No prob I'm happy to explain. The way my wife and I played it, it was like constructing a story together with the other players. The PC's aka Player Characters (you guys 'n gals) create your characters and only have control with that character for the most part.
Example: Jeff (PC) hurried to catch up with his teammates from Beta. He couldn't believe they were about to go on their first field mission, true it was simply a search and rescue but still, they'll be out of their training uniforms and wearing their "hero" gear. Jeff adjusted his belt which gave him his gravity control powers and made sure the gauntlets were attuned to the correct waveband (for the tenth time). As he entered the hangar he caught a look from Mr. Jeffries aka Box who would be leading the mission along with Puck, and stopped fidgeting with his gear. Mr. Jeffries tried to instill in Jeff that over checking your tech usually ended up creating problems rather then fixing them. Jeff lined up with his fellow teammates taking a place beside Bethany. End Example
Here we see the PC describing actions and inner thoughts and perhaps even an incident that happened earlier with Box regarding Jeff's gear. I'll put forth the situation and the players react to it and each others actions. If a previous poster used his super strength to knock Absorbing Man through a wall you can follow up on that. Be flexible but also don't hog all the spotlight. Think of it as a page in a team book where this is your page to strut your stuff but you can't solve the problem in a single page alone. Also, don't take direct control of other players. Little things are fine, short responses that are in-character to how they have been portrayed, having them leap out of the way of a crashing building. It keeps the story flowing but doesn't peeve people off that they are being controlled.
OK Example: Jeff halted the fall of the statue by creating a gravity bubble above Bethany and giving her time to scramble out of the way to which she gave a thankful nod.
Not OK: Jeff lifted Bethany off the ground by negating the gravity around her and brought her to the fifth floor. She then proceeded to enter the apartment and scan for survivors, when she could not find any she radioed back to the shuttle and gave a report. If the PC playing Bethany didn't give permission to be lifted up in her own post then it shouldn't have happened. In fact in that case Bethany could have taken over and just used Jeff's power (since he already offered) to describe her ascent (story flow and frees up both characters, Jeff no longer has to wait for a response and Bethany can continue posting). However. Jeff's PC continued using Bethany even after he lifted her up. In a previous post Jeff could have offered to lift Bethany to the fifth floor then end his postleaving it up to Bethany's PC.
I hope that didn't seem too complicated. But considering RPG manuals are usually a couple of hundred pages I think I did alright. I hope everyone is alright with how I handle using other characters, I had no problems doing it this way in my last group. Generally people are respectful and usually don't even do it until we have a few pages of posts under out belt so we get a feel for each others characters. Even then the usage should be minimal. I don't mind PC's using NPC (non-player characters) to interact with. You just can't be having them do things that gives your own character special treatment "Guardian helped modify my belt so I can now lift up an aircraft carrier!" Uhh, no. During combat scenes the villain can also be used sparingly if he is directly interacting with your character.
Also no, there is no dice rolling as that slows a forum story way down.
Posts are put up in the story thread which I'll create when we have enough people.
I'll create a separate thread for OOC (out of character) chatter regarding the story so their are no interruptions. Actually this could be the OOC thread and character bios.
Please use spell check. It helps with story flow. Some like to type out in word or office first for spell check then copy/paste to the forum.
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