OngoingWorlds blog

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

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The importance of community in Star Trek Freedom

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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Welcoming Blue Dwarf to OngoingWorlds

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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Halloween story competition!

Pumpkins

Please note this competition has finished. You can see the winning entry here.

After the success of the Flashback week competition in August, we decided it’s time to run another competition!

Halloween is just around the corner, and many roleplaying games take advantage of the event to run a spooky story in their play-by-ghost, er sorry, play-by-post games. Even if this isn’t tradition for your game, you might want to think about writing a short story using the characters in your roleplaying game. Read More

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Giving yourself ideas (and remembering them!)

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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Should a character’s “thing” be unique?

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

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Don't be afraid of your characters failing

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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New feature: Rating member posts

Here’s a new feature that we’ve recently added to OngoingWorlds. There’s nothing better than receiving feedback to help you improve your writing. We’ve added a new feature that allows you to rate other posts to let the author know how good it was.

How to rate posts

When you read through posts in your game written by other members you’ll see 5 stars at the bottom. These will show the current rating for the post, showing the average rating that everyone else has given.

Rate posts

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

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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Announcing the winner of the Flashback week competition

A few weeks ago we ran a week-long even called Flashback week where we encouraged roleplayers and writers to think about the backstory of their character and write about a flashback to a different time in their lives. We held a competition which finished on the very last day of Flashback week, and our team of judges have been busy over the last two weeks reading the entries and voting for the best story, and we’re happy that we can now announce the winner! Read More

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Flashback story – Lieutenant Saveron

This is a story submitted as part of the Flashback week competition. It’s a Star Trek story written by Sarah Eccles from the roleplaying game USS Thunder on Starbase 118.

Lieutenant Saveron

The Vulcan doctor was accustomed to having the answers to questions or the where-withal to find them. His professional life was ordered, organised and logical; his personal life was anything but, and he had yet to deduce a solution to the problem. He had no answers, only a determination to search until he found them.

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