E6 collective world - a community project

[Fouredged Sword]

Ok, so I have started getting involved in pathfinder societies. For thos of you unfamiliar with it societies is a massive multi DM run world set in pathfinder that characters join short campaigns designed to complete after short periods. Characters are consistent and you play the same character in game after game.

So I thought that would be really cool to set up for PbP here in the forum. We could set up an official DM and player/character registry and set up a few games. The idea would be short PbP dungeon crawls and plots that can be completed without a long campaign.

Mostly I am thinking for simple light role-playing fun for active posters, without having to build a new character every game and without watching PbP games die after 2-3 weeks. Nothing that isn't already here, just a little more continuity between games and structure between DMs.

Think of it though. Gronk the barbarian could be in a party with Melfas the wizard, then part ways after fighting a goblin camp, only to bump back into each other 3 quests later to fight off a wight invasion. Collective world, character continuity, many DM's and players side by side.

I think e6 so you can keep your character for long periods without too much power creep and large exp spreads between players not throwing off groups to bad.

Thoughts from the playground?

[Madcrafter]

I had a similar idea about a week ago, though not about keeping characters (just the world; future adventures might see the effects of previous ones). It would be an awful lot of work though, especially keeping tabs on all said characters (and also making sure the players don't cheat). Hell, even if you go my route and just keep the world, all the changes that eventually develop will require quite a lot of extensive documentation (I have a thread up in the world building forum looking for software to accomplish this easily).

[Morph Bark]

I think this would be easiest if you kept the setting small, like in a single city or town and it's immediate surroundings. However, you would need to have a thread to keep up information for DMs on the PCs involved and the developments in the different parts of the setting. One of the hardest things would probably be connecting various stories together if you have multiple DMs running them. Another thing that might be troublesome is making sure stories happening at the same time run about as fast (or enough breaktime comes up to make them run about as fast in-game), otherwise some characters might age two years in the span of weeks, while others only age a few days, this mainly due to the different posting speeds of players and DMs.

[Fouredged Sword]

I am thinking not worrying about overarching plots and such. The many stories could take place in and around a large city, or across several cities.

As for keeping time the same, why bother. If the plots are short and the story is left without too much overarching effects time perfectly meshing won't matter. As for cheating, don't. You will have to just trust people playing not to add stuff to their character sheet. Go by wealth per level if you want to keep things simple.

As a DM build your own NPC's, and make any organisations you want. The idea is that there are just a city of adventurers and organisations that seek to employ them. Need an ond wizard's tower raided? Ork bandits taken care of? Post a page on the pub quest board and see who shows up to help.

[Madcrafter]

Then there isn't that much new being done. Its just a bunch of pbp games in the same setting that people can reuse old characters to apply to, which happens already, though it may be a bit more organized.

[Fouredged Sword]

That is the point. What we are doing is fun, but if we got a little more organized I think we could have more fun with less work. Sorta a PbP light setting for short games without worrying to much.