Policy: Becoming a Member

Post by **Faustus** » Mon Aug 22, 2022 11:37 pm

Becoming a member of Plains of Turia is considered an out-of-character (OOC) distinction, separate from in-character concepts like citizenship or slavery. Regardless of character concept, membership comes with the same privileges and obligations for everyone - whether they play free or slave, city-dweller or wagonfolk, taluna or outlaw, or something else entirely. The process is the same:

Start a new thread on the New Characters & Arrivals board, and post your application there; you'll find a blank application on the Applying for Membership thread at the top of the board.
Room Staff should accept your application fairly promptly; we try to respond to these in 24-72 hours.
Congratulations! You're now an Applicant to Plains of Turia. You should now be part of the Applicants usergroup, with greater access to our forums. Feel free to start including Applicant to Plains of Turia in your tags (it's an option, not a requirement). You might also want to check out the other Room Rule & Policy posts on this board, just to make sure you understand how things work around here.
Now roleplay - for the next six weeks (roughly, we don't run on an exact calendar) you'll be an Applicant. Join in the fun, get to know people, see how you like it here. We're not looking for any particular thing, nor are you being evaluated by any strict set of criteria. We want to know who you are and how you fit in with the greater community.
Around the 4 week mark, Room Management will solicit feedback from the rest of the membership - especially those you've been roleplaying or spending time with. For the next two weeks, all members will have an open invitation to share their opinion with us (privately or publicly, as they prefer) regarding your application. If any issues or concerns are raised, we'll do a deep dive into them to make sure we understand all the details before moving forward.
After that, there'll be a conversation between you and Room Management. In a perfect world it'll be a short conversation, where we welcome you to Plains of Turia and formally offer you membership. In some cases, if issues were raised or there were objections, the conversation may be a little more in depth, touching on some issues to watch for or setting some firm expectations alongside an offer of membership. And sometimes, hopefully rarely, we may need to extend the Applicant period or even end it with a denial of membership - it's our hope this is a "never happens" circumstance, but we want to be realistic about all the possibilities.

And that's it. Six simple steps to becoming a member, and most of those are just spelling out how we consider and act on applications. The goal isn't to make things difficult or complicated, but rather to be transparent about how we'll be considering applicants so everyone is on the same page.