people have useful skills that supplement yours, even if you think you could manage without them.

We sometimes call this “walking into the buzzsaw”: you, the player, know more than your character, and you let the character blunder into something that can only go badly but furthers the story for others. It doesn’t mean ignoring the reasoning your character would follow, or intentionally failing or losing a character. It means making concessions because the story makes sense going there, even at some cost to your character. Preserve the meaningful ways we interact with each other’s characters, without requiring every defense to fail for it to happen.

Give people a thread to pull. You do not need to hand them your entire tapestry.

RPC.IV · Don’t Escalate Everything

Allow different offenses against your story to carry different weight. Embarrassment, rivalry, inconvenience, theft, betrayal, and attempted murder (or the murder of loved ones) should not all warrant the same response, even from a character with a short fuse. A character can be proud, dangerous and hot-tempered while still showing restraint.

Dismissal, ridicule, restitution, favors, exclusion, negotiation or narrow reprisals can be more interesting than another war. For them to be accepted, they must be offered with good reasoning, in good faith, and with good reason to accept them.

Allow your opponents limited victories. Decide what might reasonably end a feud as seriously as what could begin one with you and yours, and think about what they might be able to do. A good question to ask: what would satisfy this slight without destroying the opposition entirely?

If everything is a blood feud, absolutely nothing will carry the weight of one.

RPC.V · Consequences Create Better Stories

Let established scenes change something. Your injuries might alter your confidence. An arrest might create a debt or a favor. A failed conspiracy might force a new alliance. Exposure might change your routines. Victory might create obligations.

Avoid treating every result as a temporary inconvenience that turns into dots on a sheet and is then forgotten; people internalize and change because of their failures. Consequences should also leave room to act: repeatedly stripping a character of every authority, relationship and resource can end their participation and fun without a satisfying ending for anyone. Our stories conclude with both winners and losers, so make the ending worth it.

A consequence is most useful when it creates the next decision.

RPC.VI · Character Knowledge vs. Player Knowledge

Distinguish what your character knows, believes, suspects, and has merely heard, and heed the difference.

Reading the books as a player does not give your character the same knowledge. They shouldn’t easily know the clans, factions, powers, cosmology, or secrets of supernatural societies. Approved character-creation knowledge and lived experience determine what they start with, and we should avoid lore- or info-dumping, especially about anything supernatural. This world is very secretive, and these forces kill those who readily tell their secrets. Just as your group keeps its secrets, keep your lore discussions to the point and in flavor.

A high rating confers expertise, but not automatic knowledge of everything, and certainly not of every named or special individual or power.

  • A rumor establishes that someone said something.
  • An observation shows you what you saw, and only what you saw.
  • A failed roll means the attempt did not do what it was meant to: you saw no evidence, not necessarily that they were immune.
  • If a Storyteller gives you a mistaken conclusion, it should affect play within the narrated scope as though it were true.
  • A supernatural impression conveys only what the power can convey, nothing more, and serves no purpose beyond what the power describes.
  • OOC recognition of a voice, model, username, or player habit does not establish an IC identity. Do not manufacture a convenient “independent discovery” to launder OOC information.

Yes, you might randomly get close, like writing a story about a brutish pirate named Jack Drake who became a vampire by sheer chance. That doesn’t meet our standard of quality roleplay. A character’s fiction or speculation may coincidentally resemble something true, but coincidence is not a substitute for discovering information through play. Do not invent backstory, creative works, guesses, or off-screen events that conveniently supply knowledge your character has not earned IC. Arguing that your character “could have come up with it independently” does not establish that they did, nor does it entitle them to treat an invention as fact. IC knowledge requires an IC basis; coincidence is not a loophole.

“Walking into the buzzsaw” applies here too: let an honest belief in a mistake lead your character into a trap, even if you anticipate it. Failure doesn’t compel stupidity. It means the evidence was wrong or misapplied, and now you have a way to approach it.

The books describe our world. The books are not your character’s autobiography.

RPC.VII · Respect the Scene

Like a sandcastle, notice what the participants are building before you add to it. A funeral, an interrogation, a celebration, a rescue, or a quiet confession each offer different themes and opportunities. Humor and gravity both belong in our world, but neither should automatically replace the existing tone just because a certain type of character is present.

Do not monopolize speaking time, perform for spectators, pick a scene because an audience is there, or redirect every problem to your own history or moment. In public spaces, interruption can be natural and valid. Respect doesn’t mean nobody may complicate a scene; the distinction is between contributing a credible development and repeatedly hijacking attention.

There should be scenes we star in, scenes we support in, scenes we’re background extras in, and scenes without our characters at all.

Sharing the world naturally includes sharing the spotlight.

RPC.VIII · Generate Roleplay, Do Not Manufacture It

Build from established events, your character’s resources and knowledge, and plausible action. You can investigate, assume, misunderstand, accuse, forge, lie, threaten or even frame people. What you cannot do is declare contested history or evidence into existence.

