OngoingWorlds blog

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

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5 ways to advertise your roleplaying game

join my play-by-post game

Often it’s very difficult to advertise your roleplaying game. Lots of new games are created every week, so there’s a lot of competition. What you have to do is advertise your games to get new members, but this is quite difficult. It’s most likely that you don’t want to spend any money on advertising, so it’s not like you’re going to pay for a large billboard to advertise your game, and even if you did you probably wouldn’t be hitting the right audience, roleplayers.

What you want to do is make sure that when you do advertise your game, you’re doing it to the right people.

Here are some ways you can advertise your game and make sure you’re showing it to the right people:

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What to do when your Facebook roleplaying account is deleted

Facebook logo in a coffinFacebook can decide whether your roleplaying character lives or dies.

Facebook doesn’t like roleplayers, and if it sees that you have a separate account that you use for roleplaying, your account might be deleted. I’ve written about the reasons why in this post. One of the roleplayers I heard about being deleted was Fleet Admiral Michael Knight, roleplaying as a Star Trek character. He had to recreate his profile.

Michael Knight on FacebookI made up a new e-mail address and then a new profile. Luckily i am friends with a few RP people in RL so they re added me and told other people to add me. was quite easy really. but was a pain in the butt having to make up a new profile.
FltAdm Michael Knight on Facebook

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Facebook hates roleplayers

no roleplaying allowed on facebook

In a recent article I explained how you can use Facebook for roleplaying. You can create a new profile for your character and post to your own wall and other people’s walls as your character, speaking as if you are the character updating their own Facebook account.

But roleplaying is something that Facebook doesn’t like.

Vice-Admiral KirkI just personally feel that Facebook doesn’t like our Hobby shall we say. It is a means of escaping real life pressures but facebook won’t allow us to do that.

Vice Admiral James T Kirk on Facebook

Facebook might delete you

That’s right, if you don’t use Facebook the way they intend for you to use it, your account might be deleted. If that happens, there’s no way to get it back. All you messages are deleted, all your wall posts deleted, all your friend connections, all your photos, all your Farmville scores are all deleted.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve experimented recently with having a separate roleplaying account for Facebook and made some connections with other roleplayers. At least once a week I heard that someone’s account had been deleted, and they’d had to create a new account.

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#Multiverse IRC event will be back next year

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the 4 day IRC event called #Multiverse. The event was to bring the IRC roleplaying community together and to grow it.

The community you see on DarkMyst is the best collaboration and community of players that many have ever seen amongst IRC role-playing community.

It’s an amazing group of talented and friendly people. Bringing folks together and creating the effort that you see was risky and an incredible challenge to do but it has worked out quite well and has been part of a massive and on-going plan to bring renewed interest and growth to the community.

Ryan, Network Coordinator, DarkMyst IRC Network

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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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I've created a new game, now what?

So you’ve just created a new game, given it a title and a description (if not, go back and see my article “How to create a game in Ongoing Worlds”). And you might be wondering what you have to do next. Your game is merely skin and bones, and you need to do a few things to flesh it out, by adding an image, some initial characters, and develop the story by writing some posts. You’ll probably want to do either of these things next, but you can do them in any order.

Brand new game

Add an image to your game

The image will display on your game’s homepage, next to the description you’ve already written. This image will be shown on the “All Games” page so make sure it’s inviting to the kind of people who you want to join your game. Click “Edit this image” under the default image and choose an image from your computer.

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How to create a game on OngoingWorlds

Ever wanted to run your own roleplaying game? There are many ways you can run your game, either using a forum, or creating an email newsgroup, or using a Yahoo Group.

Use OngoingWorlds!

OngoingWorlds has been specifically created for roleplaying games, so it’s better than trying to get a forum or Yahoo Group to do something it wasn’t intended for.

With Ongoing Worlds, you’ll be able to approve pending members with a simple click, and this will automatically put their character profile into the Character List. Also as a Moderator, you’ll be able to edit the questions that you ask new members when they apply to join.

Create a game

On the Ongoing Worlds website, click “Create Game” at the top.

Click create game

Login or Register first

You need to login for the next step. If you already have an account login with your username and password. If you’re a new user, click register now.

You’ll now be taken to the New Game page

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4 day IRC roleplaying event #multiverse

If you’re a roleplayer and use IRC, you might be interested in an event happening this week called #Multiverse. The event starts on 11th November and lasts for four days. Players from across many IRC networks and communities are invited to participate.

portal to another world

I asked Ryan from DarkMyst about the event and got this reply. As the event has already started, I’m just going to paste his reply below:

One of DarkMyst’s primary areas of focus right now is to bring the IRC role-playing community together and grow it. I am incredibly passionate about this and it’s become my personal mission to ensure its success. With the decline of IRC role-playing over the years and the struggles that it has faced, we have an opportunity to make a play to reinvigorate this wonderful community and bring folks together. That’s why #RPG-Hub was started – to make it easy for a new player to jump in, socialize with like-minded individuals, and find a game on DarkMyst that’s perfect for them. We do extensive advertising to promote the network and community on creative writing and role-playing websites, we are ranked top on Google for hundreds of text-based and IRC role-playing related keywords, and have an easy-to-use website that focuses on new players and bringing them into the community. The work that’s been put into things and the end result you see is a culmination of years of progress, and it’s starting to be noticed across the creative writing and role-playing communities.

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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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