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Play-By-Post RPGs
Today, my mind was wandering, and I ended up thinking about an old message board RPG that I played in very actively for three years or so. This game and many of its characters were very near and dear to me, and I had a bit of a nostalgiasm thinking about all the things that we did back then. Sometimes I toy with the idea of re-joining that game, but I know that it probably wouldn't turn out as well as my nostalgic half thinks it would. The reason I ended up quitting in the first place was mainly that I felt I had exhausted all the possibilities for my most well-developed character. Even with my side characters, I felt I was simply going through the motions of the game's setting, repeating more what had already come before.
After that, though, I got to thinking: people talk a lot around here about the more structured tabletop and video game RPGs, but I've never heard anyone talk about free-form play-by-post RPGs before. The only thread I could find that was even close was an old thread about someone needing players for a play-by-post D&D game, which isn't exactly what I had in mind. When I say play-by-post RPG, I'm discounting online versions of tabletop/video game RPGs. What I mean are games that aren't so much "games" as they are a collaborative, often multi-branched approach to novel-writing; the prose written is more important than any real game mechanics. Games like these usually take place on message boards, journal communities, e-mail lists, or over IM.
So, now I'm curious: who all has played in games like this before? If you have, what was the experience like for you? Were you in (a) well-run, high-standards game(s), (a) piece of crap fanwanky game(s), or something else? Any good games going on that you recommend?
Apart from the game I mentioned above, I've also played in a couple of other, shorter-lived message board games, as well done as a ton of one-to-one AIM-based RPing (particularly with one person, whom I created multiple lengthy stories with over the course of about five years or so). Most of the RPing I did in this fashion was pretty good, as I tended to strictly avoid games that tolerated spelling and grammar errors. I also stuck to games with original plots and settings, mainly due to a growing distaste for most fanfiction. Maybe the plots of these stories still weren't the best ever (and tended to involve a lot of slash), but hey, most of the RPing I did was in high school. So sue me. :P
I would still like to play PBP games, but I've felt that the writing bug just hasn't been so strong for me over the past year or so. Whenever I try to start something, it usually fizzles out either because I'm too hard on my own writing/ideas, I quickly get bored with the other person's/people's writing, or I just get caught up in other things and accidentally neglect posting. *le sigh*
Oh, and one thing I did really dislike about a lot of group PBP games: the fucking DRAMA. I don't know if it's just because writers are more naturally inclined toward it than other internet denizens, but good fucking god, was there a lot of OOC drama between players sometimes, especially in that first game I mentioned. Luckily, most of it never really spilled into the IC parts of the game and was kept mainly to IMs and PMs, but at the times where the drama level got really high, I sometimes ended up just splitting for a week or two, waiting for it all to cool down. Urgh. ><
After that, though, I got to thinking: people talk a lot around here about the more structured tabletop and video game RPGs, but I've never heard anyone talk about free-form play-by-post RPGs before. The only thread I could find that was even close was an old thread about someone needing players for a play-by-post D&D game, which isn't exactly what I had in mind. When I say play-by-post RPG, I'm discounting online versions of tabletop/video game RPGs. What I mean are games that aren't so much "games" as they are a collaborative, often multi-branched approach to novel-writing; the prose written is more important than any real game mechanics. Games like these usually take place on message boards, journal communities, e-mail lists, or over IM.
So, now I'm curious: who all has played in games like this before? If you have, what was the experience like for you? Were you in (a) well-run, high-standards game(s), (a) piece of crap fanwanky game(s), or something else? Any good games going on that you recommend?
Apart from the game I mentioned above, I've also played in a couple of other, shorter-lived message board games, as well done as a ton of one-to-one AIM-based RPing (particularly with one person, whom I created multiple lengthy stories with over the course of about five years or so). Most of the RPing I did in this fashion was pretty good, as I tended to strictly avoid games that tolerated spelling and grammar errors. I also stuck to games with original plots and settings, mainly due to a growing distaste for most fanfiction. Maybe the plots of these stories still weren't the best ever (and tended to involve a lot of slash), but hey, most of the RPing I did was in high school. So sue me. :P
I would still like to play PBP games, but I've felt that the writing bug just hasn't been so strong for me over the past year or so. Whenever I try to start something, it usually fizzles out either because I'm too hard on my own writing/ideas, I quickly get bored with the other person's/people's writing, or I just get caught up in other things and accidentally neglect posting. *le sigh*
Oh, and one thing I did really dislike about a lot of group PBP games: the fucking DRAMA. I don't know if it's just because writers are more naturally inclined toward it than other internet denizens, but good fucking god, was there a lot of OOC drama between players sometimes, especially in that first game I mentioned. Luckily, most of it never really spilled into the IC parts of the game and was kept mainly to IMs and PMs, but at the times where the drama level got really high, I sometimes ended up just splitting for a week or two, waiting for it all to cool down. Urgh. ><
Comments
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great way to learn and develop your character. But the more formalized you try to get, the more likely the RP is to stall out. The less formalized it is, the more likely you can keep it going, but then you get illiterate asshats you have to deal with.