Claiming OOC that an animal on someone’s property injured you establishes an event without their participation or agency. Your character could, however, invent that accusation as a lie and roll with it. That is valid, but it must be detectable as a lie by any supernatural abilities that allow it, such as additional anxiety under Aura Perception or other powers.

Likewise, if you want a fabricated medical report, you can’t simply say you have one. If you do the work to make the prop, going through the forgery and getting materials that look right, it becomes valid.

Do not retroactively invent witnesses, cameras, actions, debts, or promises. The other player need not always be told OOC that an accusation is false if it would spoil a legitimate plot, but do try to include Storytellers or staff, and if they approach you, you must always tell them the truth.

A character may invent a story. A player may not invent the server’s history.

RPC.IX · OOC Remains OOC

Care for the people while allowing the characters to disagree, hate, fight and kill one another. Do not use IC betrayal to justify exclusion, audience attacks, harassment, or OOC retaliation against the player. Do not use OOC friendship to grant unexplained trust, access, assets, leniency or favors.

Natural feelings are not misconduct. Recognizing frustration and taking a break can be a good and safe practice.

Keep technical and administrative talk to designated OOC channels. Do not use terms such as angels, sending a prayer, green zones or flexing an “e-muscle.” These do not become IC just because you didn’t say “staff” or “keybind.” Use the OOC chat channel for those functions, and have a fully in-character reason for everything else you do or say. If you need to go AFK, have your character go to the restroom, or step aside to write an email.

When real life needs you, step in, even mid-scene. Safety checks and emergencies are always the exception, and if a short accessibility question must use voice, keep it brief and stop as soon as possible. Technical concerns, clarifications, and rules conversations belong in OOC chat. OOC chat is not for general chatter: keep it brisk, or use it for rules and things relevant to roleplay or combat. Everything else belongs on Discord.

“Let’s just play cunty Vampire dress-up.” (Rickett)

RPC.X · Staff, Storyteller, and Administrative Decisions

Follow the active ruling, then use tickets or Discord to appeal or ask for review. Respectful disagreement and appeals remain available once the roleplay has moved past the area the decision covers. The same applies when someone suddenly has to leave roleplay.

Rewinds and corrections: staff will identify the corrected starting point and what remains canon. Players will discard information learned solely through the invalidated events, and restore any resources and conditions spent because of them. Do not allude IC to an erased event through jokes, insinuations, dreams, or “time alterations.”

Crashes and technical failures: treat the affected character as temporarily outside the camera’s focus. Do not infer unconsciousness, abandonment, consent, or vulnerability from a disconnect. Do not rob, interrogate, move, or attack them because they cannot respond. Preserve any unresolved situation and continue when practical, and do not let the interruption become a way to evade consequences.

Staff should always explain material rulings, record precedent where useful, and hand conflicted decisions to an uninvolved reviewer. Staff authority settles the immediate procedure, but never places an issue beyond accountability.

A technical interruption is a pause in performance, not an event in fiction.

The Golden Rules

Going forward, these are the main rules for everyone to remember.

I · The Rule of Cool

Rules as written exist as a baseline so new people can join and have stable footing in an otherwise volatile and changeable storytelling environment. That said, a Storyteller has the leeway to amend things to make a scene better and more memorable (subject to review if it becomes problematic). And as arbiters of our own roleplay, if all parties in a scene consent (all of them) and it doesn’t empower anyone permanently, the rules can bend for the moment.

Examples include, but aren’t limited to: gaining an action without cause to finish a fight with a powerful body slam (normally requiring two); using a Discipline in roleplay after feeding but before learning it or spending the XP, to show practice; or improving something like movement speed or an ability’s recovery so others can get back into the action sooner.

“Flavor with reason.” (Cash)

II · Should I, or Shouldn’t I?

In a scene with many options and a literal World of Darkness of nefarious choices, it’s easy to get lost in the theme and forget that we aren’t facing impervious monsters or bad people, but friends and ordinary people who can be hurt by what we do if we play in bad faith or without good rules. Whether you’re a player, a Storyteller or anyone else, ask yourself:

  • Is this realistic? Could it reasonably happen in this world and rule system?
  • Is it fair? Am I giving the other player a reasonable chance to participate?
  • Is it fun? Am I amplifying the scene’s theme and purpose?
  • Is it good storytelling? Will it progress the story, or just empower my character?
  • Would I be okay with this happening to my character in the same scenario?

Final Word

This we want every one of you to understand, and realize:

You are responsible for the roleplay around you.

You do not need to be the highest-ranked Kindred, the most powerful police officer, the best fighter, or the hottest character on the server to matter or be integral to roleplay. What you need is to approach each situation with openness, respect, creativity, fairness, and a willingness to contribute to other people’s stories as an NPC, so your story as a PC can progress. Be the arbiter of the roleplay standards you want to see, and set a good example at every turn you are able.

Our expectation is not perfection. Our expectation is that you act in good faith, as all of your admins here will.

Create your stories, enjoy others’ stories, accept your consequences but do the fun that earns them, respect the other players, and leave this server and the people here better than you found them.

Thank you for considering us for your time and leisure!