[Poll] What was your biggest challenge in learning Mizahar?

[Hania]

I honestly haven't had too many problems catching the way things work around Miz, that weren't my own fault . The only real sticking point for me is a few of the magic skills. I can't seem to wrap my head around them because they don't seem to have borders or a "This will happen if" scenario. And that may be the way it's supposed to be, it's magic, if there were set rules then it'd lose it's sense of danger and mystique. An over simplified system would make it too easy to use, and not as fun for the technical writers. Maybe more in-depth? Dunno, just mso here.

Other than that it's been finding people to thread with. I know I'm in a big nasty jungle and stuff but I have ventures elsewhere in the world too. Now, granted, I jump in chat with the intention of finding someone to write with but then I open my mouth and this guy's sense of humor and funny isn't always copasheeshee. I take the knock for that one however other than chat there's only a limited number or ways the newbies (many gun shy about PMing others, especially the well established ones) can get in touch with others. Don't have the slightest idea in how to fix that...maybe make use of chat's other channels? I just know everyone's friendly and awesome regardless of thread relations

[Siiri]

Same with Duskie and the Myrian, I'm having trouble with the magic system. Probably why is stick to PCs that are combat types. The roleplaying tips at some of the wiki write-ups help but I'm having trouble RPing it when my PC is just starting to learn a particular magic skill. It's easy enough to learn a physical skill, like you run when you want to learn running, swim if you... you get the idea. But it's different with magic. How do you start learning, say, glyphing? What about channeling djed? What about teaching such skills to other PCs who have no experience in using any sort of magic? While I think it's good that there are no hard and definite rules about magic like what Hania said, I want to know if what I'm RPing out is actually the wrong way to learn/teach/interact with a particular magic skill. Sure, I can BS doing a skill just to get XP in it, but I'd rather do it right so others would too if they want to use it as basis for their own magic threads.

Like what Dusk said, in-game 'samples' would be awesome.

[Eshara Aravell]

As a newbie, I know that most of the problems I have are getting started, because there is just too much to read before you feel confident about joining, and I still have some things that I think are lacking. Also, the geography is not completely fleshed out, which is a bit of a hiderance, and I only found the city list today, after two weeks of reading.

Also, the thing about a fixed maximum of 50 base skill also doesn't work too well in my opinion if you would like to create characters over 35 years old, because characters over 35 years old can, and in my opinion, would generally have base skills of over 50. But that's my opinion. Maybe you should have a staggered skill system? Where people of different ages get different base skills?

[Jilitse]

Geography and How to Move Around
While the charts and maps are helpful in a way, we all know they are far from being complete, or at least being user-friendly. Up until now there's no one way of traveling from one point to another or a caculation of doing so. There should be some kind of prescribed metric by which we could check our own travel time against.
I also heard from Goss a while back that the Map needs to be done because the dots are inaccurate and aren't really showing the right distances (wrong approximation). I hope that these two things will be high on the list of Things-to-Do to make Miz more friendly to newbies.
It would follow that I am also curious about weather and climate. We could infer from what's in the wiki, but I think that it would be nifty to see the seasons fleshed out. This may bring about the development of agriculture (per region), and traveling (no caravans during winter, etc).

Money System
We know there are different kinds of currency, but right now we don't really have a list that could sort of work like a foreign exchange tabulation. It gets worrisome when you don't know how much worth a Miza is in other currencies!

How to Get Started in General
Everything is in the wiki, and that's true, but when I started I was actually more confused when I tried to follow the list in the wiki than when I had my friend tell me what I need to do. I'm not saying I'm better than other people, but relative to the kind of reader that I am, I already had difficulty navigating around the site - took me a few days to familiarize myself. I really preferred a real person than an overwhelming help list when I started - and I know we can't assist everyone personally.

Anyway I'm just saying that it really made me frustrated at first - so easy to miss where to start roleplaying, where to put the CS, what to put in the CS, what not to put in the CS. I'm very lucky to have many people gladly assist me and not shove me away when I was still new!

Might I also add that registering for the wiki and the forums separately was also a confusion for me at first!

Magic system
After picking Animation, I was really confused. Am I doing this right, am I doing it right? I think that I haven't practiced as much recently, but I would have to say that it was as challenging as it sounded awesome. I would say that it is among the magical disciplines that requires you to have former knowledge on esoteric stuff so that you can play pretend.

Until now, I worry about putting style into my magic. There are magic for beginners like, Reimancy one of the easiest to RP imo. But there are also hardcore magic like Alchemy, which, to this date, I am still unable to clearly understand. Grasping magic became easy because most of my first threads were graded by Tarot, and he provided me feedback and endless questions to my queries.

The hard thing about it is that there is always more than one way to interpret the magic... I like that about Miz, but sometimes I worry that I might be bringing it too far, or imagining it badly, or doing it wrong. I know that there are boundaries for using Magic (one of the good things that I'm using a World Mage, and not need to fear overgiving)... but yeah, overgiving is also a very big question for most magic users, how far is far enough? Would producing a big ball of fire cause you headache, convulsions, LBM? How big, how dangerous, how far?

Those are my thoughts for now.

[Mao]

Definitely magic, ESPECIALLY alchemy. And how I wanted to wrap my head around alchemy, seems like a fun magic tbh!

[Nivex]

I picked 'Timestamping' and 'Money system', though I never did anything with magic so that could be challenging. Timestamping was a little confusing because of how different it is to our world, and I never played an RP that did that (Though I love it because it adds a pretty cool environment). My problem was I didn't know what the current day was. It took me a bit to figure out the timestamp is on the main page, and I make up my own day.

Money was confusing to me because of the housing situation. I didn't know if being a Vantha meant I go a free house in Avantha or not. Luckily a mod cleared it up for me, so it wasn't a problem for long.

I should have checked skills to, only because, again, I never been on an RP that was so well in depth that they do this. I love it that much more though.

Things were pretty clear on the Lore that I wasn't confused for long. In only a couple of days, I got everything in order and I'm playing pretty well. This site is in depth but you can figure it out easy too.

[Sira]

I have to admit, I lurked around Mizahar for nearly two months before ever creating a character, then I created three and none of them got beyond one or two threads before I gave up. Then I lurked some more, and discovered Wind Reach, and that's when I really got into it. So, yes, Mizahar can be a very intimidating place.. it is one of the most in depth and well thought out rp sites I have ever seen, but it is still in development as well, so that makes it hard. To touch a few subjects that have already been touched:

Travel: Travel is very intimidating. A: its dangerous... which is okay. But then there's B: Nobody knows how long it takes. Everyone seems to have touched on this, and I'd like to reiterate the point... don't really know what to do about it though.

Magic: Magic is very confusing, but I think its vagueness is what makes it so interesting to play. Anyone who is familiar with any of the Mage games form whitewolf should be familiar with how Mizahar magic works, somewhat. Especially in the older Mage games, where magic was extremely open ended. The point behind it was that while a singular school of magic could accomplish certain effects, the actual method of getting to that effect could vary from mage to mage. It seems to kind of be that way here in Mizahar. Mages of a single discipline all have similarities, but each interprets and wields his magic in his own unique way.

...I really don't know where I was going with all of this, and seem to have lost my point entirely, so I'm just going to stop here and press submit.