OngoingWorlds blog

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

Jul
13

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RPG Rating: Provide a standard rating for your game

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs Tags: 1 Comment

RPG ratingA while ago I asked Sarah Carney the creator of the RPG Rating system for an interview. Because I’m an idiot I forgot to publish the article, & it wasn’t until Sarah emailed me a year later (almost on the exact same date – freaky!) that I realised I hadn’t published it. So here’s the interview!

To give you a bit of background info, RPG Rating is a universal rating system which comes as a little graphic you can add to your site to display the levels of bad language, sexual content or violence the game allows. Sarah’s created a snazzy website at rpgrating.com where you answer a few simple questions and can get your own graphic. Read More

Jul
11

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Disown & adopt characters

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, OngoingWorlds guide, Website Improvements Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Part of the updates I worked on last weekend included improvements to the way characters can be “disowned” and “adopted”. Read More

Jul
9

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OWCH awarded to Jack Tennant & other awards

Category: Awards Tags: , , , 1 Comment

The OWCH awardI’m proud to announce that I’m awarding the OWCH award (OngoingWorlds community honour) to Jack Tennant, for being an awesome member in Blue Dwarf and for going “above and beyond” being just a member of a roleplaying game. For months Jack has been recording the Blue Dwarf story into an audio podcast, a task which isn’t as easy as it sounds. it takes careful planning, organisation, practice, a talent for recording your voice and… well… the guts to record your voice in the first place! Believe me it does take guts, and I’m almost an emotional wreck when I record things like the how-to Youtube videos. Read More

Jul
9

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How to: Remove a member and adopt their character

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, OngoingWorlds guide Tags: , , 7 Comments

Adopt a roleplay character

Did you know that characters in OngoingWorlds can be adoptable? Here’s a scenario:

A person joins a game, and creates a fantastic character. Lets call him… Bob. Pegleg Bob who’s a dwarf. And a pirate. (the name or description isn’t important btw, I’m just adding colour to a boring example!). Read More

Jul
7

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Updates on a sunny weekend

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , Leave a Comment

the sun nothing todo with pbem roleplayingI’ve some small updates to announce. This weekend has been baking hot, and for some unknown reason I decided to spend it indoors, sweating my nads off, working on some updates for OngoingWorlds!

New award

Moderators in games can give awards to their members, and they’ll normally all look like a black trophy which you’ll see on many people’s profiles. Most trophies are given to reward excellence in a particular roleplaying game. But I’m going one bigger, and have created a trophy to reward users that have done something extra special for the entire OngoingWorlds community, not just for a specific game. Read More

Jul
3

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Stick your face in a cake for Moderator appreciation day

Category: Events Tags: , 2 Comments

It wasn’t widely announced, but Monday was Moderator appreciation day. I completely forgot until the night before, so didn’t make much of a big deal about the day itself apart from a meek message on our Facebook & Twitter.

Kim from RPRepository put up a fantastic message, thanking all forum moderators. She’d even baked a cake, which she proceeded to stick her face into. Seriously! Watch this:

Read More

Jul
2

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Nomatter how hard I try & ask you to subscribe, it won’t be as good as this video

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: 5 Comments

Stupid subscribe video

I noticed recently that this blog gets a lot of viewers (I assume all cool roleplayers & writers like yourself), but not many actually subscribe, which would make it a whole lot easier for you. Subscribing by email means you’ll get a friendly email reminder when we publish a new blog. Read More

Jun
30

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Maintaining a creative atmosphere and inspiring players

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

Greir Reinard from Starbase 118

This article was written by Amy Drysdale who plays Greir Reinard from Starbase 118

The roleplaying games that stand the test of time are those that can maintain a creative atmosphere and keep their players inspired. There are times when a mission seems to stall for one reason or another and posting rates seem to drop. If left unchecked the game’s players will start to get bored and eventually leave. There are several things that can be done in-game and as a group to keep players interested and inspired in the long term.

It all begins with mission planning and looking at the crew and the strengths they have. By thinking hard about players’ capabilities it is possible to find more creative and interesting ways to include them in missions. Read More

Jun
28

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Show us your desk

Category: Competition Tags: 3 Comments

Sabrina Pandora's writing deskI had an idea yesterday when I saw this cool photo that Sabrina Pandora had uploaded to Facebook of her desk (Sabrina is a roleplayer in Independence Fleet, and the winner from last year’s WBWW competition).

I started to wonder what everyone else’s writing desk looks like. Sabrina’s filled hers with some amazingly geeky collectables, I can only assume this is to give her maximum inspiration when she writes. But what does your desk look like? Is it cluttered? Is it clean? Do you surround yourself with inspiration? Do you even write at a desk at all, or do you write somewhere else?

Share a photo of where you do your writing on our Facebook timeline & we’ll share it, if we get loads I’ll also publish a blog article here with the best 🙂

Jun
25

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The Ball guy

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: 3 Comments

David Ball

David Ball

This is a just a very small article to let you know that the creator of Ongoing Worlds, David Ball (that’s me, hello!) was interviewed recently by Steven Savage from Seventh Sanctum. If you’ve never heard of Seventh Sanctum you should – it’s an excellent website full of automatic generators of character names, alien species names, world names, equipment names, tavern names, disease names, etc etc anyway, you get the picture. There’s loads of really useful stuff there for writers and roleplayers, especially when you’re feeling lazy and need to come up with a realistic name for an NPC or gadget. Read More

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