OngoingWorlds blog

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

Oct
14

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Starbase 118 – serious Star Trek simming

Category: Interviews, non-PBP roleplaying Tags: , 1 Comment

Federation Starbase

Star Trek is one of the most popular genres of play-by-post games, some having been played way back since the 80’s when PBEM games really started. If you want to roleplay in the same universe as Captain Kirk, and Captain Picard, you’ve got plenty of choice of games to join. Many of these Star Trek games have organised themselves together over the last few decades into fleets, allowing many games to be run in parallel sharing the same resources, members and sometimes sharing the same stories.

One of these fleets is UFOP: Starbase 118, which is a fleet of 7 games, each game set aboard a different starship or starbase, and one set on a planet.

I interviewed Miles Unum from Starbase 118, asking him about the fleet. Read More

Oct
10

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The importance of community in Star Trek Freedom

Category: PBEM games, Play-by-post discussion Tags: , , 5 Comments

Star Trek FreedomSome roleplaying games have the staying power to stay around for many years, while some lose their members and close just after a few weeks. A roleplaying game isn’t just about roleplaying, it’s also a community. To find out how important a sense of community is to a roleplaying group I asked Anthony Keen, CO of roleplaying community Star Trek Freedom. When I last interviewed Anthony Keen, it was clear that they’re taking it very seriously and put a lot of effort into both the game and the community. Star Trek Freedom has been around for over 13 years, so they’re definitely doing something right to make their players stick around. They’re really active as a community and socialise together using email, forums, Twitter and Facebook.

PR (Public Relations) is very important to us as its the sense of community and family that holds our game together.

Anthony Keen, Star Trek Freedom

Many roleplaying games focus on the characters in the game, and not so much about their players. It’s common to see a character biography on many roleplaying websites, but Star Trek Freedom also has a personal biography for all players too. You can also see a gallery of player photos here.

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Oct
5

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Welcoming Blue Dwarf to OngoingWorlds

Category: OngoingWorlds site news, PBEM games Tags: 5 Comments

Blue Dwarf

Last week a new game was created on OngoingWorlds that is a big deal for me. It’s technically not a new game at all, it’s a game that’s over 11 years old, a game I created and have been running for over 11 years.

The Blue Dwarf is a game based on a comedy scifi TV show called Red Dwarf which has been a favourite of mine since I was a teenager. I wanted to extend the world of the show, but knew I didn’t want to involve the small number of original characters because we’d never be able to write them as well as the original writers. There was a lot of scope in Red Dwarf’s universe, mostly because it was hardly explored which meant that anything we wrote couldn’t be proved wrong. Mainly it was the spirit of Red Dwarf that I wanted to continue, even if it wasn’t about the original characters.

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Sep
30

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Giving yourself ideas (and remembering them!)

Category: Inspiration for writing, Writing tips Tags: 8 Comments

thoughts in head

I expose myself to a lot of really good stories. I watch films, read books, read comics, watch TV series, listen to audio books, read the news, and hear a lot of really good ideas for stories in my roleplaying game.

Copying isn’t bad

Taking a story that you’ve heard before and using it isn’t bad. There are many ways you can take an idea and use it as a story which is totally legitimate, and might be totally different to the original story that inspired you. Most works of fiction are inspired by other works of fiction. Taking a good idea that you’ve heard and applying it to your own characters might create a very different story.

There are many interesting background stories or settings that you could use, and adding your own characters into the story will create a very different story, and could have a dramatically different outcome.

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Sep
23

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Should a character’s “thing” be unique?

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: , 7 Comments

Jack Harkness in Torchwood Miracle dayI just finished watching the latest series of Torchwood. Despite its many flaws, it’s a fun series. The final cliffhanger of the series though has left me asking a question that applies to other TV series, roleplaying games, and any ongoing stories. Read More

Sep
20

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Don't be afraid of your characters failing

Category: Play-by-post discussion Tags: , 3 Comments

Detective Jayden from Heavy rainI’m writing this after playing Heavy Rain on PS3, which is not a roleplaying game in the sense we’ve come to use the term today. But it’s definitely a game where you assume the role of different characters. The game is like a film, each scene you assume the role of a different character who has their own story, and each story overlaps with every other. The way this game is a bit different to other games I’ve played is that each character can die, and the game continues. The story is just dramatically altered because you can’t ever see the continuation of that character’s story, and any scene that includes them from that point will be different.

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Sep
8

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What do you do with characters from members who have left your game?

Category: Play-by-post discussion Tags: 2 Comments

a man leaving his character behindIt’s very likely that people who joined your roleplaying game will choose to leave at some point, and sometimes (or often perhaps) these people will just leave and give no explanation of why. There can be many reasons why people leave, usually they just can’t commit enough time, sometimes they’re lazy, sometimes they have arguments with other members of the game. But the question really is what should you do with their characters once they’ve left?

It might seem too harsh to kill their characters off, what if perhaps the member wants to re-join at a later date? If you do kill them, do you build a story about it? Should you make your existing characters react to the death like any real person would? Or maybe you should just neglect to mention them until the characters disappear into obscurity as if they never existed?

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Aug
27

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Pressing the reset button on your story

Category: Inspiration for writing, Play-by-post discussion Tags: , 3 Comments

I’m sure you’ve seen TV series where no-matter what happens in the episode, everything is back to normal again by the end, ready to start next time. TV Tropes calls this the “reset button”.

The Reset Button is any means by which previously occurring drastic events are made partially or wholly irrelevant by the end of the story. This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The Sixties through The Nineties, because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order or no particular order at all.

TV Tropes – Reset Button

Resetting the story is way to make sure that the viewer/reader doesn’t have to sit through lots of episodes of back-story to understand the characters, or what’s happened to get them to the current point in the story.

fry from futurama“It’s just a matter of knowing the secret of all TV shows; At the end of the episode, everything is always right back to normal.”

— Fry, Futurama

It can be extremely limiting because you can only go so far with a story before you have to reset it all, but also can be very useful.

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Aug
19

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Why we love flashbacks

Category: Character Development, Inspiration for writing Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Flashback week write and roleplay about your character's pastIf you’ve not heard about Flashback week, see the details here and remember to enter the competition here.

In my last article I explained that flashbacks are great ways to help build your character, and they’re also really great fun to write because it gives you a totally open canvas to put your character anywhere and in any situation. If you’re writing about them with others as part of a roleplaying game, this can sometimes be quite a difficult thing to do, because you’ll have to get everyone else to agree that the story is taking a turn in the direction you want it to. But as anyone who’s ever done collaborative writing knows, the story won’t always go in that direction!

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Aug
17

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9 more movies with character flashbacks

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

You might need some inspiration for flashback week if you want to create a really good back-story for your character, and want to enter the competition. We’ve shown you movies with flashbacks in them before, but there’s just so many, so here are some more to inspire you to write your own! Well you can watch all your favorite movies freely at https://freecouchtuner.com/years.

Eternal sunshine

Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind

Despite not flashbacks in the conventional sense of cinema, we see glimpses of the main character’s life (Jim Carey), including many moments he shared with his girlfriend (Kate Winslet) as they are being erased by a company he’s paid to eradicate memories of their relationship.

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