You see here an entry. --More--

[active_apathy]

Welcome, one and all, to my Next Entry.

It's come to my attention that a lot of my readership consists of roleplayers, writers, and people who just love having fun. That, and some people have no idea what I talk about with some of the odd or different game systems I may occasionally mention.

So, I thought, what can be done about it? I've wanted to get into some kind of online RP that's likely to happen for a while now, and I've a good mind to introduce certain LJers who design bits and pieces of games to other systems that they can raid for ideas appreciate and enjoy.

[EDIT: Please don't be horrified if you've never heard of any of the four I mention. Have a look at them, if you'd like to, or leave it blank if you're not terribly worried about it. If you want, you can even pick the one with the prettiest name.]

Not just that, but this is also an opportunity for people who've never played before to jump in with no prior knowledge needed - all I'm asking for is an imagination. In fact, chances are it'd be easier for you to learn any of the four I mention below than it would for, say, a D&Der.

And so, here we have a poll!

[Poll #541908]

The existence of the above poll, by the way, is further evidence that lesslikeyou is awesome. *squish!*

Comments

[eighthcloud.livejournal.com]

Hee! ::is squished::

I voted, but it didn't help much. :/

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

You deserve many, many squishings, for you are awesome.

And that's ok; it's more of a survey, really. I'm not going to make anyone do things they don't want to.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

StickGuy makes me want to play KOL again. Or at least a KOL character in it.

I remember Risus now... been ages since I took a peek at it.

Hrmm... much reading and pondering...

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

StickGuy's probably the only RPG where you can just use an icon for a character sheet, and update it as necessary.

Risus and Pace are nicely rules light, and there's been a lot of PbP success stories on the FATE mailing list.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

I have a copy of Kill Puppies For Satan laying around that I haven't done anything with... great fun if you're in a blasphemous horror/angst sort of mood.

I ran a pretty successful d20 supers PbEM for over 2 years... it eventually ended when most of the players went through major life events at basically the same time which killed net time. We still remember it fondly though.

Admittedly, one of the reasons it worked so well is because I kept the actual gaming aspects rules-light on the players side. They did character creation and levelling up by the book... and everything in game happened by the book. I just kept all the mechanics behind the scene. They narrated their actions and desires, I rolled the dice and dictated the results.

It worked well. I love my crunchy bits in games, they give me something concrete to work with. Once I have that, the RP just flows.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Probably the best mechanical advantage of Pace for PbP is that it's completely diceless, but that's easily portable to FATE where you've already got a pool of points you can use to tweak things to your own ends. Not to mention, if you catch the GM a bit short, it'll earn you a few extra points.

That said, some randomness is fun and most of the spin comes after the rolls anyway.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

Diceless... eh. I've never been big on diceless.
Everything either becomes static yes/no matters, or everything basically comes down to GM fiat (moreso than any diced RPG) which just bugs me.

Life is random, and superior ability doesn't always win (another problem with diceless).

All in all... I have too much of a lifetime love affair with my dice to be happy giving them up :)

So, do you have any ideas in mind yet?

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Pace does diceless much, much differently. Players and the GM get a supply of 'pips', which are used to buy results that are better than a basic success. If you run out, your opponent gets the pips you overspend.

Drop this into FATE, and it means that you have the option of spending points to buy your result (or selling off the dice for points) - though it may come back and hurt you. I'm mostly thinking FATE with dice and some of the bits and pieces from the mailing list.

In terms of a genre and, in turn, setting, I'm starting to get a bit of an idea of where that could go. It depends on how folk see 'sci-fi'; I might work on a few ideas and see what everyone thinks of them.

Playing on LJ looks pretty definite, but I was rather expecting that.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

Guess I'll have to read up on Pace then. Still working through Fate, slowly (damn my ADD for making these simple things take so long)

Sci-Fi is pretty vague as a genre... you get everything from modern day mad science to non-cyberpunk near future through space opera and beyond. Plus it does cross-genre very well too... Star Wars is basically a western, Space Pirates are a cliche, and so forth.

Perhaps another poll is in order.

Playing on LJ is the obvious solution. We're all already on it. It also avoids scheduling conflicts (like time zones), but runs inherently slower. My PbEM ran through email primarily, but we moved to IM whenever everyone was on and things went faster there.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

*waves leetle flag of lurkerdom...hood...ity...ness*

Amazingly, I've never heard of any of those systems - but FATE seems closest to the free-form I do mostly, and Stickman sounds fun, for a casual thing.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

I think I might even abduct some bits of Pace and use them for a kind of diceless FATE, with some of the bits and pieces that've been bashed out on the mailing list. There's rather a lot of very good stuff there, including a fun option to turn your own serious injuries to great advantage.

StickGuy sounds fun indeed. Icons as character sheets would amuse me greatly, but that's an entirely different StickTale. That amusement is easily the most important rule of StickGuy. :)