OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Maintaining a sense of danger, and getting your players to post

Captain Kirk fighting the GornIn tabletop RPGs, and computer game RPGs there’s always a risk of your character dying. Players will spend a long time building their character stats, collecting items so the danger of their character death makes them take great care in trying to stay alive.

In play-by-post games, players are in control of the story, and write as if writing interactive fiction. There’s no real risk of a character being killed, unless it’s something you want to happen yourself. Killing other player characters is against the rules (in every play-by-post game I’ve ever seen), so there’s not much chance it will happen.

We all need danger

Danger makes good stories. Nobody wants to read a story about a man walking to the shops to get an ice cream, but if it were a dangerous journey over rivers of hungry crocodiles, past an erupting volcano and past deadly ninja warriors, it suddenly becomes much more interesting.

So there’s a chance that your players might get complacent because they know their characters aren’t really in any danger. Like main characters in a long-running TV show, you know they’re not going to die really, because they’re essential to the show. This doesn’t stop the series writers from putting them in trouble though, and making things extra difficult for the character.

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10 Ideas for Babylon 5 RPGs

Probably the biggest obstacle facing the Babylon 5 roleplayer is the huge scale and undeniable canonicity of Joe Michael Straczynski’s original vision, which covers several decades of detailed history and spans 2000 years in total. While most science fiction TV shows (Star Trek in particular) occupy wider, very versatile universes – an open landscape with canonical building plots available – the Babylon 5 universe is structured very closely around the events of the show itself. The Babylon station sits at the very centre of this universe, a focal point through which all the most interesting storylines pass. Stepping out of its long shadow is not easy, as the two ill-fated Babylon 5 spin-off shows demonstrate.

The B5 roleplayer therefore has two options; attempt to avoid the Babylon station and its long legacy altogether, or meet the complex existing plot lines head on. Read More

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Announcing Flashback week

Flashback week - write and roleplay about your character's past

Last year we announced the first ever ‘Flashback Week’ a week-long writing event where writers and roleplayers were encouraged to think about something that happened in their characters past. The event isn’t held anywhere, there’s no fee, and there’s barely any rules – only to write a flashback about your character and your story and tell everyone about it. Oh, and to have fun!

Flashback week is the 2nd week in August, starting Sunday the 14th. If you’re writing in that week, make sure to include a flashback!

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Instant video game fun vs difficult roleplaying writing

Motprstorm Apocalypse
This is a subject that I’ve thought long and hard about, and I’d love to say that I always do the right thing here, but often I’m just as guilty as everyone else. Let me explain…

I love writing, and I love roleplaying, I’ve been involved in play-by-post games for about 15 years, and GM of my own game for over 10 of them. I write a new post about characters in my game about once a week, and if anyone ever asks me I tell them I love it. That’s true, I do love it.

I love roleplaying in play-by-post games so much that I want to encourage as many people to take it up as a hobby as I can, and I honestly believe they’ll love it too. For me there’s nothing better than being in control of a sprawling and unpredictable story that you’re constantly writing with friends.

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Valuable things learned about play-by-post games

Things learned about play-by-post roleplaying games

The popularity of OngoingWorlds as a place to roleplay is growing, with more games being setup this month than ever before. Unfortunately some of these games are badly conceived and don’t get popular, but the good ones stand out and it’s clear they’re being played by experienced roleplayers and great writers. One of these great games is Colony World, and the member MnMike emailed me with these great lessons he’s learned from play-by-post games.

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Avoid going stale

Some bread

I’ve just been looking around some websites of play-by-post games that I know, for the purpose of asking someone some questions for an article for this blog, and what I noticed is that sometimes the website haven’t been updated for a very long time, and in some cases they haven’t even been updated this year.

So I just shrug my shoulders and think “well, play-by-post games are sometimes slow, they probably do have an active community over email or something. I know what, I’ll check their Facebook and Twitter pages.” So I do that, expecting to see regular updates, even if it’s just general chitchat.

Nothing.

A cold shiver runs down my spine. “What if everyone’s dead” I start to think about the possibility of a serial killer picking off roleplayers one at a time until there’s nobody left, leaving our websites going stale, and our Facebook pages like ghost towns.

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Give your characters flaws

The weakest link

Most of us want the character that we roleplay to be badass. It’s our childhood fantasy to be the hero of the story, to be the person who helps rescue everyone else from danger, to defeat the badguys, and for everyone else to look up to. But be careful you’re not making your character too perfect, or they might turn into a Mary Sue.

I’ve been creating a Rolemaster character recently, and they have a great system that allows you to pick special abilities for your character (they call them ‘talents’), and you have a limited number of points to spend on these talents. To gain more talents you need more points, and to get these you have to choose the equal number of points worth in ‘flaws’. You can choose these talents and flaws from the book, and there’s many of each, and it’s the flaws which really inspired me.

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Play-by-post or Interactive Storytelling?

woman dressed up playing a gameWhen I first started creating the OngoingWorlds website I was faced with many challenges about how to technically build it, but also I had one question which was far more difficult to solve, how do I describe it?

I’ve always been clear in my head what I wanted OngoingWorlds to be. I want it to be a place where a group of people can create a story together. This isn’t an original idea, nor is it unusual. There are thousands of roleplaying games across the internet that people have been playing for years. But everyone seems to call it something different.

Searching for common terminology

One of the most common terms was PBEM, meaning play-by-email, even though the capitalisation of this is not standardised, I created a poll to find out which was the most common way it’s written. This is a term that has existed for a long time, when games were played by email, and before forums existed. Despite this being an accepted term, I decided not to use this term for OngoingWorlds because it’s inaccurate, and anyone just getting into roleplaying might ask what the abbreviation stands for and then get confused when their game isn’t actually played by email at all!

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Create a character you're proud of

This post was ritten by Lt. Alleran Tan, Helm Officer of the USS Independence-A in the UFOP: StarBase 118

Character development pyramidCentral to any roleplaying experience is designing a character to play. Essentially, in play-by-email groups there are two main types of roleplaying: roleplaying with games mechanics, or roleplaying without game mechanics (known as ‘freeform’ style). But irrespective of if you have to build your character to rules, or simply so that she fits in the world, it’s important to know a bit about making a character that’s fun for you and everyone who plays with you.

No matter the roleplaying system, the character you play should be interesting. This means that the character should have something that distinguishes them from the ordinary, and this reflects the theme of most roleplaying games. You play a Starfleet Officer, or a were-wolf hunter, or a mutant (or vampire or a space ranger or whatever). Your character should be, well, special! They should have something that makes them a little better than most people, even if that’s just a skill, or a talent, or a special gift.

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Interview: Zombie Apocalypse 2

Zombie apocalypse

Zombies as a genre are extremely popular, in films and especially videos games. They’re multi faceted and can appeal to wide audiences all who might like something different about the genre. It suits horror fans, as zombie movies promise buckets of gore and blood, and it also appeals to people on a deeper level when you start to think about Human survival and the downfall of society. Each zombie film take a different approach and shows us a different angle to zombies and the way that Humankind is trying to save themselves from them.

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