GM-ovanje on line, majstorstvo ili vjeshtina...

Ako želite da igrate ili vodite FRP preko foruma, ovo je mesto za vas

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GM-ovanje on line, majstorstvo ili vjeshtina...

Post by IG »

Tema za sve igrace i GM-ove koji bi volili da se RP na mrezhi poboljsa:)

Evo ga i moj doprinos tj par tekstova koji mogu da olaksaju stvar :) a vi postujte iskustva ili slicne stvari :)

Playing WFRP by Message Board
by Philip Hamilton

Play By Message Board (PBMB) is a close cousin of Play By Email, using the same electronic media to enable participation in a roleplaying game. It’s considerably younger, what with PBEM having sprung up out of Play By Post and PBMB having branched off from the initial ideas, but it has some key differences that can make it very much preferable to other forms of internet roleplaying, depending on your circumstances and preferences.
For those who don’t know, a Message Board is a public discussion area on the internet, where running discussions called “threads” are categorised in named forums. There are probably millions of such communities now extant on the web, with thousands being dedicated to Warhammer: new ones sprout all the time, as the companies that host these discussion areas tend to provide free “basic services” with the option to pay for an advanced, ad-free and enhanced service. Many established Warhammer boards already have roleplaying forums; there are also completely RP-dedicated boards, and boards created by small groups of friends exclusively to run their own RPs. Should you wish to pursue this last option, invisionfree.com is a very good community host. Visit their website, register, and you should be able to create your own board with the minimum of fuss: most hosts provide forum-creation controls that even the most ignorant of the world of computers (such as myself) can figure out easily.

PBMB Basics
On to the meat, then: how a forum-based RP works. In essence, the idea is the same as that of PBEM: people who are far apart or do not have the time to meet regularly are able to play their favourite roleplaying games with each other via the medium of the ‘net. Much of the same pros and cons apply: you’re able to think your descriptions and responses through fully, but it’s far slower, etc, etc. However, already the first key difference creeps in at this basic level: a forum RP on anything but an exclusively-established board is “open”, whereas an email-based RP is “closed”.
Allow me to explain: on any established board, there will be a community: to survive more than a year or so, most boards will have a registered membership of greater than or equal to 200, with a far smaller “core membership” – those who are consistently active, posting regularly and taking an interest in the well-being and continued existence of the board. This core membership can equal just about any number over thirty or so; a board with a core membership of less than twenty is something of a “white dwarf”, and will probably implode within three to nine months, due to lack of activity. Activity is something I’ll go into in more detail later.

Finding Players
Anyway, provided you haven’t created a board exclusively for the use of you and your friends, the PBMB method offers an “open” RP setup: rather than organising it by inviting/pressurising people to join, you simply set up a “recruitment thread”, in which you ask who wants to join in. People reading the RP section will be able to see your recruitment thread, to have a look at any taster text you’ve put in there, and to decide whether they like the look of your RP: rather than sending out emails to gather people in as in PBEM, or talking some friends into doing a normal RP, people actually apply to join your game: not only people you know, but people from all over the world, with whom you might be speaking for the first time when you receive their application. This is a great way to get to know some new people, and also takes a lot of the pressure out of the RPing situation: no-one is going to be meeting with strangers, everything is done in a group situation with everyone able to see what everyone’s saying, and you are shielded behind the persona of your username. It also gives you a fast and easy way to gather up people for an RP should you live somewhere where roleplayers are thin on the ground, and allows you great choice: I generally receive somewhere in the region of 10 to 15 applications when I start a new RP.

Getting the Game Going
The advantage of this openness continues once the game gets rolling: because everyone can see what everyone else is doing instantly, PBMB is significantly swifter than PBEM, and cuts around all the troublesome filing and meticulous organisation necessary to keep the different players on the same timescale; since posts are displayed in chronological order, things are much more easy and casual to arrange. Most boards also incorporate a Private Message system, allowing you to communicate with other board members without giving away your email address; this allows you to split off certain members of the group should you so wish, keeping their actions screened from the others. Similarly, you are able to read back across your RP as a simple, story-style linear timeline rather than a series of numbered files, and thus the amount you need to store and save is drastically reduced, plus great nostalgia value is added since
you and others can easily read back over your own work. I know at least a couple of people on the relatively small board in which I roleplay who avidly read roleplays they are not actually involved in, and budding GMs can often gain helpful, constructive criticism from fellow GMs and players, since their work is open to all and easy to read.

