Lessons from playing Uni on Wiki?

a Wiki the story takes forever to get told. So it's a mimimal reward given the time involved.

I think that it's interesting that we keep coming back to this. Four tries now at UniWiki, and they've all failed, more or less. What's interesting is that it's so compelling.

I'm new to Universalis but I've run play by mail, later play by email, now play by live journal/wiki Matrix Games for 17 years. It is a neat feature to have people all over the planet joining into a story telling game.

Universalis story telling may take a long time because role players are used to focusing on the character/character interaction rather than a slightly bigger picture interaction. For instance, if I spend 15 pages describing all the dialog in a scene between the dashing space pilot and the beautiful alien babe that ends in the camera panning up to the ceiling (because we don't show those kinds of scenes on broadcast television) That might take weeks to complete. In a Matrix Game an "Argument" might describe it that way or is might give a newpapers story version of it that can be done in a single argument "The dashing pilot Dirk Hearthrob smiles at Princess Yabadabadoo, who swoos. Later they share a cigarette, knowing the future heir of the Empire was on his way."

Have you ever tried to apply Universalis rules to role playing an entire country?

PBEM games dod have short shelf lives. I've noticed that they seldom last more than ten "turns", what ever that means. Can you make a compelling story that can be told in that few exchanges?

In Matrix Games we've learned that having a good scenario/hook, and preset cast of characters is vital. The openning material acts as a road map for player action. They know what the story is about right up front and just get on with it.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press
http://www.io.com/~hamster
http://www.livejournal.com/users/matrixgamer/452.html