Role-Playing Forum - Terms, Rules and Guidelines

This is an important question.... No, really!

I have been involved in forum RP before. One major problem is location. Location, location, location. The other problem is time.
With location, the problem is people being in different places, which makes interaction difficult, and people teleporting over instantly to get into the location, which spoils the role play.

The other problem is time. Multiplayer mods in Arcanum disable the quick passage of time because Troika didn't want to deal with everyone being in a different time. How shall time pass? Will it be semi-real, with time put to scale? That forces people to keep appointments. Will it be lax? That makes people crazy.

The best solution I've seen so far is timelessness. With timelessness, there are less "waking up" posts and "going to sleep posts" and "riding on a train" posts. Things simply happen. Another solution is ex post facto. That means that people can backdate posts.

Of course, with an edit button, who knows what could happen? Hehehe.

Tell me what you think, o' beefy one.

 

cool :x

 

Natstar, why do you keep using the angry smilie? Especially with comments like that one. It gives you the apppearance of someone with an anger management problem! :lol:

And I don't feel there is any particularly correct way of cataloging time. Some RP threads have very strict time keeping, with every post time and date stamped so everything that happens is detailed in exact chronological order. It can work and does work very well on some occaisions. It can also be a terrible thing if posts are written in different timescales, since some people might write letters and things, but then you have to wait for an entire week or so in 'thread time' before you can reply again, or if you're travelling whilst someone else is not then you've got major problems and some people will find that they've been written out of the thread for weeks at a time.

However, I've also been in threads that have absolutely no time reference whatsoever. Again, this can work very well, or it can go disasterously wrong. If people have no sense of time in their posts then you invariably get people who write things that just cannot happen. For example, if one group is in Tarant and they travel by train to Ashbury then they could meet up with someone travelling by boat from Caladon at the same time and that obviously cannot happen and you get inconsistencies creeping in to the story.

I usually find the best way to RP a thread is to have everybody writing in timeless form for the majority of their posts, and every few posts write a thread that ties it into the timeline. Whilst this is going on the thread creator keeps an exact track on their own threads and the story they write. What happens then is that you've got a very well-defined timeline and story and everybody else can then write their posts so that they tie into the main story, whilst it allows them to write about other things too, using the story timeline to keep track of events and the chronology.

Regarding location, there is no problem in using different locations. Infact, every thread I've ever played in before has had different locations used at once. It enhances the play and the feel of the thread and allows for greater creativity. As long as the timeline is dealt with properly (see above method) then you can always meet up at some other point. You can even have two completely seperate timelines. For example, two concurrent but incongruent timelines that meet up further in the future, or one set in the past and one set in the future, where the one in the past lays down the foundations for the one in the future (although you've got to be careful about discrepancies).

Instant translocation is not a problem with the game mechanics. Some characters might have a teleport ability, but if someone decides to use an instant travel method not in keeping with their character or the story, or if they imply that a method of travel is instant when it is not then it is simply a sign of a bad roleplayer and not a game problem.

[Edit]Oh, and Xan. Can you please refrain from gravedigging topics. Especially if they are a year old! :-o