For GMs: 5 things to say to your members OOC
OngoingWorlds is a great place to post chunks of story that you can share with your other members, but there’s no reason you can’t use it to send OOC (out of character) messages to your entire group. In a forum you might have a separate thread for this, but as you’ve noticed OngoingWorlds is a bit simpler than this (which in many ways is better – it’s intentional!). So when you post an OOC message it’ll get sent to all members just like your normal story post.
How do I send an OOC message?
Just create a post as normal, but write OOC at the start of the subject line. How you write this is totally up to you, it’s no different to writing a normal post.
So what should I be telling my members?
1. Announce a competition – Part of running a successful roleplaying game is about creating a community, and a good way to do this is to challenge your members with a competition and maybe even offer a reward. If you don’t want to give away a real-life prize (which can get a bit faffy when collecting someone’s address and sending their prize through the post) you could offer them an award instead. If you haven;’t yet given any of your members an award, you can learn how to do that here (LINK).
2. Update them on the story – If your story has been going on a long time it might have taken many twists and turns and might be now a little confusing. To keep events fresh in your minds why not post a regular summary of the story so far, this will also help your new members catch up without having to read every one of your posts.
3. Invite them to something – If your game has a Facebook page or Twitter account, or blog or forum you might want to occasionally remind your members to go visit it, and maybe engage in some OOC chatter socialise?
4. Tell them something – If your game has a specific theme or is based on a TV series or book, you might want to update your members on interesting news that they might be interested in. There might be some common interests that your members have that they’d really appreciate being told about.
5. Ask them something – Depending on how you run the story in your game, your members might already be able to dictate where the story goes next, but they might not feel like they’re able to and are waiting for you to take the lead and tell them what to do. Why not ask every now and again for ideas about where the story should go, which characters should interact and what would be cool to do in the future.