Disadvantages of PBMB
Of course, there are disadvantages: like PBEM, PBMB is significantly slower than real-time roleplaying. My PBMB roleplays tend to last around a year (although I use quite sweeping story arcs): this pales in contrast with the seven year “Fragile Alliances” mentioned earlier, but also is extremely long compared to real-world roleplaying, where even the most convoluted of adventures will probably last less than half that time. PBMB also has its own unique problem, in that with impersonal, remote players, activity is much harder to control: chivvying via personal message and out-of-character discussion is all that is achievable, and people can drop out or lose interest without a great degree of warning. If their computers crash, players will be unable to communicate with the GM, even to say how long they’ll be absent for; players could even be run down in the street outside their home and you’d never know, save that they stopped posting. A million and one personal circumstances can slow down post rates and pull players out of the game altogether with minimal notice: thus PBMB games suffer from the two flaws of inactivity, where post rates decline at an exponential rate as other people see the roleplay as ‘dead’ when the first slowdown begins and slow down themselves, and autopiloted characters, where players on holidays or with intervening personal circumstances voluntarily or through necessity have their PCs put under the control of the GM until the player can return or the PC can be quietly disposed of.
Another, less important but noticeable blight on PBMB is quality of roleplaying: while those who invite/persuade their groups will usually have a relatively good idea of the roleplaying capacities of the people they ask, you cannot control who applies. Those who already use message boards will be all too aware that many people on boards post in a manner somewhat like this:
“i think yu shud drop teh unit of pikemen, cos i dont think that iz gud in a dow army. but then dow suxx, buy CHAOS WARRIORS khorn ROXXORZZ!!!!!!!!!!!”
A note on language in PBMB
Even worse is the dreaded “l33t sp34k”, where bad posters seem to revel in just how horribly they can abuse the English language by inserting absolutely unnecessary abbreviations (3s for Es, 4s for As, u for “you”, 4 for “for”, and so forth) at every possible opportunity, generally spraying a generous helping of gurning emoticons into their text to break it down into inane expressions in case you find their chunks of unpunctuated (…save for the occasional horde of exclamation marks) code incomprehensible. These are people you do not want in your roleplay. You don’t want to make them angry or upset, but it’s best to introduce some sort of quality control: as I mentioned earlier, you will probably receive more applications than you have space to use, especially if your roleplays turn out to be popular. I myself use a “marking sheet,” which evaluates the originality, realistic-ness and general quality of character background and assigns a quantitative value by which character entries can be compared: by releasing the marks only privately and by request, and offering advice and pointers on where those who missed being in the roleplay lost ‘marks’, you can make sure that the process of selection and rejection is as friendly and civil as possible. It is important, however, to remember that many on the boards may not have English as a first language, and that people will get irritated if you begin to develop a set ‘clique’ of players to the exclusion of everyone else: if others drift away, you may, ironically, get stuck with that clique, even if some of them disappear/become inactive or the quality of their roleplaying begins to degrade.

Assorted Advice
So, I hope I’ve outlined the pros and cons of PBMB without making your eyes bleed from the reading so far; what remains is the how. Most of the stuff that has been or will be said about PBEM applies: you can’t break down decision-making as much due to time restraints, and minor railroading is necessary in places to keep things going, especially if inactivity looms.
Don’t trouble characters with tiny, irritating decisions that you know they’d take anyway: let them do what they want when working on a low level, and keep intervening tests to a minimum, since you want to keep the flow running.
Similarly, I would advise that chopping up fights into more than one or two segments can be fatal: you will lose the sense of pace that should be instilled in good fight-writing, and you will also make even the simplest encounters drag on for weeks. My standard practice is simply to obtain a plan/plans from the players before an encounter, generally with a time limit before I will initiate it, and then run through the entire fight according to that/those plan/s. Should major new developments arise, the fight can then be broken off in mid-swing to allow a second round of urgent decision-making, heightening the tension, but generally two segments is as much as I would consider. After all, if you make your encounters too tactical, your players may begin to see the game as more of a strategy exercise than a roleplaying game, and treat it as such.
Keep activity high by gently prodding people whose post rates drop off (using private messages, OOC discussion and sometimes email) and by keeping things exciting: PBMB roleplays need to be fast-paced, since the slowed rate at which investigations and subtleties can occur makes it important to convey information quickly and emphatically before investigations and such like can become boring: intersperse your plotline liberally with encounters, as a well-written fight can inject a lot of life into a floundering RP.
Don’t let things get stale, keep things fluid and dynamic: a lot of PBMB is a balancing-act on the part of the GM, not going overboard on the battles and explosions while keeping his or her players interested, involved and excited about where the plot might go next. The key cause of inactivity is simply people deciding they’re not happy with the commitment of the GM/the quality of the roleplay game and stepping their characters down a gear so that they require minimal input while not being rude and dropping out: you need to treat your players a tad less like powerless pawns (however fun that may be) and a tad more like customers, whose expectations you have to fulfil in order to keep them subscribing to your ‘product’. Just a tad, mind you. Don’t let them forget who’s boss.
Open an OOC thread, to run parallel to the game thread: this will stop large OOC passages cluttering your game thread, which should be mainly in character (OOC means Out Of Character – I probably should have mentioned that before). This will allow you to answer questions about situations in-game without posting contrived and cumbersome in-character creative writing, and will also allow you to convey large masses of important information should you need to without having ridiculous IC passages: recently I had some warriors searching a large room, and it is in this kind of situation where the OOC thread is invaluable: it would have taken me for ever and set the whole group yawning were I to describe the cellar IC, so I simply described the most striking bits IC and then conveyed the more mundane info on my OOC thread, saying how many chests there were, which were locked, the relative positions of everything in the room, where the bookcases where, whether there was anything hanging on the walls, etc, etc, etc. Finally, OOC threads also allow your players to vent any silliness/humour to do with the RP completely freely, without endangering the feel of the game thread at all: I’m sure many GMs know the horror of the good gaming-session going down the drain as the joker of the group decides that a half-hour of hysterical guffaws and lewd puns will greatly enhance the atmosphere.

