Recently my dog chewed up my laptop's power cable and I wasn't able to get on here and do any RPs. In my absence from the site I did a lot of thinking about what sort of RPs would be fun to do (at least for me) and I had a couple of ideas that I thought might be fun and the one I liked best was a Lost Planet style RP.
The basic concept behind this idea is that we have discovered FTL travel and Earth's governments have recently decided to begin expanding out into the universe. even with FTL travel and communications it can take up to a decade to travel any significant distance and communications coming to earth from another star system can take just as long. Earth found a planet that they thought was worth attempting to colonize this planet was either a desert or tundra planet. Instead of sending a scouting party first and colonizing later the government decided to send the colony ship right away to colonize the planet. 60 years later they receive a message from the planet that they are under attack and the message gets cut short. The colony had been in place for 40 years (10 years for the ship to get there, 40 years of peace, and then 10 years for the message to reach earth) and they send a scouting team to try and find out what happened even though the attack would have taken place 20 years before the team's arrival. The team arrives 20 years after the attack and 10 years after the message was received by earth and the RP takes place on the planet as the team tries to find out what happened and see if there are any surviving colonists. I haven't decided whether to make it a desert planet or a tundra one, I would leave that up to any interested people. I prefer desert myself, maybe have oases that are surrounded by dense jungle and a few mountainous regions that are so highly elevated they become frozen and permanently covered in ice and snow so the RP could take place in a variety of terrains and make survival difficult.
I was thinking the scouting team would have a crew of about 4-5 people to keep things from getting out of hand. This, of course, would require people to commit to posting at least once a day to keep the RP from dying. If anyone wants to drop out they can always PM me and their character can be killed off or given to someone else or something. If you won't be available for some time just give someone control of your character or announce in the OOC that they are an NPC and can be controlled by anyone until you get back. If anyone really really wants to join this RP even if the crew is full we might find a colonist or two along the way that could join up.
I'm also thinking that in the case of a desert planet surface temperatures during the day would be about 200 degrees Fahrenheit (about 93 Celsius and is survivable if you have protective equipment, which the team and colonists would have). At night the temperature would reach -40 degrees Fahrenheit (also -40 Celsius. A human can survive it, especially if they have protective clothing). Jungle regions would have lower daytime temps because of the proximity to water and amount of shade provided by the plants, Tundra/mountainous areas would have far lower temperatures because of higher altitude and the team would probably need special equipment to breathe in such low temps and at such high altitude as well. I was thinking mountainous areas would be about -70 Fahrenheit at night and closer to -40 or -50 in the daytime. Jungles would probably drop to about 120-130 Fahrenheit in the day and closer to 0 at night, still very hot and very cold but not as bad as the open desert or the mountains.
This would be casual, but not high-casual, my standards are not as strict as some others on here. All I ask is that your posts be at least one paragraph per character (duh) and that we try to observe some semblance of a posting order. Maybe give the person who is supposed to post next around 12 hours to post and if they don't you can. That is up for debate though, I'm not huge on posting orders so we can use the 12 hour rule or cut it down to just a few hours before breaking the order. Whatever other people are more comfortable with.