[Idea] User-run Worlds

[Mahz]

I know I'm behind in rolling out basic features, but talk is cheap and gives me something interesting to switch between when I'm working on boring things like BBCode and PM deletion. Dev time is expensive. And often developing hard features is what forces me to implement the menial ones.

A common feature request I get is some permutation of custom roleplay tabs (beyond IC and OOC), moderator-like privileges for GMs, and some way to manage larger/more ambitious games. I've been thinking of ways to actually achieve this.

If you go to http://toprpgsites.gotop100.com/ or a directory like http://rpg-directory.com/forums/fantasy-myth-rpgs.30/, you get a peak at the world of decentralized roleplays, each one meticulously created on its own Proboards/Jcink/InvisionFree/etc forum.

This is the kind of case I'd like to support on the Guild. Right now, roleplays on the Guild are constrained to a single thread. And I think a lot of us appreciate that simplicity.

But there's no way to go further, grab a group of like-minded players, and grow your own lore on the Guild unless you want to arduously manage a web of interlinked topics.

The Idea

This idea would live alongside the Guild but I would maintain it separately so it doesn't complicate the current system. For instance, imagine if our homepage is on a "Forum" tab and this worlds system is on a "Worlds" tab. There's probably a better name than "world", but that doesn't matter for now.

- You click "Create World", name it, and you become the GM of a "world". Ex: http://roleplayerguild.com/worlds/42
- Within your world, you can create your own non-roleplay forums and roleplay forums. You can organize them into their own categories like the Guild does. You can appoint local moderators, write your own rules, and sticky your own topics.
- You can also write your own stylesheet (CSS) so that you can change the skin to suit your world.

Example Worlds

Here are some examples of stand-alone roleplays that consist of a smaller group of users that maintain its lore.

- http://second-pass.net/
- http://www.markedrp.com/
- http://deathstown.b1.jcink.com/index.php

I'd like to provide the ability to run projects of this scale on the Guild. At the very least, I know it's something our nation-building players would appreciate.

[Phoenix]

I really, very much like this idea. I currently have a separate forum for the information for my original world. It would be both convenient and less awkward if I were to be able to keep the information in a related space.

I also like the idea of limited moderator privileges over one's own RP. However, would one of those privileges to be able to extend those privileges to another, in the case of Co-GM's?

[Rare]

:o I like this! It can be useful for my NRPs.

[ApocalypticaGM]

I could see this idea being applied even outside of Nation RPs. RPG has a few signature roleplays that have lasted years, and given some freedom, could branch into other beautiful areas too. Putting complete responsibility on one GM is all well and good, but this would allow the creator to share ownership with a few they trust in other directions. I see a lot of wonderful potential in this -- even so early on in the ideation process.

[Marduk]

This would be fantastic, Mahz! I've wanted something like this for a very long time.

[Rilla]

This would probably help a lot with Allaria.

[Jorick]

This is an awesome idea. I've got a few thoughts about it that I'll just list in a slapdash order.

It seems like something that might cause undue server strain if anti-abuse mechanics aren't put in, such as limiting the number of "worlds" that can be created or some time limit on how often one can make a new one. I'm certainly no expert (or even a novice really) when it comes to dealing with servers and what they can handle and whatnot, but creating whole new side forums with their own sub-forums sounds like the kind of thing that asshats could abuse by making tons of them and crashing the site.

Mod level GM controls would be imperative for these things to work well, as would the ability to appoint co-GMs. On a second read I see you've already accounted for that, so all is well.

I saw that in all those specific examples there was some kind of registration system where prospective players would have to register a new account. I figure that wouldn't be the case here, but it gives me an idea. If they so choose, the creators of these side forum things should be able to bar posting from unapproved members in some sections or threads. Maybe this could fall under the general mod stuff, or maybe this could just be a wider scope use of the whitelist type feature you indicated that you'd like to add for RP threads, but there should absolutely be the option to bar random people from posting in the IC threads of these "world" things.

Alternative name ideas: Persistent Worlds (as that's kind of what they are from what I can see), Realms, Universes, Domains

[natsumehack]

To ride a bit off jorick in the end, why not have it have a few different names, such as Worlds, Universe,ect, as just using one for everything doesn't best describe the RP as a whole.

If it's a fantasy RP They could use Realm to better set the mood. A modern day RP can use world, A futurist RP where they explore other worlds, and stuff better fits universe, but so does Alternate Universe RP of well known fiction.

So just give them ability to call it any of them when creating it, rather then limiting it to just one name

[The Imagination]

That's an amazing idea, actually. I'd be down for it.

[Captain Jordan]

As someone who wrote exclusively on isolated forums such as these for RPs for most of my career, I support this feature, so long as it doesn't prove to strain or bog down the server. I've seen plenty of large communities suffer from Big Board Syndrome, where too many posts, topics, forums and users really strain the database.

[Mahz]

RE: Server strain -- This is really just a reorganization of data rather than something that inherently adds data to the system.

Phoenix said However, would one of those privileges to be able to extend those privileges to another, in the case of Co-GM's?

Yes.

Jorick said I saw that in all those specific examples there was some kind of registration system where prospective players would have to register a new account. I figure that wouldn't be the case here, but it gives me an idea. If they so choose, the creators of these side forum things should be able to bar posting from unapproved members in some sections or threads. Maybe this could fall under the general mod stuff, or maybe this could just be a wider scope use of the whitelist type feature you indicated that you'd like to add for RP threads, but there should absolutely be the option to bar random people from posting in the IC threads of these "world" things.

