Oh, you mean character sheets and things?
Yeah, I always require them on my RP's -- as, often times, reading someone's CS gives you a pretty good indication of whether or not this person actually understands anything about the concept of the RP, so, you can clear up a lot of confusion early by catching any mistakes in a CS (or, you know, you can also tell people to just, like...
read the OP). I also just like knowing who everyone's characters are and having an easy reference to go to if I just want to know about their appearance or age or whatever.
I always have a template laid out for players to use, but, I generally don't really mind if the template is tweaked to better suit the player's needs, and I certainly see no issue with adding fields if the player really wants to add all that extra info. Really the only thing that I usually
don't allow is when a player tries to remove certain fields on the template because, well... they were included for a reason.
Actually, in
Omnibus Academy -- an RP where any player can design their own race of magical creatures, so long as they post up a 'race sheet' and have it approved -- I actually wound up having to emphasize that the race sheet template is a
suggestion and that the player can make about as many changes to it as they feel they need to. The reason for this being that the original template for the race sheet was apparently
really confusing for a lot of people, for a whole bunch of reasons, and one of the big issues that people seemed to have with it was that, even when players were recycling a race concept that they used from something else and therefore already had tons of lore to work with, they had a hard time working their info into the fields provided -- sometimes leaving out some really important stuff just because there didn't seem to be a place for it, or awkwardly breaking up certain bits of info into different fields and making it hard to piece it all together. So, because of that, I wound up making some edits to the template and emphasized that players can add and remove as many fields as they want if that's what they feel makes sense for the information they want to get across -- just so long as they
are actually including basically everything that the race sheet asks for. It's not often that I really
encourage players to mess around with the template like that, but, Omnibus is kind of an out-there RP where players are given a lot of freedom to make some ridiculous stuff, so, it makes sense that one template wouldn't be very fitting for every possible race.
Anyway -- I never make players use preset coding, although I
do greatly appreciate using at least some basic BB coding to sort of break sections up and make everything easier to read. If a CS is ever formatted in a very confusing, wall-of-text-y sort of way, I'll usually tell a player to add some coding, and make a few suggestions about how to best go about prettying it up. Beyond that, I don't generally tell players how to code their CS's. Oh, but I
do try to remember to make sure that heavily-formatted CS's are still readable on mobile. I personally don't get online from mobile all that often -- at least not to do anything more than casually poking around the forums -- but, for the sake of people who
are on from mobile regularly, I like to make sure they can read everything, too. And some of the fancier coding options can
definitely break a CS for mobile users. o_o
I also always have my players post their CS's in the OOC instead of making a whole other signups thread, but I
also always have a character list on the first post of the OOC, which includes links to everyone's CS's. Obviously I can't just let CS's get buried in the OOC -- but, I really do feel like having a character list with links to people's CS's makes it easier to get to a CS than scrolling through a signups thread. Not only that, but, if you have lots of heavily-formatted and/or image-heavy CS's, then each page of a signups thread can take quite a while to load and be rather annoying to scroll through... Linking to a CS in an OOC post doesn't have the same problem, since whatever page that CS is on
probably doesn't have too many other CS's posted on the same page as it.
