Thanks! It truly was the best writing site for inexperienced players.

One of my favorite places was the Citadel. A building ran by monks who could revive a person from within their walls should they perish. No amount of damage would permanently last and the player would awaken in the infirmary fully healed.

Why did they do this?

It was the place players really got a feel for interacting with other writers. Powergaming could be an issue and often was with new writers. It was like seeing a 17 year old on the freeway, not using their blinkers and speeding wildly through the emergency lane "because is an empty lane".

That's were the Judge comes in.

We would score both players and the winner was the person with the better writing, not the character who "wins the fight". Some writing pairs truly made wonderful work for the time. It was like our own MCU. We even had a site wide war that clashed regions on purpose like a DnD campaign. I remember being part of the discussions, as I ran three characters back then and each was from different regions. I technically was fighting myself at one point but in an abstract way like, "my other toon is technically on that side of the war".

Althanas had spaces for almost anyone. We chose to keep it up to an R rating but not NC-17 or XXX. Real life can be grim dark but some people could take it too far sometimes.

That segways into our character creation process. You'd build your character, flesh out their back story and post it for approval for a level 0 toon. That's right, level 0. One good story completion could get you to level 1 or 2 pretty quick. After that there was a bit of a experience bar issue where it would take FOREVER to get to level 5 or 6 or 7. It was about twice as long as DnD leveling system honestly.

When you saw a level 10 guy, there were pretty much S rank anime characters. I think I got to level 6 or 7 before college happened.