Yeah, I will definitely have to make a decision about what that UX will look like.

At the beginning, I would just lean on the world's GMs/Mods to clean things up and potentially ban users that don't follow their rules.

[Alphakoka]

Forum 22 revisited?

[Jakhi]

...Anyone remember Avidgamers??

It seems like this idea is quite similar, let me briefly break down what I remember from AG:

When you signed up you got posting rights for the main forum which included all 'help' forums, 'chat' forums, and advertising sections.

You could also create your own game from the ground up. Each user had the capability to register their own game as it's own separate website under the ag banner. So the url would read: www.avidgamers.com/myawesomenewgame

When you started a new site you could use the basic layout and just change the colors (or not...), it included a front page (with a log in for players who had been accepted) info pages (which could be set to public or members only), and forums (of which you could subdivide ad infinitum if you liked.)

Alternately, you could use 'advanced mode' as a GM and completely do everything from square 1. Your own formatting, forum design, anything you could code you could do. (It WAS as amazing as I'm describing, some of these games were absolutely jaw dropping).

There was a mechanism for rating players by level and then assigning those levels different permissions. So the GM had access to the back-room, but the rest of the players didn't. This level could only post in THIS forum, ect. Mainly this was used as a game mechanic, so you could create one character and join with him and be one level, then create a second character with a different level. How it was used depended largely on the GM.

Basically, within their own site the GM could do whatever they liked. They had total and complete control over who was accepted, what each player could see, where they could post, and if they kicked them out.

I don't know if you're looking at quite that level...but I still dream of AG 10 years later. (Aaaand I've dated myself, lol)

[Mahz]

Avidgamers. Such a big part of my preteens yet its name hasn't even crossed my mind since I last uttered it a decade ago. Until now.

This grotesque specimen should be a refresher for anyone else:



Yeah, the high level idea here is to simply expose a toolkit that allows roleplaying at a scale beyond one roleplay. If a GM right now can control the scope of one roleplay, then the idea proposed in this topic just allows GMs to control the scope of multiple roleplays.

It's a pretty obvious iteration. It just so happens that once you follow this idea to its end, you realize you're just a stone's throw away from the reason why all those RP forums on Proboards exist. But since the Guild is one large ecosystem, the possibilities are much more interesting.

---

The other idea I work on when I have time is how to give individual roleplays the toolkit to be their own self-contained ecosystems. Custom tabs seem promising at first, but it doesn't scale.

If you think about it, a single roleplay topic with its single IC tab is pretty much just a narrative sequence that tells one story. Even if the IC posts do some nonchronological time-hopping like Memento, it still tells a coherent story. So the single-IC-tab-per-roleplay constraint makes sense. It's the single OOC tab that's the showstopper. It's impossible to coordinate any discussion at depth in a single thread, so that's a real problem I want to solve.

One simple idea would be to add a third tab (keeping the OOC tab around as more of a light-hearted chatbox):



Both ideas are half-baked, but the point is that player coordination can be dramatically improved by reapplying the same tools that a forum already provides.

[Rilla]

Everyone seems to handle the OOC well for conversations. I'd like an extra tab for character sheets for RPs, or a customizable one for other things.

[Brovo]

I could easily see this becoming a giant clusterfuck of dead worlds. Pardon my French.

People seem to have a hard time keeping a single-thread RP alive. Entire worlds at this scale is a whole new beast with all new levels of complexity to conquer. I know that people like me would appreciate it, I mean Renalta has hit its sequel and the world is humongous, I could easily use a feature like this, but a lot of people might not. I dunno... This seems better to have as a backburner project for when you don't have much else to do, because not that many people will even be able to use it properly.

Hm... Almost seems like it might be better to have an evolutionary process. That a thread after a certain period of time could become a world by virtue of having proven its longevity so the forum isn't cluttered with dead worlds?

Actually I would almost like a visual representation of it. Get some idea of how it would look structurally before I make any kind of concrete, specific criticisms. The idea itself is fine, though, I just see a lot of ways it could go terrible wrong.

[HeySeuss]

I can totally understand the appeal of this; I have run RP's under one mythos of my own creation in 1x1 form and group RP form in the past, drawing off the same events but approaching the writing of the RP itself from different angles. Truth be told, I'm batting around doing it again, since I've preserved that stuff (having backed it up)

As an open source sort of repository of lore, it sounds good. One of the things we have a lot of here are people that like to create worlds, come up with lore and so forth. Communities like SCP and so forth seem to thrive off that dynamic and it can't hurt for us to add some incentives for our own native pool of talent to do the same.

Edit: Like tabletop and nation RP's, lore-creation does have a strong following and the idea of user-generated, voluntary-participation PW's sounds messy in theory, but I think in reality, it wouldn't be messier than the other RP's and the amount of information they generate.

[Kestrel]

Just do the custom tab thing, it will allow people to govern 'multiple threads' easy enough, or not if they don't want to. Slap the CSS editor onto it and you got the exact same thing, except contained in a thread instead of a forum. It'll look a lot nicer than having a graveyard of worlds. The only function the worlds tab has over it is being able to support a large scale world, but honestly... If a PW was going to be succesful on this board, it would've happened by now.

[Psyga315]

Well, I'm interested.

[Draconilian]

Absolutely, this idea is awesome and I would be highly interested in using it to run some larger RPs that I attempted on the guild that fell flat for various reasons.