NationStates

Nations in Forest, please sign up here if you're interested in participating in the (first?) "Green Cup" of association football/soccer. For now, please only sign up with one account per user (no puppets).

I'll post details depending on how many teams sign up, but there will be some kind of group stage in which teams play each other once or twice each, and then a single-elimination knockout stage. The latter will be in Zwangzug; the former might be in different teams' home countries. Games will take place approximately every 24 hours.

Scorination will be generated with the SQIS module of xkoranate 0.3.3 and additive style mods. If you don't know what any of these words mean, don't worry about it.

(Let me know if you have a better name in mind, too!)

What is sports roleplaying?

Incredibly fun and the reason I'm still on NationStates after so many years!

You don't have to be a sports fan to participate; indeed, I knew very little about football when I joined. If you like funny, or creative, or interactive roleplay, you'll fit right in.

What happens is that scores of matches between teams are generated primarily by random numbers every so often, and these results are what motivates the series of roleplays.

The forms that roleplays take can be many and wide-ranging. You can write newspaper articles or television reports covering the game as it might be reported back home. You can write third-person narratives about the lives and chronicles of the players and fans and their exploits or lack thereof. You can write goofy accounts of what's going on in your country (sort of the way that the message board gets sometimes) in a way that's only tangentially related to sports. You can respond to other countries' posts in a similar vein! Just don't do anything that permanently impacts another country without permission from that user.

Here's an example RP from Errinundera, blending sports and other news. There's no need for your posts to look much or anything like this, just an example of the kinds of stuff you can do. This tournament also featured other users roleplaying regime changes, song parodies, and everything in between!

Roleplaying will give you a small bonus that increases your chance of success in future rounds of the tournament. In other tournaments, there are ranks that give teams that have participated and succeeded before increased odds of success as well, but here there obviously won't be any of that kind of built-in history. It's important to note that RPing is only an influencer, not a guarantee of success, and that ultimately the randomization always has the last word.

You can start thinking about what your rosters will look like. Those will go in a different, in-character thread. (I'll post that soon, once we have a better sense of what signups will look like.)

Here's an example of Zwangzug's latest roster. This thread is full of different roster examples. Yours doesn't need to be as fancy, just gives you various ideas.

In general there are eleven players playing at a time. Traditionally, you can include twenty-three players on the team (substitutes, backups, etc.)

Some rosters will tell you stuff about uniform colors, manager, positions, and the country itself. These are nice details to help your opponents brainstorm ideas, but aren't necessary.

Good things to include are;

Style modifier: a number between -5 and 5 that represents how defensive or offensive-minded your team is. A more positive number (offensive) represents a team that will both score and allow more goals. A more negative number (defensive) represents a team that will both score and allow fewer goals. If you don't choose a number, it will default to zero (balanced).

RP permissions: what can your opponent do if they roleplay the game first? A typical list looks something like this:

If my opponent roleplays our game first, they may:
Choose my goalscorers: Yes/No
Give out yellow cards to my players: Yes/No (a yellow card is given out for a minor game foul)
Give out red cards to my players: Yes/No (a red card is given out for a major game foul, that would result in an ejection)
Roleplay injuries to my players: Yes/No
Godmod injuries: Yes/No
Godmod scoring events: Yes/No
Godmod other events: Yes/No

"Godmod" refers to unrealistic or implausible roleplays. Feel free to depart from this formatting; maybe you want to allow your opponent to injure your players, but not anything that would keep them out of the next game. Or you can ask your opponent to contact you in advance before doing anything that could be perceived as suspending disbelief.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask by TG, on the RMB, or in this thread.

Errinundera is.proud to be the first to sign up.

Count me in

Sure.

Whilst the Caracasusian football team really isn't up to scratch, would it be possible to run a commentary on the IC thread? I was thinking a broadly funny sports commentators post every now and then. It'd link nicely to the regional newspaper where I'm thinking of keeping people abreast of ongoing forest RP's.

Caracasus wrote:Whilst the Caracasusian football team really isn't up to scratch, would it be possible to run a commentary on the IC thread? I was thinking a broadly funny sports commentators post every now and then. It'd link nicely to the regional newspaper where I'm thinking of keeping people abreast of ongoing forest RP's.

Sure, but again, there's no requirement of experience IC or OOC to sign up.

Zwangzug wrote:

Caracasus wrote:Whilst the Caracasusian football team really isn't up to scratch, would it be possible to run a commentary on the IC thread? I was thinking a broadly funny sports commentators post every now and then. It'd link nicely to the regional newspaper where I'm thinking of keeping people abreast of ongoing forest RP's.

Sure, but again, there's no requirement of experience IC or OOC to sign up.

Okay, sounds like a plan! Now I need to come up with an appropriately punnish team name.

do you allow mixed teams? The unhuman reserves had switched their sports to compete by skills instead of genders since the transexual incident. Oh and also there was an issue that says that "clothes make the man" so our feminine identified players are totally nude, not even shoes so all that identify them as part of the team is an armband or two

I'm not sure how much time I can put into this in the next few weeks, but it seems like so much fun I'd like to try.

Unhuman Reserves wrote:do you allow mixed teams? The unhuman reserves had switched their sports to compete by skills instead of genders since the transexual incident. Oh and also there was an issue that says that "clothes make the man" so our feminine identified players are totally nude, not even shoes so all that identify them as part of the team is an armband or two

Yes, mixed-sex teams are fairly common in sports RP.

No one will be excluded from the tournament on in-character grounds! If the customs bureaucrats in Zwangzug give you a hard time about "weather-necessitated compliance", talk confidently about your "birthday suit uniforms" and they will probably be too literal-minded to understand what's going on.

Count us in!

Mixed species ok?

either way I am in.

Liberal Liberals wrote:Mixed species ok?

either way I am in.

Absolutely. Again, the free but confused Zwangzug press might report on you as "wow, convergent evolution has produced some awfully bear-resembling humans" (or whatever) and it's probably better not to correct them.

Zwangzug wrote:

Liberal Liberals wrote:Mixed species ok?

either way I am in.

Absolutely. Again, the free but confused Zwangzug press might report on you as "wow, convergent evolution has produced some awfully bear-resembling humans" (or whatever) and it's probably better not to correct them.

even better news, because our team captain is a female bigfoot and our goalkeeper is a lion

The in-character thread is here!

Count me in!

The mighty Potiran Football Association isn't scared of playing against bear-people!

Newcomers in!

(An ideocube puppet of Zwangzug, this account will not accrue RP bonus in its own right.)

With that, assuming Unhuman Reserves is signing up, signups are closed, and the group draw will follow shortly. Please get your rosters in!

Put a post up. The team roster will be coming soon. It might not be perfect - though I'd like to state here that I'm really not interested in winning this contest - whatever provides entertainment and suspense is good for me.

I posted in the wrong thread. It's been a long time.

Tentative schedule is up in IC thread.

Getting hammered at work this week - won't have my roster up in the IC thread until Saturday (12/17). Sorry for the delay