Forum based rpgs

[Balbinus]

Hi all,

I thought it might be interesting to discuss briefly a form of rpg most of us have no real experience with.  Online forum based rpgs.  As I recently joined one I thought a summary of how it works in Actual Play might be useful.

Firstly, a forum based rpg is essentially a freeform, gm-less, storytelling exercise.  It is an rpg in the sense that you have a character and you roleplay that individual, but there are no attributes and essentially you write the story of that character's life.

That's a bit too freeform for me, but there are variants.  In http://www.avidgamers.com/TREII you choose a name, in my case Lucius Gracchus.  You begin play as a 17 year old member of the Equitas class.  Registration grants you access to a number of fora.  Some fora, for example the Forum (for political and social debate in character) are open to all.  Other fora (for example the forum for members of the Gracchus family) are limited to only certain players.

Lucius has no stats.  I can define him as I please.  He has, however, starting money of 300,000 Cesterces with which he can buy things in game.  He can apply for positions and ranks (and can be rejected for the same) and can follow a variety of careers.

So, on starting play I got my name and starting money.  I first logged on to the Gracchi family forum and introduced Lucius as a young noble recently arrived from a family farm in Arretium.  Within a day, two other Gracchii had posted, one narrating that he was my older brother and the other that she was my older sister (before my arrival in the game they had narrated each other as siblings).

So, Lucius now had a family.  I next volunteered him to join the legions requesting allocation to the First Legion, infantry.  A more senior PC in charge of the First Legion saw that and accepted Lucius but assigned him to the newly formed Second Cohort, a combat engineering division.  Sappers.

So, Lucius is now a Centurion in a newly founded division and he has a family.

Lucius is now entering onto his first battle.  Battles are fought by the player writing a short piece describing how the battle went.  This then goes to other players involved in the battle and they agree changes to reflect their various views.  The game moderators then amend the piece so as to prevent every account being another glorious victory.  Further, the other side are players in a rival game who also get an input.  Therefore, although the outcome is entirely narrated, it is not entirely narrated by me and I do not actually know how Lucius' first engagement will go.  Not random, but uncertainty is maintained.

Lucius has also bid on two iron mines at auction and for some slaves.  He has commissioned a villa and made sacrifice to Vulcan.

So, there you have it.  Roughly two days play has taken Lucius from being just a name to being a young soldier with a family and responsibilities, a role in the political and economic life of his city and a property owner.  Although forum based, not everything is directly player narrated so I don't have pure control over Lucius' future.  To succeed in politics he will need the votes and support of other players.  Trade varies by other players' actions also.  I have already discussed how war works and why results there can be a surprise.

Two points in posting this.  Firstly this is actual play and the above is actual play, not of an rpg in the sense we're used to but Lucius is clearly a character I am roleplaying, the lack of total authorial control means it is not a pure storytelling exercise.

The other point is to draw attention to the fact that there are huge online communities of roleplayers which we simply have no real knowledge of.  The forum based communities are big, they are roleplayers, they are not roleplaying within our preconceptions though and it may be that there are things we can learn from them which will make our style of roleplaying more fun.

Thoughts?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I've done this, albeit briefly, on a forum for an RPG Yahoo club I used to frequent. One of the memebers had a running game which ended and while people were waiting for the next one to start, I kind of sort of started a freeform game. I just started posting and others started posting. It was kind of fun. and many of the others said so as well, but once the "regular" game started, everyone jumped ship and ran back to the saftey of stats.

Now, part of the fun was making up magical spells on the fly. It was a humorous game, so I had silly names Like The Nefarious Curse of Michael Landon or things like that.

But, one thing I did learn is that such a thing needs more structure than we had. At one point a monster had one of the other characters and two people, myself included, narrated rescuing the guy. He laughed it off saying he something like he "got up feeling dazed with the strange sense that he had been rescued twice." but this probably prompted the regular game to resume.

So it worked and people had fun, but one little slip up and they were willing to say that playing that way "doesn't work" or whatever. It works, but it just takes some experience to avoid screw up like the above or forum software that can allow you to edit posts, which we didn't have, and the willingness to do without typical RPG ecoutriments (sp?). It's surprising what you can do without.

[Andrew Martin]

It works, but it just takes some experience to avoid screw up like the above or forum software that can allow you to edit posts, which we didn't have, and the willingness to do without typical RPG ecoutriments (sp?). It's surprising what you can do without.

I've run a Usagi Yojimbo (carton bunny samurai medieval Japan) and a WoD (Werewolfs, Mages & super-powered beings from another dimension) PBeM for about two years, which resulted in several megabytes of text postings. It would have been very nice to be able to edit posts, no matter who posted them. That way a number of problems with synchronisation wouldn't have occured or would have been minimised. If I were to do another, I'd prefer to use a Wiki.