OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Snipping in a PBEM game

Often in a PBEM game you’re going to have lots of story threads going off all at the same time. This is okay, soap operas and TV programmes have several stories running alongside each other anyway, and as Humans we’re perfectly capable of remembering what’s happening in each story.

 

Jack Bauer in 24 - they recap what's happened at the start of the episode

Jack Bauer in 24 - they recap what's happened at the start of the episode

 

In a TV show, there is normally only two stories, an A-Story and a B-Story. Soaps can have more as the scenes are often shorter. However, in a PBEM game, depending on the amount of players you have, there could be loads of stories all running separately. Often it’s really easy to loose track of what’s happened in a story, so it’s really handy to have a short summary at the start of the post, just like in the TV series 24 when they spend the first 5 minutes showing what’s happened so far.

So in a PBEM game you use what is called a <snip>. This allows you to insert the last few lines or paragraph from your previous post. If you left your last post on a cliffhanger then this is especially handy, or other players might have to go and find your older post to see what the hell is going on.
The idea is that you put the word <snip> before the paragraph, and <end snip> underneath.

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18 ways to spot a Mary-Sue in your PBEM

So you’ve got a PBEM game, and you’re recruiting for new members. You accept members based on the character biographies they’ve provided to you, but how do you know that these players are going to be any good in your game? Well, you can’t really tell until you see them post.

A Mary-Sue character is a stereotype of RPG games

A Mary-Sue character is a stereotype of RPG games and fanfiction

There is a stereotype character called a Mary-Sue. This is normally a female character who is so perfect that she’s annoying. She resembles all the many character stereotypes all rolled into one. A Mary-sue character is normally a player’s first character, when they don’t realise that they are creating such a stereotype.

Mary-Sue’s aren’t always female, as male characters can have all of these stereotypes too, as well as some more of their own. A male Mary-Sue is sometimes called a Marty-Stu.

The name Mary-Sue comes from a short Star Trek fanfiction story, written as a parody of fanfiction.

Look at the points below to see if you have any Mary-Sue stereotypes in your own game. Maybe your character is one and you didn’t even realise! Take each of these points with a pinch of salt, some of the points mentioned actually make good character traits on their own. But a typical Mary-Sue will use them all.

Character’s Name

1. The character is named after the player, this could include their nickname, first name, last name or all of their names.

2. The character’s name is a noun or word that isn’t normally a name. (Angel, Moon, Chaos etc) This could also be a name of historical/mythical significance that doesn’t relate in any way to the character or the setting of your game.

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Creating a sitemap for Ongoing Worlds website

I created a sitemap of all the pages I’ll need inside the Ongoingworlds PBEM website. I used a piece of free software called MindMap which was very easy to use.

I’ve listed the main pages, obviously there will be more than this, as each form page will need a conversion page to say “thankyou” or to highlight what needs to be done next.

I’ve numbered each page for my own reference, this relates to the mockups I’ve done. Some in Balsamiq like I’ve posted here before, but some just exist as a very rough sketch in my notebook. So far everything is in the layout-only phase, and doesn’t reflect the actual web design, I’m hoping the actual design will just slot easily over the top and not affect the layout of items I’m placing on the pages.

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Sitemap of the Ongoing Worlds website

Sitemap of the Ongoing Worlds website

I find that working like this gives me a focus and a goal. I could go on endlessly tweaking this website and never making it live. But at least seeing all these pages is like a list of things I need to get done. Once I’m happy with these pages I’ll make the site live, and think about adding any additional functionality as a phase 2 thing.

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Website Mockups for Ongoingworlds.com

I’ve created and attached some wireframe images (using Balsamiq) that show what I want and where, so that the designer knows what to design. It looks basic at the moment (as it’s a wireframe!)

Homepage

Muck-up of the homepage

Mock-up of the homepage

The first (and one I’m least happy with) is the Homepage. A lot of designers start with the homepage first, mainly because clients always want to see that first. I actually think the homepage is the least important design, as it’s the one you’ll be looking at the least. Maybe your first visit to the site it exists to promote the site and encourage you to go further. But after that, it exists as nothing more than a landing page with a username and password box to login.

Anyway I’ve tried to show what the site is for without too much explanation, hoping that people will work it out from seeing examples of other games. Something I hate about lots of RPG or PbeM sites is that they don’t really tell you what’s what on the homepage, you have to go into a separate section to see the game posts.

I want to show on the homepage the most recently updated games, so that people don’t think it’s one of those RPG sites that died in 1998 and has been static ever since.

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5 tips for someone joining a PbEM game for the first time

Joining a PBeM game for the first time can be quite confusing, here are a few tips for the newbie.

