Greetings all,

Welcome to my first Voice Report! I wanted to take this time to introduce myself, discuss in brief some of my plans and the like, share some ACC-related news, and give a glimpse into some current usage information from the character sheets. I've also got a new area of my report where I'll be requesting feedback from all of you! Hang on, because this first report is a bit of a doozy!

Who Is Mav?

I've been a member of the DB for most of my life. My first Clan was Satal Keto, but my real first home was Clan Aquillas, where Yacko helped show me the ropes of the club. I've served in every position within a House and Clan and a whole slew on the DC, most recently as Combat Master. Prior to my last couple years of activity as Combat Master, I was largely inactive during college. I was around for the Exodus and was Jac's first DGM before the real world claimed my soul for a time, but I couldn't stay away. Now I'm back, and have been lucky enough to get a chance to share some of my ideas with the rest of you guys... which is to say, I've imposed the Character Sheets and new ACC on all of you. I was a Magistrate to the Voice, and I've helped Sarin with many projects. In the real world, I'm a biology PhD student that travels to exotic locales for research purposes. This gives me plenty of time to help get you guys fun stuff to do, but it also means I have random commitments at strange times and can be gone to Bermuda for a week at a time. ;)

Voice Projects, Updates, and Staff

As Voice, I consider fiction and character development to be my primary spheres of influence. In addition to regular competitions that will help you develop your character and its place within the Brotherhood, my office will continue to develop systems to help encourage fiction and writing as a whole within the Brotherhood. Many of the projects currently ongoing in this office originated with Sarin, and we will be continuing to roll them out as we finish.

My biggest priority is to finish the Fiction Society. I think you all will like the direction we are heading with the fictional background of the organization and the various perks our writers will gain access to, and it is totally unintentionally playing into a major Star Wars event happening soon. For now, all I can share is that advancement through the society will have three paths: participation, skill, and service. A member may easily cross between paths with no trouble. No matter the path, you'll earn nifty rewards and cool stuff!

A minor but significant change is the upcoming implementation of tracking word counts between fiction entries to award CIs. What this means is that if you write 1200 words for one comp, and 800 for another, those "Extra" 200 and 300 words will combine to award you another CI through the magic if JamesCoding. While this change is not yet implemented, it will be soon, and special thanks to the MAA office and James both for the collaboration on this. As before, competition organizers will still need to submit word counts to me for review and awarding.

Remaining on the Voice Staff will be Wally and Rax. Wally is working on a number of character sheet projects, specifically on rewriting Skill tiers and developing additional options for members. Rax is working with Shadow to wikify and thus preserve the Dark Crusade, as well as exploring ways in which members can display their fictional activities. I'm glad to be keeping both of them. If you're curious about opportunities within the Voice Office, I will be opening up applications for one Magistrate and one Praetor position in the coming days, so watch for that news post!

The Antei Combat Chamber

After a discussion with Muz and Sarin, we decided not to open up Combat Master applications for now. For the time being, the duties of CM will be rolled into the Voice position. This is not likely to be a permanent change, but instead represents my desires to continue work on the ACC directly, as there are a number of areas that I'm actively working on, and a hand-off now just wouldn't work so well.

I wanted to quickly mention a feature of the ACC that I've not really talked much about before, but briefly covered in this Discourse post: Elo. Elo, a rating system named after a Hungarian chess player, allows for relative ranking of skill. What's that mean? Basically, when you play an opponent in the ACC in a hall where Elo is enabled, you will gain or lose rating from winning/losing based on how far that member's Elo rating is from yours. The lower that member's rating is compared to yours, the more you would lose for losing that match, and the less you would win by winning. Conversely, you would gain more by beating a member with a higher Elo than you, while also losing less should you lose. Ultimately, we hoped Elo would be a slightly more objective way for members to figure out what other members to challenge... and maybe allow for a bit of bragging rights, too. You can easily browse the Elo ratings board here, or from the ACC Resources menu.

As many of you have read and heard, we will not be having an ACC society. Because of the Fiction Society that is coming, we do not plan to double dip on CIs, which is one of the ways to track participation in fiction activities. Instead, we're rolling out two specialized titles for the most skilled participants in the ACC. These titles are meant to be extremely difficult to obtain. A member achieving Elo rating of 1600 will be known as an Avatar of Strife, while those rare members with the fortitude and skill to reach an Elo rating of 1800 will gain access to the Avatar of Triumph title. A special thank-you goes out to Timeros, who took the time to calculate the number of matches needed to hit different ratings and informed the ACC Staff's decisions regarding these titles.

Speaking of Elo, a new fixture of my report will be highlighting the member that has the highest Elo at the end of a month. Consider this putting a target on that person's back. ;) For the month of September, our member with the highest Elo rating is Andrelious Inahj! Congratulations, Andrelious! In addition to being featured in my report, I've created a Discourse thread here where I will update the list monthly to indicate who has the highest Elo. Next update will be two weeks into October, so plenty of time to get matches in!

The Character Sheet System

While my staff is in the process of revamping descriptions for Skills and Force powers to make them more understandable, we're also looking into adding new Feats, Disciplines, and other customization options that let you create a more unique character. New species are added regularly, and we're always looking for new ideas for features in the system.

Today I wanted to share some of the data on usage for the Character Sheets. First of all, we have a total of 290 active character sheets in the Brotherhood. Of those 290, 13 are NPCs (I think), so assuming I'm not missing anything, that means a whopping 277 active character sheets are floating around the Brotherhood! Second, I prepared a series of tables on the breakdown of the most common Species, Feats, Disciplines, and Skills. I selected only the five most common choices for each category, but the full data are available if anyone is curious.

So what's the take home message from this? Well, other than the massive number of Humans, the system is being used about how we'd expect. Though they're a bit down the list and not shown in these tables, hundreds of members still take advantage of a variety of non-combat skills, such as Leadership, Starship Piloting, Lore, and Manipulation. However, Wally is investigating how we might improve our Skill system, so if you've got feedback there, feel free to contact us!

The Voice's Question

Most reports, I'll have a question (or three related to the same topic) to ask the membership for feedback relating to directions some projects my staff are working on my take. My first question, though, is one near and dear to my heart: Roleplaying. Our system of character sheets was inspired by the FATE Core system, which allows for a lot of very cool, very collaborative roleplaying options. I know many attempts have come and gone at RPing sessions in the DB, but I repeatedly hear interest in it despite past attempts seemingly not meeting with much success. So here goes, members: 1. Are you interested in potentially joining any kind of DB-based roleplaying campaign? 2. Would having it be done over a forum - similar to a run-on, but much more structured - increase or decrease the likelihood of you participating? 3. Would you be more or less likely to participate if you could use whatever your current DB character is?

That's it for this report! A special thank you for Muz and Sarin for giving me this chance!

Voice-Related Links

• Fiction Discourse Category
• Useful Character Sheet System Links
• Useful Antei Combat Chamber Links
• ACC Question and Answer
  

TL;DR

• Fiction society is coming
  
• Wally & Rax are Magistrates; Other positions opening soon
  
• Titles from ACC Elo rating 1600 & 1800
  
• Andrelious has the highest Elo rating for the month of September!
  
• Most of us are not only humans in real life, but also in the DB!
  
• Interested in a roleplaying campaign?
  

Telaris "Mav" Cantor

Voice of the Brotherhood