OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

Mar
6

By

Rewarding your members with awards

Category: OngoingWorlds site news, Website Improvements Tags: 3 Comments

squid trophy

You might have seen the mockups that I’ve put on Facebook already, showing a peek at a new feature in OngoingWorlds that allow moderators to give Awards to their most worthy members.

Give Awards to your members

As  a GM there are times when you might want to reward your members for some really exceptional storywriting, or maybe some good collaboration with another member, or going above and beyond to help out with a group event or competition. These are the times when you might want to give them something to say thanks.

Read More

Jan
4

By

How I have been using Facebook to advertise Ongoing Worlds

Category: Advertising your game, OngoingWorlds site news, Website Improvements Tags: 2 Comments

Ongoingworlds facebook pageSo I’ve created this website called Ongoing Worlds. I think it’s pretty cool but I got to the point after I’ve put it live to the internet where I realised it’s missing something. Members! So I had to go about getting people to use the thing, quite nervously biting my nails because I’ve put so much effort into building that site that I really don’t want it all to be wasted if nobody likes it.

With Facebook dominating the news lately as the most popular social network in the world, I had to at least consider it as a way to promote the website. I’m a keen user of Facebook anyway to chat to my friends, but I didn’t really have a lot of friends on there that were roleplayers.
Read More

Oct
2

By

Examples of great world building in children’s films, inspiration for your roleplaying game

Category: Inspiration for writing, OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

finding nemo

In my last article about taking inspiration for worldbuilding from films, I said it was best to have a look at some examples, demonstrated brilliantly on the big screen. Read More

Sep
24

By

Website Update – Post Summary and Formatting options

Category: OngoingWorlds site news, Website Improvements Tags: , , , Leave a Comment

I’ve added two great new features to the Ongoing Worlds website this week, as well as fixing a few bugs that were causing problems.

Post Summary

This was something which was inspired by the Yahoo Groups page that I’ve been running my Blue Dwarf game on for over 10 years. A table allows you to see how many posts were submitted each month, and different years will appear on different rows underneath. It’s a great way to see at a glance how long a game has been running for, and how popular it’s been.

If you’re worried that a game might be too involved for you, and has hundreds of posts per month, then you’ll be able to see on this table. Or the opposite, if a game seems to be struggling with only a few posts per month and you want a faster paced experience, you’ll be able to tell by looking at this table.

Post summary

The post summary, showing posts per month since the game started

This table will show on your game’s homepage, and will only show if you game has more than 20 posts.

Read More

Aug
27

By

Flashback week roundup

Category: Inspiration for writing, OngoingWorlds site news Tags: Leave a Comment

The OngoingWorlds event “Flashback week” has now ended. But this doesnt mean you have to stop writing your flashbacks!

The event encouraged you to write a flashback to your character’s past, to possibly explain something about your character for the purpose of character building. You can find the original article explaining flashback week here. Also for some inspiration and encouragement I posted an article with 10 ideas for a character flashback and also 7 movies that use flashbacks to show more of the plot, or better develop a character.

Read More

Jul
17

By

New feature: Character tagging in posts

Category: OngoingWorlds site news, Website Improvements Tags: , , 2 Comments

I want to let you know about a new update to the OngoingWorlds website that I’m quite excited about! Now, when you write your post, you can select which characters are in the post. This will show the characters names and thumbnail photos down the right-hand side of the page when you’re reading the post.

I’ve been talking about this feature for months on Twitter and to any interested people who I’ve talked to directly. I even did a blog post back in December, about why this feature is so cool. It’s part of what I want the site to be about, making it easier to see information at a glance. Being able to see a quick snapshot of the characters involved, you’ll quicker be able to see what the post is about.

Read More

Jul
1

By

Delete your abandoned games

Category: OngoingWorlds site news 9 Comments

There are many websites where you can advertise your PBEM/PBP game. It’s unfortunate though that so many of these types of site aren’t updated regularly enough. In today’s world of social media, Twitter, Facebook, etc, many of us check websites regularly, and if we see that nothing has been updated we’ll check back less frequently, and eventually we’ll not check back at all.

There are many websites where you can create a PBEM/PBP game. Often these will be on forums, or Yahoo! Groups, or other such hosted solutions. It’s also pretty easy to setup a PBEM game using each of these ideas, all you need is something to type with and an imagination. The choice of places to host the game also means that if the game isn’t working, it’s not hard to setup somewhere else, and because all of these solutions are free – it doesn’t matter to users if they abandon a game without even making clear that it’s closed.

Read More

May
21

By

Interview with Mike Bullen, GM of Wizards Inc PBEM

Category: OngoingWorlds site news, Play-by-post discussion Tags: , , 1 Comment

Wizards Inc office building

Wizards Inc is about Wizards in a modern day office block

Many many role playing games are set in a fantasy world, each with their differences in how you use magic. Fantasy is a staple of Play-by-post games too, and it allows the member’s characters to live their lives in a rich and exciting world where the only limits are our own imaginations.

Mike Bullen has created his own play-by-post game where the characters are Wizards. What is most unusual is that instead of being set in a typical Dungeons and Dragons type world, this one is set in our own world. Wizards Inc is a game about some Wizards who work in an office block in England. They solve problems for clients using their magic, but try to keep their wizardry secret from normal people.

I’ve known Mike since he joined up for my Blue Dwarf play-by-post game, and is a fun writer. I’ve asked him a few questions about his Wizards Inc game.

Read More

Apr
26

By

You can now add character photos

Category: OngoingWorlds site news, Website Improvements Tags: , , 20 Comments

The OngoingWorlds website has now been updated so that you can add photos to your character profiles. The photos will show when you view the individual character pages, as well as on the “Characters” page for each game.

All games have been upgraded, and any new games which are created will have this functionality as standard.

Add a photo for your character

To add a photo for your character, view the character’s profile, and click “Edit Character” (note: you can only edit characters that you own, or if you’re a Moderator in the game you can edit all characters in your game).

Read More

Apr
26

By

Original PBEM games on OngoingWorlds

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Leave a Comment

This blog was created initially so that I could chart the progress of the creation of the OngoingWorlds website, with a few articles to help people out when creating their own PBEM games. Also I’ve used it to talk about new features, and how I should progress with creating certain features of the site – as I want to make sure I’m creating something that will be really useful for GMs.

But now as the website has launched, I’m going to use this blog to also report on the progress of the PBEM games that people have created on the website. So far there have been two major games created on the website, these are Wizards Inc, and Omega 7.

Read More

Newer Posts »