[@Rilla] Hopefully this is the right place...I was going to post it in Harbringer's FAQ thread since it was a living document, but they've since stepped down from the position, so I wasn't sure if it was still being updated.

Anyway, I see a couple of 'mission' recruitment threads, like [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/163835-space-raeym-retrieval-operation-recruiting/ooc]this one[/url]. I'm assuming that a mission consists of a task that must be carried out by approved characters, facing opposition controlled by the person GMing the mission.

My question is: Does a thread GM need to be staff, or can we, as players, create and run missions for other players?

And by extension (if yes), what limits are there in terms of the scope and staff approval of the opposition inherent to the mission?

I had a conversation with Circ regarding this in the Discord chat, and I wasn't super clear on what the response was, but the way I ended up reading it was, "If an NPC has any capability/intention of affecting a PC, in any context, they must be submitted and approved as a PC themselves". I'm honestly not sure if that was a correct reading of the response, and the conversation was pretty short, but that was something that I wanted to get more detailed clarification on.

As a smaller example, in a thread going on now, we have the Love Bomb Pirates fighting a group of faceless armed mercenaries run by the thread GM. But in searching through the FAQ and similar resources around, I couldn't find guidelines on whether or not we were actually allowed to run mooks as opposition for ourselves, as said mercenaries are not employed by any currently approved PC. The existence of the thread (retroactively) contradicts my reading of Circ's ruling on the matter, which caused some confusion amongst ourselves when I brought it up in our group chat.

I like making stories for people, and running missions and creating subplots is definitely something that I would do if I understood the bounds in which I was able to do so, so I really just wanted to get clarification on that. Are 'missions' of this nature solely a staff-run thing, or do we have the capability to make similar missions ourselves? Can these missions involve hostile NPCs or hostile phenomenon (e.g. negative space wedgies)? What approval process is involved? Etc.

Thanks!