A forum role-playing game is a game where players assume roles of themselves-created characters in a given world (most often fictional), and write posts - passages of story - on their behalf to further the game. An FRPG usually contains a detailed description of the given world and one or more main plotlines.
Each player may wander aimlessly on the given world territories (usually separated in categories, with each place preserved in a single forum topic) doing stuff they deem fit for them or take part of personal or plot-related quests; neither type of quest is limited to a single character unless that's the point of the quest (which is rare anyway: the main reason people take up FRPGs is literary cooperation with other players' characters). Rewards for well-played quests are usually in-game items or medals which distinguish the characters or the players but don't give them significant advantage over other players' characters.
Players are usually balanced by some strong barriers (like: your character is too young to take up so many advanced skills) as well as some weak ones (like: your character doesn't fit the theme of the game), with weak barriers defined on case-to-case basis by the administration (which usually consists of the authors of the world and who may or may not take part in the game as well).
Think of it as writing a book, with each more-or-less-major event being written by a different author, from different perspective. Would you take part in such an activity?
Please contribute to #worldbuilding! :DI love a good worldbuilding session
I haven't been involved in one that worked out. However, several pals and I turned a blogspot blog into one that ran for a few years. It was largely comical and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I just don't have the time to devote to one these days. I am hoping to get a tabletop game going again in the not-too-distant future. I miss it.
Shoutout to Dream Realms Roleplaying. It's currently where I RP at.
http://www.lotrplaza.com was my introduction to the internet, basically. Nerd.
It's not something I would partake in any more. In general I have lost interest in role-playing activities as a whole (D&D, etc). I have friends that are very involved with role-playing, LARP was big among a social circle to which I used to belong. They spend so much of their actual life trying to make their fictional characters fictionally learn and succeed at things. They get stressed in real life over the fictional successes of their fictional plots. They spend so much time trying to make their fictional characters fictionally better, gaining fictional accomplishments. They pretend to be other people so they do not have to be themselves, but maybe if they spent some of their time working at improving their actual selves and actually learning skills and so on, they would not want so desperately to escape their lives. They were an extreme set of people to be sure, and not all were like that. But if I am going to choose between earning a skill level in herbal lore through investing XP, or actually reading about herbs until I gain some basic knowledge, I would prefer to do the latter. I know that RP have their benefits that you can't have IRL - like, I will never have magic powers or so on, and I know that that can be fun for people to pretend as a result. I do get that, I get that for some people it's not an obsession and it's just a fun release like reading is for me. I suspect my RP disconnect is similar to my disconnect from gambling: I would rather know I have money in my hand than spend that money in my hand on the chance that later it will bring me more money. For some people, both work and are enjoyable.
Fair enough. I came to think of it as acting and writing combined, since I've never seen someone as obsessed in the FRPG circles; granted, I never dove deep. If you'd ever like to try your hand at it, feel free to message me: I'll bake some simple world for you to train on.
Admins and moderators are the overseers. They can either lurk through the topics, keeping up with the game, or react to others' reports. They distribute the rewards, too. Well, it's in their name: they run the place. To start, you need a forum. Any forum will do, but the more modifiable it is, the better. The person who registers the forum is the first admin, which often means that they can't be relieved of their duty; rules vary from hosting to hosting, and you can write your own rules if you host it, by selecting the engine that serves you best or writing your own. In Russia, many forums put in a lot of effort to get the best design for their story, which means that the stylesheets ought to be modifiable as well. It doesn't have to be this way, but it helps with immersion. Also, oftentimes there are features that you'd like to put in that aren't in the vanilla engine: medals/achievements, gifts, reputation system (where people vote up or down on certain posts of a player, thus creating a number that represents their respect within the community) etc. From my experience, the world is expected to be included when the game starts. You can register a forum and fill it up with info, or you can write it beforehand and open the forum already filled with details. It's not impossible to create it as you go, but it runs with a risk of turning the world into a kitchen sink or an outright mess if done poorly (i.e., without moderation and/or by newbie worldbuilders). Most often, two or three persons cooperate to fill the world under a certain single idea - "your typical fantasy", "post-apocalyptic world filled with advanced tech and magic that's dangerous for the mage as well as for the surrounding world", "My Little Pony-based" etc. - with material moderated by the authors themselves through discussions. Usually, players are forbidden from writing the world because they're assumed to be not in the groove with the idea, which may or may not be true, given how people can still play inside the world with joy and cunning.