The RP is going great so far! Everyone is doing a fantastic job of giving their characters personality and shaping their world.
I have noticed a trend of people introducing additional characters, which is great! However, I also want to make sure that I don't step on anyone's toes as I continue with my own narration. I try to avoid controlling your main characters when at all possible, because I want you to each feel in control of yourselves, but what are your thoughts on the additional characters? I think there's a bit of balance involved. On one hand, I want people to feel free to shape their characters lives and background, and fully immerse themselves in the game. Other people are an important part of your background and environment, so it's natural and expected for everyone to add minor characters to help spice up the story and expand the game world. (Vell's introduction of the innkeeper at the Red Dragon was a perfect example of this. That was great!)
However, at some point, this does start to approach the line where the RP is no longer a game, but instead more of a community driven story, with each person being a narrator and an author, knowing the thoughts and actions of everyone on the metaphorical stage. Because of this, I feel that the actions of major, plot-important characters (aside from each person's individual character, of course) should usually be under the control of the one running the RP. Now, again, there's a bit of balancing to be done here, as having everything in the entire environment run by me would take away a lot of your creative liberty as players, which I definitely don't want to do. I don't want to take away your ability to flesh out the lives and backgrounds of your characters, and I don't want to replace characters that you introduce with my own versions of them that don't meet your expectations as to the actions and personality of those characters. I certainly don't want to limit this to a "choose your own adventure," where each of your responses is only a single sentence, followed by you waiting to see what happens next. So, there will be times where it is necessary for a player to take control of other character (in very rare cases, even other players' characters!) in order to be able to type more than a few words.
So, we have a matter of balance on our hands here. I want to make this the type of RP that you would all enjoy the very most, whether that be through each of you having complete creative liberty over the characters and plot, or whether that means limiting the player's realm of control to their own individual character.
What are everyone else's thoughts on the matter? Maybe I'm the only one who has even noticed anything at all, and everything looks fine to everyone else. If others are also noticing a bit of a problem, maybe we should start outlining a few loose guidelines for posts. For example (and this is just an example,) if someone wants to introduce a new character with any sort of importance to the story, rather than creating the character as part of their post, they can PM me with information about the character and allow me to integrate them as part of my next post.
No one has done anything wrong, so there's no need to feel that you've posted incorrectly or anything like that. Everyone is doing really great! I just want to make sure that we have things established so that everyone will be able to have the most fun possible.