PDA

View Full Version : Play by Play Websites



A_Man
2015-04-19, 06:40 PM
As many of us sadly know, most play by play games end in the DM abandoning the game, the players abandoning it, or even both at the same time. One of the hardest things to do online is to find a group of dedicated players who are interested in your own specific game/system, or even find a dedicated DM to run a game. Even when you know the people in real life it's difficult, and all the more so when you don't know the players. But sometimes, you can find a band of players, or even a whole website that has dedicated players interested in crafting phenomenal tales that you can look back on forever, and it's just amazing.

So, the purpose of this thread is to spread knowledge of good play by play websites, aside from this one, obviously. Obviously, part of the reason I'm posting this is to give some attention to the website I frequent, but I'm also looking for other places to RP at. We can't hog all the good gamers, right? :smalltongue:

Anyways, I'll start. My main PbP website is , a small scale website with about 11-12 active members, with a couple less active but still around members. As of now, we have recently finished our first full campaign, taking about a two years from the projected 5-6 month our GM suggested, ha ha. The game actually survived a site swap, with only losing three members over the whole two year period, as well as 9 on site shorter roleplays. We're pretty open to multiple systems, as long as the DM is willing to assist in character creation and explaining the games rules. We may not always be the best bunch, but I feel that we've managed to accomplish a lot of play by plays, and I hope anyone interested in running or playing a game on the net takes a look. We're in a hidden corner of the net, but I believe that we are worth a short check. ^_^ We generally run/play games using the oWoD ruleset, and the ruleset the website was made for, JP's bountyhead bebop sci fi and fantasy system, which is a lot of fun.

Anyone else come from other cool pbp websites with active members and willing to spill the beans? :)

Magikeeper
2015-04-19, 11:32 PM
Sure! Before going into that, though, it could be useful to discuss why we think our websites / sub-forums are still around. This is in the general gameplay subforum, after all! Personally, I recommend the following:

> OOC chat. I prefer using aim or something instead of having a forum thread for this, but the key point is that in a healthy gaming group not all chat is directly related to the game (from my experience). People sometimes get tied up, but a good OOC chatting experience can keep them involved even if they can't take the time to post. This may be the most important thing, actually.

> Multiple PCs and/or party splitting: In real time gaming, splitting the party and/or having multiple PCs and such is not the greatest of ideas. But in PbP it is a fantastic idea, since each player is posting on their own schedule anyway. Basically, the RPing shouldn't come to a screeching halt because 1-2 players got tied up at the same time.

---

As for my main PbP website, that would be the Epic World sub-forum I'm recruiting for elsewhere on this site (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?409614-Lightly-Ruled-Unique-Shared-World-Setting-Desires-More-Players!), which is effectively shared world setting with several moderators where players can have mulitple PCs running about the world going on quests and such. Rule system is unique to EW, world is a fantasy setting.

We've been active for over 2 years now, with some months being more active than others (44,223 posts in total, very little of that OOC since we use AIM). At the moment we have 4 active players, 2 sorta active players, 2 players that will likely be active again in a month or so, and 2 I'm not sure about but they might be having RL computer issues. We plan to more aggressively recruit closer to summer, as we'd really like to have a couple more regularly active players.

The Grue
2015-04-20, 01:24 AM
Minor pedantic aside: PbP actually stands for Play By Post. :smalltongue:

A_Man
2015-04-20, 06:25 AM
Minor pedantic aside: PbP actually stands for Play By Post. :smaliltongue: close enough. :smalltongue:

And thanks magikeeper! Im gonna have to check that out. The structure of the website forums and subforums tends to get me confused, ha ha.

Cyclopean
2015-04-20, 10:29 PM
I did Living Pathfinder (http://www.enworld.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?388-Living-Pathfinder) for a while. I'm not 100% certain what the community is like now, but I enjoyed it when I was involved. It's very open to new players, although character creation is a bit involved--you need to make your character on the wiki, which means you can't use mythweavers or the like for your character sheets.

I played in all of two campaigns, and read a few campaign logs of others. PC attrition occurred, but GMs seemed to stick around.

Magikeeper
2015-04-21, 05:57 PM
And thanks magikeeper! Im gonna have to check that out. The structure of the website forums and subforums tends to get me confused, ha ha.

Ah, Epic World is easy in that regard - it's just one subforum with different locations using a [tag] like so: [Elexia] Exampleton's Tavern. The larger site (MTGsalvation) is a magic the gathering site that doesn't have anything to do with the subforum (not a magic the gathering RP).

---

That brings up another general topic - subforums. I think a lot of shared-world RP sites go overboard in this regard, and the end result is a forum that looks like a ghost town even if they actually have a good number of active players. I feel like they design these giant site structures for dozens (in some cases it feels more like 100s) of highly active players when they're probably only going to have a dozen active people plus some number of on-again off-again folks.

Take this very forum as an example - both it and its subforums are very active. Now think about just how many people are involved to reach that level of multi-forum/sub-forum activity.

Personally, I would suggest that someone designing their own website for a shared-world RP have one subforum for gameplay, and maybe a few others for OOC stuff. But even with the OOC I wouldn't spread it too thin.

-----

Edit: Heh, everyone else is directly linking to sites, might as well: Epic World (http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/outside-magic/the-colosseum/the-epic-world)
I kinda picked a slow week to do this... but on the plus side it means the WMs are free. :P

kyoryu
2015-04-21, 06:30 PM
While it's not actually a typical game, www.storium.com is pretty cool.

Sparx MacGyver
2015-04-22, 09:52 PM
My favorite is still www.myth-weavers.com

It's got pretty much everything you could want. Each game get it's own separate forum for use, dedicated t that game only. You can have subforums as you need them, like one for OOC and what not. It has a nifty built in die roller, and just as awesome - they host your character sheets. Everything can be made to private fi you don't want anybody to see, or you can always let it be public. Off hand, I don't think anybody can post in there unless you invite them, but it has been awhile.

Some other cool features they have are Dungeon, Town, NPC, and Treasure Generators, a Point-Buy Calculator, and a pretty good forum of users that can help you. Probably the worst thing about the site is that they don't do combat maps...yet. They are updating and working on features all the time. In the mean time, you could use http://ditzie.com/ which is a free online mapper. Your players can freely move all the pieces, as I don't think there is a way to only let certain players user certain 'tokens' but you can upload images and stuff so it can be your maps and your tokens being used and all that.