What Can I do about sham characters and Idiots ?

Latley, people in the TMP have been bugging me. Under a different name i found a person that was acting as if she were apart of El Defensa. Characters have been acting like they know that Gina and El Defensa secretly sell weapons and been blurting it out in public, they have been telling ME about it under different names I have. I feel i have to go undercover now and then to search for things like this. This disturbs me, I feel like my storyline is'nt safe from players that think they can jump into it without any authorization. I would like to know what steps i can take to protect me and my cast from things like this. Keep in Mind every time i have seen this happen i have let the players in PM know of the storyline, yet i still see it.

That's impersonation.

You should get the names, dates, and times.. and submit it to Pounamu or Adele

That's really the best answer. Unless a Wizo has a better idea..

It's not exactly "impersonation". Impersonation is primarily when someone is pretending to be site or company staff. It is stetched to include when one player is pretending to be another player or another player's character. Sounds like here we've got copycats, people who just think it's cool to copy the idea, or tagalongs/wannabes who are trying to join in without checking it out first.

There is no rule against copycats or wannabes in the CoC. It's something that you need to try and deal with yourselves at the start. We're not here to police individual stories or groups, it's out job to try and keep the place working overall. If the situation turns into something else, that's another matter. (See below)

What you need to do is:

1. Politely but clearly contact these players OOC, eg through PM. Tell them straight out that they are not part of your story and ask them to stop pretending that they are. If you think you may play with them some time in the future then tell them that also but make sure you are clear that their "jumping in" without checking with you first is unwelcome.
   Make sure they understand the situation. If you can, take note of the names that you contact and /time and room details. That way you will know who you've talked to and who you've just heard about if their names come up again.
2. Make sure your own players are in the know. It's pointless trying to stop other players from thinking that they are part of your story if your own team accepts and interacts with them.
3. If you are having difficulty because characters your group does interact with are assuming that the outsiders are for real, post a list of cleared characters here on the boards where people can refer to it.
4. * If a player refuses to accept that they are not part of your story and contnues trying to force their way into the story despite your clear requests that they dont, that would be Harassment. At that point yes, call us WizOs in to help you. But if it really does come to that it would be a help if you had those names/rooms/times so that we can see "yes, there's definetly a history and she's really tried to stop this but ________ is ignoring her wishes."

Meanwhile, a tip if I may, Gina. No offense intended...
Get rid of that first line on your site's front page that says "El Defensa is a large weapons dealer in new york". Your welcome page should act much like the description of a character - use it to give what people know or see on the surface. Quite likely, other players are following the links across to your site and reading only the first couple of sentances. If you rearrange the info to give the impresion that it really is nothing more than the bulletproofing business and your group's players/characters remember to play it that way, you may have less chance for these problems in the future.

We all know that there's tons of players around who just can't keep OOC info OOC.

I hope this helps,

- Pounamu

Thankee