OngoingWorlds blog

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

Aug
14

By

10 Ideas for a character flashback

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: , , 7 Comments

child with spraypaint

Was your child a nuisance when they were little?

This article was written in Flashback week to hopefully give you some ideas of what to post about in your character’s Flashback.

Here’s some ideas:

Explain how you got that scar

If your character is the rough, rugged type they might have an impressive scar on their face. The scare probably comes with a story where they fought a great beast, or a bitter enemy. That’s a great story to tell.

Trouble with the law

Is your character a troublemaker? Have they always been like this? You might want to show the first time they had a run-in with the law, maybe for committing a small crime and got caught, or had a narrow escape. They could be even younger and were always getting into trouble with a teacher for shenanigans in the playground. It would be a great contrast if your character is now a calm, law-abiding citizen to show that they once had a rebellious streak and often got in trouble with the law, maybe this is what set them on the straight and narrow.

Read More

Aug
5

By

Flashback Week – write a flashback about your character in your own RPG

Category: Play-by-post discussion Tags: , , , 7 Comments

Old photograph of a child

With a Flashback you can write about your character’s early years, and how they became the character they are today.

What’s a Flashback?

A flashback is when you write about something that happened in your character’s life before the current story. It could be from the character’s childhood, and it could explain why their personality is the way it is now. It could explain why they are scared of spiders, why they hate the colour blue, why they don’t trust men with beards, or why they are such a bastard to everyone.

The flashback might relate to what your character is currently doing in the story, and might explain how they know a specific skill, or they might now meet a character from their childhood.

You might have written a flashback for your character before, or you might not have. It’s dead easy to do, just think about it, and start writing. But even though it’s so simple, you don’t always think about doing it. So why don’t we all do it at the same time?!

Read More

Apr
9

By

Should story posts be private?

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

Private sign

Some PBP/PBEM games can be set to private so that you can’t see their messages but what have they got to hide? There are some disadvantages of a private game

Edit: At the end of the post I say that OngoingWorlds doesn’t have a feature to make games private. This changed in September 2014 when private games were introduced. 

Play-by-email and play-by-post games have in the past been either private or public, and in this article we’re going to look at the advantages and disadvantages of each, and see why people might want their games to be public or private.

What is public or private?

Traditional play-by-email games (PBEM) were stories told by users who sent emails to each other, always keeping every member in the group cc’d into the email, or every member was part of a “newsgroup”, where emailing one email address distributed the email to all members of the group. Doing this meant that the posts that you sent to each other were only ever seen by other members of the group.

Games played on a public forum, or Yahoo groups are often public. This means they can be seen by anyone who has navigated to the website, and doesn’t have to be a member to view all posts in the story so far. In both forums and a Yahoo group, you have the option to make all posts private if you need to. This means that only members will be able to see the posts, retaining your privacy.

Read More

Newer Posts »