OngoingWorlds blog

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

Oct
26

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Things All Ongoing Worlds Members Should Know

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, Character Development, OngoingWorlds guide, Roleplaying community, Writing tips Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Ongoing Worlds community is about as open as you get. Anybody who can access the internet and understands English can join. There are no rules nor protocols listed anywhere except in the game information sections and descriptions of some of the games on the site, and those vary per game. Yet despite that, really becoming a comfortable member of the Ongoing Worlds community and getting the most out of the Ongoing Worlds experience is not quite as simple as it may first appear. Ongoing Worlds offers a substantial number of tools whose value and utility may not immediately be recognizable, and the Ongoing Worlds community itself has a unique microculture, with a lot of values and beliefs that may not be readily apparent either.

In an attempt to help newcomers and veterans better understand the tools at our disposal, how we use those tools, and understand the beliefs of the Ongoing Worlds community, I have worked with the people of the Ongoing Worlds Community Platform to put together a list of ten things that we would like everyone to know and understand about Ongoing Worlds. Many of these are lessons that I have learned through making mistakes, resulting in hurt feelings for me or those that I have interacted with. Hopefully, by sharing this information, others can learn what I have learned less painfully than I did.

Tools

1. Email is Ongoing Worlds’ method for Private Messaging. You can find the email address of any given member by clicking the links to their profile page. Email communication is extremely valuable here on Ongoing Worlds, as it is the primary means through which different OW members can discuss things that don’t need to be publicly displayed for everyone to see. The Ongoing Worlds experience is not meant to be enjoyed alone, and email is the primary means of bridging the physical distance between you and other OW members. Keep in mind that you cannot see another member’s email address until you are an accepted member of a game that they are also in. A quick way to be able to see the email addresses of a lot of other members is to join the Ongoing Worlds Community Platform. Read More

Sep
11

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What’s in a Name?

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs Tags: , Leave a Comment

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

May
28

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Update to character groups

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , Leave a Comment

Some updates to a website take a long time and a lot of effort, but there’s not always something obvious when it’s done. This is one of those changes that’s taken a long time, and the advantage isn’t totally obvious straight away. I’ll start by explaining the problem.

Character groups for the game 'What will be'

Characters can be organised into groups

OngoingWorlds allows you to list all characters on a game’s character page in groups. By default there was a maximum of 10 groups, which wasn’t enough for all games. Another problem was that the order of groups could not be changed, which I’ve now solved by a nice easy drag and drop interface. Read More

May
20

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Updating the default character groups

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , 4 Comments

Cats in a boxI’m currently working on changing the character groups in a game, if you don’t know what these are, look at the character list of any game on OngoingWorlds (for example this one). See how the characters are grouped together? Those are character groups.

Groups will be different for each game, which is why if you create a new scifi game you’ll get a different set of character groups than if you created a fantasy game, although you’ll be able to change these if they’re not suitable to whatever you want.

If you think these default character groups aren’t appropriate or you think they might need changing, now is actually a good chance to speak up and give me some suggestions. This won’t affect existing games, only ones that will be created from now on.

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