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On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Nichole <nichole672000@...> wrote:
A lot more of these groups are destined to fail for another reason. You
ever seen how many one or two line post role playing games that are out
there? Heaven forbid you get an actual paragraph. The quality of role
playing games has just gone completely down hill. A free for all is not
the answer either. But yes, some mods could stand to loosen up.
Is this where I step in and point out that what you ladies are describing really aren't role-playing games? I think that's my usual role here, punnily enough. I haven't laid it out in the forum in a while, so I suppose it's time to revisit that essay again.
Consider the elements of the term: role-playing game. The forum-based prose-content exchanges in question definitely involve roles. They involve playing. But there is an almost total (and in most cases, is a total) absence of game involved. While trying to gauge the limits of each Moderator, their intents, and then trying to write something that plays to them might, technically, describe a "game," but that game is not the "game" people generally signed on for.
The problem as I see it, and speaking as someone who's written for and designed actual RPGs over the years, is the absence of actual mechanics which govern interactions and which are known to all the players up-front. There are an increasing number of game designs which are Game Masterless, that is which don't require anything but an actual "moderator" for a community and not someone overseeing the play itself, because the game has discernible rules which help govern and shape interaction.
There've been a lot of game developments in the past year or two I haven't gotten around to mentioning on here as suggestions and guides, but I certainly can and should now:
Absolutely something that can (and arguably should!) be played online, requires no Moderators in the draconian sense you guys've been using and turns out something very, very cool. Totally breaks the general theme of a "round-robin prose-writing exercise" while turning it into a "structured simultaneous dictionary writing exercise." The rules are simple and concise. I'd personally love to see what some people came up with as a result of, say, "a concise history of the Galactic City era and introduction of the electro-priestesses commonly thought of as magical girls."
It could be I'm weird, though.
Fairly straightforward to play online, it might actually be played best there. Again, a GM-less game where the rules are almost entirely about what kind of scene you can introduce when it's your turn and what other characters can/must be involved. No dice, of course, the main physical mechanic is a large board which contains characters quirks and motivations where you draw lines connecting them and other folks' lines they cross are drawn into the scene. You can download a little tool to draw the board for free from their site, so every post could easily link / embed the board at the end for the next person to use.
I actually ran this face-to-face at Anime Weekend Atlanta, and it was awesomely fun, but fell apart a bit in endgame for reasons I have yet to adequately work out.
Written by ... well, me. More of an unfinished sketch of a game than a full game, it's still very, very playable and the engine could be turned to any kind of ensemble cast game fairly easily. The key mechanic here, and one I think would work very well for online play in general, is a kind of coin economy which lets players introduce elements, make claims, etc. Worth checking out and exploring.
I'm sure I mention this one every time I bring this up, but it's really the father of most of the coin-based mechanics you'll ever see. Absolutely incredible, the only problem is that it generates an enormous amount of back-story that you'll want to keep up with -- and in face to face games, that means you'll end up with tonnes of 3x5 cards sprawling around. Online, however, you can use a wiki or Google Document to keep up with things and it's an absolute snap. The one complication with running Universalis online is that conflicts are resolved with die rolls. There are a number of sites that'll do secure die rolls if there isn't a trust established between players, but if you trust them well enough, let them roll their own physical dice.
Ultimately, the problem as I see it isn't in the fact that there are draconian Moderators who want to run a freeform prose-based round-robin writing exercise like a LARP without any of the support that kind of game has for resolving conflicts. In fact, the lack of an understood, simple, straightforward means of resolving conflicts (even so simple as "the person who created the scene has absolute authority but nothing that occurs in a scene is necessarily binding -- including death") is one of the things that cascades to all the other problems you've seen occurring in games, possibly including too-short replies -- after all, when people don't know and understand their abilities to narrate and limits on narration, they tend not to.
Just a few thoughts from the grumpy old crochety guy in the corner.
-- Alexander Williams (thantos@...)
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