Oooh, hey, I have played free-form play-by-post forum RPGs. They all suck. Every forum rpg consists of 2 groups of people. Those elitist arrogant pricks who think they can write, and those who cannot even spell the word 'the' properly. In the case of the first group, only 1 or 2 out of every 200 actually can write to some extent, and their writings are actually enjoyable, the rest writes nothing but 80 paragraph posts with the 2 or 3 other people they have been posting with for the last 3 or more years and have since developed/created an entire family by time travelling, inbreeding and Deus Ex Machinas. The other group you cannot read a single 3 line post from without pulling out all your hair. Even if they have been 'playing' longer than you on that forum, and English is their native language, while yours is not, you still are able to improve from being worse than they are at first, to an infinite amount of times better than they will ever be within a week. I wrote for about a year and half, little posts, nothing noteworthy, most being slightly above the second group's level, but it resulted in me becoming better at writing coherent walls of nonsense text in English. After that I lurked for another year and a half or there about, making a post a half year, until I finally got banned for 'trolling'. Yes, according to that board owner, who had kicked everyone off 'staff' a year or two before, just because, thinks that giving helpful advice in a slightly agitated tone is the same as trolling.
As for the drama, oh god the drama. Oh my loving God how huge the levels of drama were. I admit, I joined/caused some drama too, but I must add, that was mostly with a good reason. I mean, who wouldn't call a person a horrible, heartless pos, when they claim they have died, JUST BECAUSE they wanted to leave the forum and the drama, only to JOIN back up 2 or 3 months later under a different name. One year after claiming it had died, it came out and said it actually had not died, that it just wanted to get away. This of course caused a ton of drama, and the response it made "God, if I had known this would cause so much drama, I would have never told you guys. Sheesh."
Both of the two best free-form play-by-post RPG'ers I have ever met, no longer roleplay on a forum. If at all.
As for lasting, the game thrived for about two years, waned in number of active players in the third, and continues today with maybe three or four people. I realize that this is the exception, not the rule, but it does mean that not all games are doomed to die. I'm sorry, but did you not read the initial post of the thread at all? I said I wasn't talking about PBP versions of existing physical RPGs like D&D.; The games I'm talking about are strictly prose-based. A lot of the people I played with were not interested in any sort of structured tabletop RPG systems at all. They played these games because they loved to write, not out of any lack of an organized tabletop game near them. In fact, a tabletop game probably would not have served what they wanted even if they did play in one. If you mean play-by-email, then yeah, those sorts of games are included too. I did play in at least one game that was played through a mailing list, though it was kind of a shitty one and I didn't stick with it long.
I remember my first experience with "RPing" was in a Harry Potter AOL chatroom where everyone pretended to be a character from the books. Thinking about it now, its pretty embarrassing.
However, though the conditions of my life stopped me from being involved in play-by-post RPs, the need and desire to do it is still very much there for me. I love writing and creative thinking in a communal setting, unfettered by any sort of rule system beyond consent between players. When I started playing MMORPGs, I was able to fill this need again; the exchanges are one or two lines at a time, not multi-paragraph, time-consuming quagmires, and I get the fun of sitting there with my friends again for as long as we feel like staying at the keyboard. World of Warcraft has been particularly good for this, because the roleplaying community there is thriving and the game has a rich body of lore with good reference websites. While I can't completely create own setting (like I used to do in my play-by-post days), there's definitely room for making up your own character background while holding true to what happened in the history of the Warcraft games. Between the roleplaying guild I run and the in-character blogging site used by roleplayers on our server, my desire for both improvisational interaction AND longer prose-writing is satisfied. All while being able to keep up with school and live an "adult" life. Awesome.
In short: If you have a real hankering for what play-by-post roleplaying offers, but don't have the time IRL or can't find a quality forum site on the web, trying scoping out the RP scene on a casual MMO.
If anyone is on LiveJournal and wants to check out the information for the game, check it out here: http://community.livejournal.com/viciouscyclerpg/profile
EDIT: Turns out that the game above draws a lot of elements from a long-running game called Landel's Institute - Damned. Now I plan to join that one when applications for it are open, since it too has very high standards for writing and characterization. No worries about it going under, either, as this game seems to have enjoyed a lot of popularity for a long time now.
Out of the half-dozen or so games of this type that I've been involved in, only one could be considered a success, because it lasted for two years and the players were engaged with the story the whole time. But most fail rather rapidly. Really not worth the effort most of the time.
