Miracle Live! School Idol Roleplay (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
miraclelivemod) wrote2021-08-30 01:23 pm
miraclelivemod) wrote2021-08-30 01:23 pm
FAQ
What is this game?
Welcome to Miracle Live! School Idol Roleplay, a private panfandom short-term AU game based on the Love Live! franchise. Characters are students at the Harugaizumi International School, a girls' high school in a (fictional) town that's been absorbed into a larger city. The goal of the game will be for the player characters to form a school idol club, develop their skills, get their name out there, and take on the Love Live. More setting information can be found here.
Miracle Live is run by Jisu (
I know nothing of Love Live but the memes. Can you give me a run-down?
Love Live is a long-running franchise with regular cast and setting reboots, but the basic formula is that a group of girls sets out to form or revive the school's school idol club. School idols are a popular competitive extracurricular where students form a singing group, creating all of their own music, lyrics, costumes, stage props and effects, and advertising (though when a unit gets popular enough, the school will often find it profitable to license out their image for merchandise).
It's not always just fun and games, though; apart from all the exercise, training, and practice that school idols do to perfect their craft, they've also got to perform in competitions! School idol competitions run on a regular basis, the biggest of which is the Love Live, a national tournament that runs twice every school year. Stories abound about how groups that win or place high in the Love Live can singlehandedly hype up their school or prove their worth should they go pro after graduation. With how popular school idols have gotten in the last decade, the Love Live is still the number one target that every unit strives to reach, let alone win.
So this is short-term, but not a murdergame. How does it work?
Miracle Live takes inspiration from murdergames and other short-term games, and thus gameplay is split between weekly logs and weekend events. In the weekly log, daily toplevels will go up for the characters to go through their daily lives at school and around town. This can involve scouting new members for the club, training or planning for performances, preparing things like costumes or writing new songs, just attending school, and, yes, downtime to do whatever you want.
During this time, characters will also be presented with opportunities that will appear on Tuesday of even weeks to help them prepare for the event on the Saturday of the following week. This can be anything from a flyer being posted for a show they can sign up to perform at to being sent off for a training camp to, during tournaments, the brackets being posted so they can study their opponents.
They won't be entirely on their own; the Student Council President is someone they'll have to approach to form the club in the beginning of the game, and she'll reappear every so often to give them direction or opportunities... or lecture them if they're not making her happy. The reputation of Harugaizumi is on the line, after all!
How do events/lives work?
You might expect this from the last answer, but our events take place every other Saturday. On Tuesday of an even week, the characters will be given an opportunity to work towards an event (for instance, a live show, making and posting a PV, or an audition). The weekend of the following week, the event will go up on a separate log, with toplevels for preparation, performance, and aftermath unlocking as it goes.
(In the first week, you will get both an Opportunity and an Event, much like how the Dress Rehearsal worked; however, this will be more of an incentive to put the club together, as opposed to a serious live that requires more time.)
For the performance specifically, aspects like the song, costumes, stage, and choreography will be worked out over the two-week span. I trust you all to work things out fairly so everything that needs to be covered gets to and nobody's squabbling over who gets to be the centre this week, but AC will involve submitting what your character did in and leading up to the live along with what else she did during that time period.
Not sure how it works? Here's an example:
On Tuesday of one week, the club receives an email soliciting PVs for a contest. The rest of the week and the week after are spent practising, planning, and choreographing the PV; Girls A and B thread out writing the song together, Girl C is seen designing some outfits and Girl D talks about sewing them, and everyone contributed ideas in the brainstorming stage for the PV. NPCs will also be there to interact with and occasionally bring about complications for the player characters to adapt to.
A mod post for activity check will also go up, and players will submit details to the mod post, such as the song, centre, costumes, and details of what their characters will be doing; if anything is missing, I'll message or ask.
On Saturday of the next week, the log goes up. Under the preparation toplevel, the players thread out setting up the set and directing where everyone should go, covering how the performance will go. A few hours in, the locked performance toplevel will be edited to narrate how the performance went (using details from both what's been played out and what's been mentioned in the mod post). Directly following that, the aftermath toplevel will unlock, allowing the characters to thread out their reactions to what they've accomplished, submitting the PV, and anything else they may want to do.
(This structure is somewhat different from what we had in the Dress Rehearsal, in accordance with player input. Players are welcome to continue offering input should something not work as planned as the game goes on. This is a pretty new thing, after all, and may have some growing pains.)
As we approach endgame, the opportunity for the entire month will be performance and advancing in the Love Live, and thus we switch to weekly events for the final month. This too is subject to change if the shift turns out to be too hard on players.
About how long will this last/what's the schedule?
Miracle Live is expected to last approximately four months. The setting is the start of the Japanese school year, running from April through July in-universe. The current projected start date is April 3rd, 2022.
Who can I app?
You know those teenage girl muses you've got kicking around? Here's a place for them. Harugaizumi is a high school for 1st through 3rd year, generally aged 15-17, though of course, with birthdays differing, the youngest first-years will be 14 (as this is the beginning of the year). Your character does not have to be Japanese or from a Japanese canon; this is an international school accepting students from all over the world.
If you're thinking about your character's suitability for the game, keep in mind the all-ages rating and generally mundane setting, but otherwise go wild. This is an AU, so trans headcanons and the like are perfectly acceptable, as are characters being aged up or down a little if you really want to play that 13-year-old in a high school setting. This is a private game, I trust you people. OCs are allowed too!
Canon Love Live characters are currently not allowed, nor are real people; fictionalized versions of real people are allowed on a case-by-case basis (you can app a Fate/ character, you can't app a Hololive member). Characters from canons that have crossed over with Love Live (e.g. Shadowverse, Granblue Fantasy, Revue Starlight) are allowed, but must be AUed into the setting like everyone else as opposed to being straight from canon.
Canon has a few shades of magic realism; do powers exist here?
Only to the extent of plausible deniability. Nozomi might have spiritual powers, but everything she does is something that a regular miko might do; if she draws a tarot card or blesses a charm, that fits under the plausible deniability umbrella. Likewise, the instances where someone appearing to be a time-displaced older or younger Honoka appears never confirm that it's her, and you could easily brush them off as just symbolically similar randos. Work along those lines when writing your character.
Love Live does play fast and loose with realism during musical numbers, but the best explanation is that's all just visual metaphor. Setsuna can't teleport around the stage (though she does have some impressive pyrotechnics) and Mari's shaggin' wagon doesn't fly. You can definitely make your special effects onstage look unreal, though, if you've got an explanation.
What's the character cap?
This is a small game by design. We're aiming for around 5-10 players, though we'll run with as many as 15.
Do I need a reserve to app?
No, but it's a good idea to reserve your pick anyway in case there's more demand than expected. Unlike with the Dress Rehearsal, we will have a reserve page active.
Is there a network?
In a strictly technical sense, you do have the internet, cell phones, and what have you, and you can add those kinds of posts to your weekly log interactions. Now, if you're asking if there's a network community, no. Play takes place on the weekly logs, event logs for lives, and whatever you might want to post in the interim (e.g. if you're having a party and you want to make a separate log for that rather than put it on the day it takes place in the weekly log). Most interaction will be face-to-face, but again, we do have digital spaces in the setting, so your character can make all the social media posts they want.