What is this?

[hallsofvallhalla]

This is a placeholder for a new style of game I am developing. It is a forum based game and I will say nothing more until I open it for testing sometime this week. I believe it is the first of its kind so i want to hatch it out here and I am hoping the community here helps me test it to so we can release it to anyone and everyone on any forums worldwide. I will soon have players able to make their characters for the first game. Keep an eye out

[Jackolantern]

I know you said you won't say anything more, but I have to ask "Forum game" means 2 completely different things: 1. "forum game" can mean a thread game like the letters game we have going right now in Off-Topic, or 2. "forum game" can mean an RPG played through the medium of a forum, which will typically run far outside of a single thread, players have persistent characters, rules exist, etc.. Can you at least point us in the direction of the game you are creating here? At least say 1 or 2?

[SpiritWebb]

Agreed

[hallsofvallhalla]

2 with a twist!

[Jackolantern]

Very nice!

[62896dude]

Im very glad that you have thought of something that you think is gonna be this good, and never done before! I am truly very excited to see what its gonna be!

[hallsofvallhalla]

well i am not sure if it has been done before but if it has I have never seen it. Sure forum games have been done but I don't think they are often taken to this extreme. I am sure someone somewhere has tried this and it may still be in use. I hope to expand it to something forum goers will use.

I currently have character creation done. Working on Skill system and combat system. I may start the story and let everyone create a character and get the general gist of the game and develop it as we play. Maybe by Friday I will have it ready.

[hallsofvallhalla]

K time I exposed this project.

Basically how many play by post games on forums have you played or seen where characters(munchkins) run around like they are the baddest white bread at breakfast? Everyone wants to be the best character or the dark shady one, or the super fighter. Very seldom are there rules.

I see many forums run RPG Play by Post games where people just post what they do and it is one big story. The battles usually consist of everyone wanting to be the hero. Everyone is trying to out do the other with their characters they built with no definitions to define them.

PBP Assist or whatever I decide to call it is a set of defined rules that help the GM of the game run his game. Everyone must build a charter using the same rules and restrictions. The game can reside on any forums. The GM uses the PBP site to hold the character data, require skill checks, roll dice, run the battle system, ect. It still leaves the game wide open but it stops players from running amok the campaign.

So lets say Bufford the Knight says he wants to climb a wall to chase after a escaping Mage. Well the GM doesn't want Bufford to catch the mage as he has another part in the game later. Well in the old way the player running Bufford would just say "Bufford climbs the wall with his amazing spider man ability and grabs a hold of the mage so fast that the mage humbly worships bufford for the rest of his days" The GM could say " Well as Bufford was climbing he slipped and fell".
"No way bufford has a ring of anti-slip!"
"It fell off as well"
"You just dont like my character, you suck as a GM"

With my rule system, it will instead go
"Bufford climbs after the mage"
GM: " Okay the mage climbs with amazing prowess and the wall is slippery so you have to make a difficulty check on your climbing skill of a 10 which is very hard"
The GM then goes into his panel and checks Climb, Bufford, and skill check of 10 plus a 1d6 of random difficulty that equals 3 so he needs a 13.
When Bufford goes to his panel it shows he needs to do a climb check, he rolls it and rolls a 2 with his climb of a 4 = 6. It says Bufford fails and prints that out along with the verification check and bufford posts that back.

This way everyone knows he failed and the game moves on.

The rules are very light and can be modified by the GM. They are simply to allow someone to run a game sensible and keep everything organized. We will continue our game as soon as I finish a few more things.

[Jackolantern]

Very interesting! This turns a play-by-post game into something more like a pen'n'paper RPG, rather than what most PBP games are: basically free-form roleplaying. Because you are right, most of the time PBP games do eventually devolve into either constant bickering because people are trying to play it like a pen'n'paper game when it isn't set up to be like that, or it just splinters off with tons of small groups free-form roleplaying their own little stories with basically no combat or rule requests at all. Either result is likely not desirable, but a system like this sounds like it could empower a GM to actually run a real campaign!

[hallsofvallhalla]

yep, a little bit of both worlds. I am still working on this project and plan to finish. Just want to finish up Cavern Crawl for this weekend's test.