PBMB Links
So… well, I hope this has been helpful. For people looking for the specifics I think I mentioned earlier, here are a few links:
Board Hosts
http://www.invisionfree.com
http://www.ezboard.com
Warhammer Boards with flourishing Roleplay Sections
http://www.druchii.net
http://www.invisionfree.com/forums/warhammer_palace
(where I post mine)
I’m sure there are many more in both categories: these are merely the ones I can think of off the top of my head. If you speak to Luc_Arkhame on Warhammer Palace, he will happily direct you to a site which I do not have the address of, called the Blood Soaked Ruins (lovely name, eh?): quite a large and established board, entirely dedicated to roleplaying (although not by any means exclusively warhammer-based roleplaying).
Conclusion
Thanks for reading my ramble, and I hope that as a result of doing so a few people will have a try at the old PBMB: I would certainly be delighted to see an influx of new GMs at the Warhammer Palace (where I’m moderator for the roleplay section, so will definitely notice new arrivals).
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Post by IG »

Eh da i za sve vas epske fanatike :) link http://www.liberfanatica.net/, u trecoj knjizi, na kraju, imate korinse savjete o vodjenju pbem-a i vodjenju uzivo online.
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White Axe

Post by White Axe »

Ja sam GM online i trenutno vodim nekoliko avantura... Nije tezak posao, ali dosta zavisi od dogovora izmedju igraca i GMa o ucestalosti tj. brzini postovanja (a i doslednosti). Imate vremena da razmislite i na miru odgovorite.

Mi igramo PBP (post by post) online FRP i isplati se ! :D Cinjenica je da je spor, ali se ljudi brzo naviknu na taj tempo...

EDIT: posle dve godine, post u ovom podforumu 8O 8)
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Post by Xardas »

White Axe wrote:Ja sam GM online i trenutno vodim nekoliko avantura... Nije tezak posao, ali dosta zavisi od dogovora izmedju igraca i GMa o ucestalosti tj. brzini postovanja (a i doslednosti). Imate vremena da razmislite i na miru odgovorite.

Mi igramo PBP (post by post) online FRP i isplati se ! :D Cinjenica je da je spor, ali se ljudi brzo naviknu na taj tempo...

EDIT: posle dve godine, post u ovom podforumu 8O 8)
Pazi, jos kad je ovo otvoreno za test, samo ja sam bio voljan da budem GM ali to se posle nekog vremena zakomplikovalo (zamor materijala :P ) pa je sve stopirano. Ako imas zelju i volju da probas da budes GM ovde, siguran sam da ce se par igraca prijaviti. Samo pokreni odgovarajuce teme i sacekaj da vidis ko se prijavi. Ja znam da cu se prijaviti sigurno :)

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Omiljeni latinski citat : "Perikur acdatis eneus mrdi!"
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Post by Rat with a tool »

Hajde vec kad se tema pokrenula da dam neki doprinos :)
Medju prvim danima 2008. godine treba da pocnem da vodim Werewolf:the Forsaken jednoj grupi ljudi online, verovatno prek ICQa ili MSNa, posto me smara igranje preko foruma. E sada, koliko je pametan potez igrati preko chat-a, videcemo, do sada nisam ima iskustva sa takvim vidom igranja...
White Axe

Post by White Axe »

Stvar je sledeca: mislim da bi bilo bespotrebno da ja sada ovde pisem pravila i nacin igranja.. (jer se razlikuje malo od onog vaseg) E sada, ja sam GM na "Krugu Maceva" (ovo nije reklama :oops: ) i ceo forum je posvecen online FRPovanju... Tamo ima vec gotova pravila, avanture, svetovi...

Znam da ste ovde jedno vreme igrali, pa reko' ako i dalje ima zainteresovanih...

p.s. nadam se da ovim nisam isao protiv nekih forumskih pravila.. :roll:
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Post by IG »

ma ovdje je bio super frp :) sto se mene tice, a po pravilu svaki frp koji sam igrao je bio manje vise nedovrsen. Ako se bude igralo ja sam in :) hm i idem da vidim sta se desava tamo :) ako treba igraca bilo gdje :) tu sam :)
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