OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Top Retention Tips

 

This article was written by James Drysdale from Starbase 118 (visit their website).

welcome mat won't you stay a while

Recruitment and retention have been hot topics on OngoingWorlds lately and they’re both important. Attracting players to your game is essential to keep it viable because no matter how good you are, people’s circumstances change and there are many things outside a GM’s control that can take players away from the game, from education or new jobs to expanding family or even caring responsibilities. New players are the lifeblood of our games, so what can we do to increase retention and as ensure our new players want to stay? Here are a few of my favourite tried and tested tips: Read More

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Now that Back to the Future Day is over, it’s time to plan FallFest!

October 21, 2015

October 21, 2015

Back to the Future has long been one of my favorite movie franchises.  Indeed, the original 1985 film was probably my favorite movie for a good portion of my childhood.  It had everything you could possibly want from a classic 80s flick… plus time travel!  Even though Marty McFly and Doc Brown didn’t find simming and online role playing in 2015, we’re still here!

With that in mind, it’s time for us to plan the community’s premier event: The Simming Fall Festival!  And this year we’ll be celebrating FallFest V! Read More

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Myths and Legends

chimera

So, you decide to take a page from history, or the coolest parts at least, and do a game involving myths, folklore, and/or urban legends. But what do you do? You can go scary, fantastical, and more. Heck, try for superhero while your at it! But let’s see what each thing is first. Read More

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What’s more important, recruiting new players or keeping existing ones?

people being social

Last week, Charles Star posted an article stressing the importance of recruiting new players (read it here). Crimsyn had an interesting point about this in the comments, I’ve pasted it here in case you missed it: Read More

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We are now accepting nominations for the 2015 Squiddies!

Ongoing Worlds Medal for Superior Online Role Playing

Ongoing Worlds Medal for Superior Online Role Playing

That’s right–it’s time to nominate the best of the best from the entire roleplaying and simming community for our top award presented annually:  The Ongoing Worlds Medal for Superior Online Role Playing (affectionally known as the Squiddies).  Nominations will be accepted through October 31st. Read More

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Recruiting: The Lifeblood of Role Playing

Fish joining others in another goldfish bowl

No single factor plays a greater role in determining the success of a sim or club than recruiting. Read More

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Some random planet/world name generators

coruscant from star warsApologies if I’ve posted many articles about random generators, they seem to be the most popular, so here’s another!

Here are some useful links to random generators for naming your planets/worlds/realms, ideal for sci-fi or fantasy games:

 

Planet name generator

http://enneadgames.com/generators/planet-name-generator/

Simple, interesting names that can be used for a planet, or for a world/realm in a fantasy setting. Read More

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Class is in Session

teaching class in sessionI have seen many games where the mod has asked you to write three or more sentences per post. While this is a good rule to live by… or should I say write by, not every post can be like this. There have you even been mods should have asked for a certain word count or even a paragraph number. All well and good. But again not every post can have a certain number of words or certain number of paragraphs. In fact, many replies to certain post only done with one sentence or one word. How do we stop this growing trend of short blurbs for posts? Read More

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Setting Expectations – the foundation of your game

floating city

Not to long ago we saw an article about Respect, while I personally found some of it to be a bit unrealistic the author touched on some very valid and real frustrations that both writers/players and moderators feel in our particular style of collaborative creativity. With that in mind I thought I might take a stab at it as well.

We have all been in one or more games where the interaction comes to a screeching halt or we go on to check posts and find we were left behind in the dirt.  It happens, all the time, even in the best of groups, and feelings get hurt, people get mad, people leave and whole games can die because of it. Read More

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What’s in a Name?

hello my name is meaningful

So you’ve created a brand new game, you have everything set out the way you want it, and you even have the world mapped out for your future players. The only thing left is to try and figure out your character group names. In some cases, the default names are good enough. But you may want to put in something different. So how do you come up with some awesome group name? Read More