TL;DR: LJ Roleplay is awesome despite its flaws and you writerly fannish types should all join this game because it is DA BOMB.
Those who do not mind the TL;DR, read on.
Just thought I'd post here to say that the reason I have not posted a lot in this forum for the past several months to a year is that I've been so incredibly engrossed in the Landel's Damned game I mentioned a couple posts back in this thread. As predicted, the game has been going strong since I started, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon (current number of players is about 125). Based on what I've seen both in the archives and in the time since I joined, it's constantly improving, too. Especially as of late, the mods have been working their asses off to address player concerns about atmosphere and spice things up with more exciting, well-executed events. There are a few of those pretentious writers that Nine and I described earlier in this thread, yeah, but with the rigorous application process, truly horrible writers are virtually unseen. It also has about the right balance of rules to free-form for my tastes. There aren't any numbered stats or technical combat/dispute resolution mechanics beyond player consent (as expected of a prose-based game), but the structure of the setting, the rules for moving around in it, the rate at which time flows, the language laws, and the methods for dealing with inactive or hiatused characters, among other things, are all well-established and held firm.
Just AGH.
It's kind of interesting to read this thread again after having played there for a year now. When I originally made this thread, I had no experience at all with LiveJournal roleplay, or really any kind of fandom-based, no-original-characters-allowed roleplay at all. Playing on the forum back then, I had no concept of how LJ RP was supposed to work on a technical level, and I looked down on fandom games because I thought of all of them in terms of single-fandom games. I didn't see how far you could really explore an established world with established characters without seriously messing with the canon storyline. I'm still not really a fan of single-fandom games, but I somehow did not conceive of pan-fandom games back then. Now I play in one and couldn't be happier, and I see a shit-ton of other games like it that are doing just as well in their own ways.
It makes sense that one would tend to find higher quality in a fandom-based game, mainly because using established characters means there is less of a chance that people will be playing Mary Sues/Gary Stus conceived purely in the mind of some 16-year-old girl. With established characters, other players familiar with your character can more easily spot when you're doing something stupid or OOC and call you on it. Combine that with a good application team looking out for IC-ness and writing quality, and it's even better. Sure, some bad eggs will still slip through (in some games more than others, depending on the mods), but you significantly lessen your chances of getting as many of them.
The only downside, and it is a big one, is that this is still LiveJournal. You guessed it - that means DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA-LLAMA-DING-DONG. Thankfully, Damned seems to have less of that than a good chunk of the other big LJ games out there (I love our players
Well, that's not the only downside. Though, the other one is more personal, so it doesn't apply to everyone. Even without the threat of drama, it's easy to stress out over games like this. You want to do your best to write well and play your character(s) as ICly as possible, and with the self-doubting personality common to many LJers (and writers in general), paranoia about one's playing can seep in quickly and deeply. I dropped one character after almost a year of playing her due to my feeling that I wasn't doing her justice. I was about ready to drop another for the same reason before I snapped myself out of it and told myself that I was doing fine with her. No one had ever given me negative crit or attacked me for either of them; on the contrary, I got decent amounts of praise for both. It was just me building up everyone else's writing in my mind, thinking that I couldn't possibly be living up to that, and wondering why I wasn't that good. Luckily, I'm getting better with this, since it's clear to me that even the Big Name Players feel the same way about their characters.
So, yeah. Typical LiveJournal bullshit aside, I still love doing this. It feels awesome not to write alone. It feels awesome to explore some of my favourite characters this in-depth. It feels awesome whenever I see awesome crossover interactions (I still grin like mad every time Indiana Jones and Scott Pilgrim start a thread together). It feels awesome whenever I see a character I don't know played so well that I feel compelled to check out their source canon. It feels awesome to have such a well-organized structure around everything without there being too many complications. It feels awesome to talk to so many other awesome fans and writers. It's just plain awesome.
</TL;DR>
*cough* Yeah, so, sorry for the long post about a subject that most people probably don't care about. This is a geek forum, and I've been repressing talking about this geekery of mine for a while, so it all just kind of came out in one big dump. ^^;;
Nice to hear you're enjoying yourself, but don't leave us. And post-by-post RPG is a niche in a niche, so geeky or not, you cannot expect people to talk about it on a technology/tabletops/video games/comics/anime/manga podcast forum. BESIDES! Nobody wants to listen to your 20th level Paladin, or your adventures as Utena in an asylum that's filled with monsters by night.
Also, aside from mentioning one of my characters off-handedly, I didn't really go into the specifics of the story or characters in the post because I do know that people don't want to hear that sort of thing unless they actually join a game. The link was there for people who were interested, and if they weren't, then they wouldn't have to hear anything about my 20th level Paladins. If the post still came off as indulgent and boring (and I understand if it did), then I'm sorry; I won't bring this up again.
(mutters something about timezones)