  1. Get an idea of how frequently you’ll be expected to post. Some games are strict on this, and will remove you from the game if you don’t post after two weeks, and some will be more relaxed and allow you to post as much as you want. Don’t join a game where you’re expected to post more than you can handle.
  2. Take notice of the GM’s posts. In every game there will be someone who takes responsibility for the storyline (this is most likely the GM), otherwise there will be no story, leaving your character with nothing to do. Make sure you take notice of what the GM is posting, as it will contain important story that relates directly to your character.
  3. Take notice of everyone else’s posts. Other members in the game are contributing to the story too, if you post something that conflicts with theirs your game will loose continuity and you might offend other members.
  4. Leave a cliffhanger at the end of your post. This doesn’t have to always be a dramatic life-or-death cliffhanger, but it’s best to finish your post at a point where someone else can take it further.
  5. Communicate with other players. Email other players with ideas about what you could do next, and see if they mind you using their character in your post. Most people will love other people using their characters, but some are protective about their characters and want the courtesy of you asking first. This prevents surprises and other players getting annoyed if you’re stepping in and changing the story from what they had planned.

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Poll – PbEM or PBeM?

Lately I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing “PbEM” instead of “PBeM”. Making the “b” lower case because it’s the insignificant word “by”. But I’ve noticed that when other people use the acronym, they make the “e” small, for “e-mail”. I’m not quite sure when this convention came about, and why certain letters deserve to be uppercase more than others. But I wondered enough about it that I wanted to create a poll to see which was the most popular.

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What do you call an *Action Post*?

As I’m building my new website “Ongoing Worlds” I started to ask myself a question which I don’t know the answer. I’ll have to explain first the functionality I’m building into the website and then you’ll see why the question is important and and how it relates to PbEM/PBP games.

Members of a game will be able to post. This is easy, it’s just a normal web form where you can write your post and send it. GM’s of the game can obviously post too, but I wanted to make sure that the GM’s post is more clear and has more authority behind it. I’ve built in a checkbox that means this post is important to the story, and everyone has to take notice of it and their characters react to whatever plot has just been unveiled.

In my PbEM game we’ve always had one person at a time running a current story. This is usually a GM, or sometimes a member who we trust and has had a great idea for a story. The story is pushed forward by a post we call the *Action post*. The asterisks around the phrase is tradition all comes from a Star Trek game that I used to play. I thought it was an established standard, but it occurred to me that it might not be, and I wanted to check what other people use instead.

What an *Action post* is for
The purpose of an *Action post* is for when a current story is becoming stale, or the characters are wandering about aimlessly without any purpose or direction. If the GM posts an *Action Post* where something major happens, all characters have to respond to it. So in the example of my scifi game, something important will happen that puts the spaceship in jeopardy, and the Captain orders everyone to do something about it.

So is it customary to call it an Action post? If not, what other term do you use?

Returning to the relevance on the OngoingWorlds website that I’m creating, a GM posts a story post as normal, and there’s a little checkbox that they could tick. I want to say “Check this box if this is an *Action post*”, but will everyone understand this?

My other option if this is not good enough is to allow GM’s of a game to change the wording of this option, so that they can insert any terminology that they use. Would this even be necessary?

Please let me know your thoughts!

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Why I'm creating the OngoingWorlds website

PlanetOngoing Worlds is a project that’s born out of my love of PBeM games. I’ve been playing online text-based role-playing games since about 1998, when I first got the Internet at home. I loved the total freedom of using my character to inhabit this total virtual world that only existed in peoples imaginations.

I’ve already discussed in this article about how I’ve ran PbEM games before using Yahoo Groups, which does the job reasonably well, although is limited and to be honest starting to look a bit tired and oh so old fashioned.

Yahoo Groups is limited in that it’s trying to suit everyone, and therefore doesn’t provide tools that would really make life easier for the GM of a PbEM game. Of course I could bitch and moan about this all day, but it’s not their fault obviously because they can’t create all the functionality that everyone in the world wants. I chose to use what they created, so it’s my problem not theirs.

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My first PbEM game on Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups logo

Yahoo Groups logo

The first text-based RPG I joined was a Star Trek game, ran in a Yahoo Group. A Yahoo group was an idea medium for the game, as it allowed you to email one address, and the email would be filtered out to every member in the game. It was a true PbEM game, as it all happened by email.

I setup my own PbEM using a Yahoo Group because I was happy with this format. Then over the years, Yahoo changed slightly and allowed you to view the messages on the Yahoo Group pages. It still kept the functionality of being able to submit posts by email, but you could also do it on the web too, which I actually prefer to this day, as submitting it by email just isn’t as reliable and seems to take longer.

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