Player Roles and Site Staff (WIP)

[Cortex Mainframe]

Around the site you might see a lot of references to Captains and Narrators, or you might be directed to Moderators and Administrators for assistance. What are these roles? Who on the site has them? What exactly do they do? This post aims to address all those questions, and allow some space to ask more.

When someone joins our community, they became a Member. While possessing no special rank or responsibility, Members are actually the lifeblood of our community. It's Members' interaction, creativity, loyalty, and support of the site by generating character and ship ideas, offering feedback to the Site Staff, cooking up story plots, and participating in general discussion both on the forum (link) and Discord that keep this site going. Some members take the opportunity to get even more involved around the site.

Browncoats are those dedicated Members of our site who put their money where their mouth is when it comes to supporting FS - literally. Whenever a member donates to the Paypal account for findingserenity.net, they earn this special rank and color coding for OOC account. The Paypal account funds go toward financing the costs of the website hosting fees annually in addition to funding additional packages such as server and database backups and our recently purchased security suite! Without these individuals, this forum wouldn't be so secure and easy to locate.

Legacy Characters is a very special designation granted to specific player characters who have made a significant impact on Finding Serenity's history, both IC in character interactions and storytelling, and OOC by volunteering their time and working in the background. Legacy Character status is similar to a sports team retiring a jersey number, in that the associated character's iconic Play By is permanently reserved for that character only regardless of active or inactive status. This status is not granted lightly, and is only the result of weighted discussion among the Site Staff.

Captains fill a very vital role in our Ship RP areas. In short, they're responsible for leading a ship's crew IC and OOC. While the two aspects vary a bit, here's some of the things a Captain is responsible for: keep their ship's story moving along, progressing through a Narrator's plot; making sure their crew is full as it can be, allowing as many folks as they can to have a place to RP; helping to maintain team morale and overall enthusiasm, whether by offering kudos or rallying the posse; working with their ship's assigned Narrator to ensure the ship stays active; keeping Ship Information, such as the Crew Manifest, up to date; and helping to manage their crew OOC, by assigning IC and OOC tasks, ranging from suggesting a character take a certain course of action or reminding a player to make sure their character's application is linked in their profile.

The following characters are Captains for findingserenity.net's ships.

• Barnaby Goodweather is Captain of The Darling.
• Marty Miller is Captain of The Courtesan.
• Isa Romero is Captain of Revenge.
• Travis Chao is Captain of Phoenix Company.
• Charity Vonbach is Captain of Odette.
• Patrick "Tricky" O'Doyle is Captain of Empress.

Any members interested may fill out a Captain Application. (Link Coming Soon)

Narrators are the storytellers and yarn spinners of Finding Serenity. While following a plot typically of their own design or the result of a collaboration with the Captains of their assigned ships and sometimes other site members, the Narrator shapes the world the ship crews play in and can even help crew members follow their own hooks as part of a bigger thread that helps weave the tapestry of FS's little corner of the Firefly 'Verse. Narrators are also responsible with creating and utilizing NPCs to engage Player Characters, as friend or foe, and may take control of background NPCs at any time in order to direct the flow of the narrative.

The following players are Narrators for findingserenity.net's ships.

• Lomari is Narrator of The Darling.
• noseatbelts is Narrator of The Courtesan.
• HumanHyperbole is Narrator of Revenge.
• RUNE is Narrator of Phoenix Company.
• Celena Hain and RUNE are Narrators of Odette.
• noseatbelts is Narrator of Empress.

All Site Staff (Moderators and Admins) may narrate, as needed, on the Deep Space Station Iscariot.

Potential narrators are required to fill out a Narrator Application. (Link Coming Soon)

Moderators are Members who have been invited to join the ranks of the Site Staff Team. These players volunteer their time to act as community assistants and can generally answer any questions about the site while maintaining a friendly and encouraging place to participate in Firefly RP. Site Moderators perform these functions on both the forums and the Discord server. Each Moderator has other, more specific responsibilities.

The Site Moderators are:

• Celena Hain is the Tech Moderator.
• HumanHyperbole is the Player Relations Moderator.
• noseatbelts is the Lead Moderator.

Administrators direct things behind the scenes and concern themselves mostly with the overall management and functionality of the site and forums. They help the Moderators keep the rules and regulations in play, approve new characters and ships, coordinate site events, recruit new players, advertise for the site, and generally handle everything from policy changes to software upgrades.

The Site Administrators are:

• Axe is the Discord and Forum Admin. The longest tenured of the site's current three admins, Axe owns and operates Finding Serenity's Discord server and manages the forums.
• RUNE is the Site Admin, focusing on technical aspects of the site ranging from troubleshooting software errors to manual database backups to forum clean ups.
• Lomari is the Treasury Admin, and her extra duties include maintaining the site's donations, coordinating donation awards, and edits and publishes the site's monthly newsletter, The Signal.
• Caliope was one of Finding Serenity's original Admins following the site's relaunch in 2011.  While mostly retired from Finding Serenity, Caliope is the Site Owner and Super Admin, and returns from time to time to graciously guide the newer, less experienced Admins in the right direction. :)

While still a work in progress, this thread will hopefully answer any questions a regular member or prospective user at findingserenity.net may have about the many different roles around the site. If you have a suggestion for this thread or a question that you don't feel has been answered properly, we will welcome all feedback and encourage one and all to weigh in by replying below. We'll continue to polish this post up over time until it provides as much information as it can about how the many different roles and responsibilities shared by members of our community. Until then...

Keep Flyin'