OngoingWorlds blog

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

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How can you only allow good writers into your game?

writing on paperWe all want our roleplaying games to be a great experience, to be fun community, and a place where our members express ourselves through their characters. Also we want to read really interesting stories from other members in the group, and it’s really annoying if the game gets filled up with terrible writers.

We only want to allow good writers into our game

Not everybody is an award-winning author, not everybody is that great at writing. But it helps to be competent, and come up with good stories that everyone can understand, follow along with, and join in with their own characters.

If you’re the GM of a game, you have to make a decision about who to join your game. You’re under pressure to only let good writers in, otherwise bad writers might ruin everything.

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Writing your first post

Worried girl writing on laptop

You might be confused, you might be cautious, you might feel under pressure that your post isn’t going to be as good as everyone else’s. This is normal when you’re writing your first post in a new roleplaying game, especially if you’ve never roleplayed before. After you’ve made the plunge and submitted your story post, things will get much easier and you’ll get a grasp of what’s going on, and wonder why you were worried in the first place.

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Using Facebook for roleplaying

Facebook logoMany people use Facebook as a place to roleplay as a character. Facebook is one of the most advanced websites for keeping in touch with your friends and allows you to post regular updates that your friends can see and comment on. There’s great potential here for roleplaying as a character, but there’s also some really annoying limitations, the main being that Facebook really don’t like roleplayers and might remove your profile.

Roleplay your character’s social life

In other forms of roleplayign you might be used to playing the part of a character to create a story, or complete a campaign. Facebook is a lot more social, and you can really assume the role of your character and interact with other people as if you’re acting out your character’s social life.

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What is godmodding and why is it annoying?

Mr Perfect

Often God Modders use characters that are “too perfect”

God Modders have been a burden of text based roleplaying games for a long time, and they can really annoy other members who like to develop their story gradually at a decent pace, only for the story to be taken on an unusual sidetrack or finished prematurely and undramatically. In this article we’ll explain what god modding is, why it’s annoying, and some possible solutions to stop these members from ruining everyone else’s enjoyment.

So what does God Modding mean in play by post games?

In play by post games there usually aren’t usually about statistics and experience points like more traditional tabletop roleplaying is, play by post games usually have more in common with collaborative storytelling. Each character is portrayed through paragraphs of description alone, and therefore the strength, skills and abilities of the character are open to interpretation through the storytelling, and not a number on a stat sheet.

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Incorporating ethnicities into a character

Meg Gingie

This article was contributed by Meg Gingie, a member of rolplaying game Reign of Blood

by Meg Gingie

While creating a character, you’re faced with several questions about it: What gender should they be? What should they look like? What should their names be? What background do they come from? Nearly all of those questions fall under what ethnicity/ies your character is/are. Going deeper into a character’s history makes it more tangible to other readers and much more interesting for them to read about and relate to.

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9 places to advertise your PBEM game

Update – There’s a much newer version of this article here, updated for 2014

Sometimes it can be difficult to get new members, especially if you’ve only just created your game. People won’t join your game if they don’t know about it, so you’ll have to promote it as much as you can. Here is some puzzle challenges for you to solve the puzzle games and you will love it.

There are many websites where you can fill in a form to advertise your PBEM/play by post game. Some of these will be websites dedicated to advertising role playing games, and some will be forums where members can play games, but have a separate thread for GMs to advertise their games. Dota 2 mmr boost service works in 2 ways. We either play on your account, or we party with you while you play on your account until we get you to your desired MMR. Both ways work just as well, so we’ll leave it up to you how you want to get things done!

I’ve collected a list of 10 websites where you can advertise your game.

PBEM players

www.pbemplayers.com

PBEM-players screenshot

This site allows you to create articles, questions or post a link about your PBEM game. You have to register to become a member, but after that you are trusted to contribute worthwhile content to the site.

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The duties of a Game Master

USS Babylon

The USS Babylon

In this article, I asked three experienced roleplayers to explain what they think it means to be a Game Master, and what they feel are the duties of a GM. I’ve included quotes from the following:

Clayton Martin – GM of Star Trek Babylon

SMAndy – GM of HMS Sovereign and Reapers Union

Andy Longman – Moderator of JMC Blue Dwarf

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

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

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Interview with SMAndy about his forum game "Reapers Union"

Play by post games can be set in many different types of worlds, and can be based in existing worlds portrayed in films, TV programmes and books. SMAndy has created a play by post game based on Japanese Anime series “Bleach”. His play by post game is played using a proboards forum which you will find here. I asked SMAndy some questions about Reapers Union.

Reapers Union

Reapers Union is based on the anime series "bleach". It's played using a forum

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Examples of great world building in films

If you’re creating a new brand new world for the setting of your roleplaying game it helps to look at some examples first, demonstrated on the big screen. Below are some worlds from films which might give you a good starting point when creating your own world. You might also want to look my other article about world ideas to use for the setting of your game.

Pirates of the Caribbean

Pirates of the Caribbean

In this world of Pirates and swashbuckling, the films follow the same characters but there’s actually a lot more going on in the world. There’s a crew of undead pirates, a crew of seamonsters, and toffee-nosed gentry from the East India Trading Company, as well as some voodoo magic for more of a supernatural element to the world.

It would be easy to take this world and use it for a roleplaying game. Your characters could be the crew of a Pirate ship, and you raid any ship that comes near whilst avoiding any ships that are hired to catch you. Or if you want to be more legitimate, you could be a simple trading ship which moves from port to port transporting cargo, and avoiding being raided by Pirates. Or you could take on jobs from port Sheriffs to track down and destroy all Pirate ships that are causing problems for other ships. As the world has supernatural elements like voodoo magic and curses, this could give your characters plenty of interesting and ludicrous things to do.

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation

In the Terminator films we see snapshots of the grim future where robots have taken over, and in Terminator Salvation we see more of that world. The robots have huge flying ships, as well as human-like robots and many other weird contraptions.

Humans are farmed, and collected and kept in colonies. The Humans that have escaped work as freedom fighters, fighting against the robots.

Your characters could be the Human resistance, fighting against the robots. This world also has a lot of scope for time travel, as time travel is used by both the robots and the Humans to alter the course of the future. This means possible missions could be to travel back in time to before the robots took over (to our present, or further in the past), and try to stop the robots, or to prevent the robots from travelling back to the future and attempting to kill John Connor, or even your characters own parents.

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