Features for an ideal roleplaying site?

rillani

Our forum is up and stable.  It works, but it's not ideal.  I want to make Thorns the best roleplaying site out there--not just the best forum, but the best site, wiki and other stuff included.  But before we can make that happen, we have to have some idea of what we really want.

Pretend we have infinite capability, put aside what the forum is now, and imagine what a roleplaying site could do.  What would you want it to do?  What would be better than that?  What would be even better?  We're brainstorming here, so more is better.

As an example, I want subaccounts.  But really I want something better than subaccounts.  I want to make character sheets with a form, and have the sheet appear in the character's account profile, so everyone can find it easily.  Even better would be if the character was automatically added to a "yellow pages" list when approved.  Plus it would be rad if I could post to the forum and the wiki with the same account.

Do you have more ideas?  Anything cool or useful you saw on another site (doesn't have to be a roleplaying site)?  Don't worry if it's feasible right now, first I want to know what our ideal Thorns should be like.

unwanderinggirl

I love the idea of subaccounts, just for clarity and customization's sake. Always nice. Other than phpBB forum sites, I don't know if that's possible with forums running on WordPress. It would be interesting to research.

I can say that posting a CS and having it post elsewhere (i.e. on a Wiki) would be possible through WP; it would probably be a custom query. 

I wish I could say I liked all the fancy stuff possible on RP forums, but I don't even care about signatures! I want a nice profile pic, really nice typography (customizing that is cool; some font choices?), and something that looks nice on my phone ('cause I read/write in the weirdest of places).

I'll have to think of some other things, but I'm pretty minimalist. I like hitting "discussions" here to see the most recent posts. It'd be cool to have a "portal" page you see when you log in that has the most recent posts already visible, along with account-specific pertinent information (don't ask me what that is). 

It'd also be fun to have an actual in-game events calendar. But, I'm nerdy that way.

knitting

Nice profile pics would be on my list too as well as sub accounts. I'm in two minds about whether I'd like to see perhaps some sub-boards for different neighborhoods, with maybe a little description of the area that goes with it or even a picture. I'm not too bothered about thrills and frippery but I think some more immersive elements and visual aspects could be fun to help us all get a better 'Thul 'Ka' vibe while we're writing. 

unwanderinggirl

Some thoughts on building a better play-by-post RPG, which in turn builds a better forum.

I'm sorry, this is wordy, but have you come to expect any less from me? I think not. <3

So, after Thorns, the only other RPG site I gave a good old-fashioned try at was Mizahar. It's huge (if you look at the link, seriously devote some time to clicking around the forums ... especially the development areas because they are excellent), it has a very deep, well-defined lore and world structure, and it's very organized. The wiki is hard to navigate, but dizzying. The "founders" took a lot of time doing what they did, and it shines brightly. They've set themselves up as a writers' haven, have an entire forum dedicated as "workshop" space for plot outlines, story arcs, and character development. They encourage collaboration and elaborate plots, all while the moderators of different areas of the world spend each season coming up with seasonal plots, story lines, and goals for characters in that area to participate in and aim for. This is really amazing and involving and, honestly, enjoyable. They invite players to be very active in world development as well as story development; instead of keeping the over-arching plot shrouded in mystery (some things are, of course, and should be), there is a lot of freedom given to players to actively participate in defining the world and what happens to it, good or bad. They highlight players, feature stories, and keep a very active blog (players also blog and journal regularly). Moderators keep office hours. Their Q&A section is very full. That said, there is a very low tolerance for BS and for immaturity, though some things slip through the cracks on occasion. It depends on the moderator and the moment.

I especially enjoyed the moderator dedication to their particular sub-areas of the world, usually defined by provinces and a single city in that area. They came up with whole plots for the season (3-month blocks of time, 4 seasons a year), for the year itself, and possibly for the future. They had seasonal "quests" that invited player participation and made sure to flesh out locations and NPCs for their locations.

That said, Mizahar also had very high standards for character involvement. Every character had to have an occupation, earn an income (3 job threads a "season", for 12 a year), pay living expenses (defined by whether you lived poor, common, or wealthy sort of lifestyles), and earn skills. Yes, every thread was graded by a moderator (unless otherwise noted by the players involved), and so much of character development could be defined by skill-building (there was a skill list, skills were measured from 0-100, even magical abilities). If you wanted your character to be an awesome sorcerer, you had to earn it, one thread at a time, whether it was a "solo" (skill-building lit thread) or with another player or through education by a moderated NPC. When PCs interacted with each other, they were encouraged to keep all their skills in mind in the thread, whether it was cooking or sword fighting or magic or seduction. So, that was very, very, very intense.

Let me say that again: intense. (Some of the founders' personalities were equally intense, if not borderline psychopathic ... but that's a tale for another time, my friends.)

Perhaps, that was one reason I couldn't endure there. Sometimes, dammit, I just want to write and not worry about everything else. I could, surely, but there was always that hanging over my head. 

I found it both good and bad, sometimes. I thought it was fabulous for building a dedicated, involved player base. People willing to be the backbones of a story line in order to literally build their characters from the ground up. Long-timers were amazing people. At the same time, it weeded out those who weren't dedicated to the system, myself included.

I'm sure there is a middle ground, and one I felt that sometimes Thorns was trying to establish.

What that looks like, I don't know, but I'd love to find something between the extremes of pen-and-paper style skill building with graded threads and, well, nothing at all. Skill-building is motivating, skill-building creates thread goals and helps define a character, skill-building gives conflicts definable resolutions, skill-building creates competition, and skill-building helps set standards. That said, it can be consuming. It can also take away joy and freedom to do what you want with your characters or to create a certain character. There has to be some way to balance the two, to say, "Hey, most characters should start at X. An exceptional character can be created by sacrificing Y." Or something like that. There's gotta be something, but I'm not seeing it at this moment while I'm writing this. Do I want to have a defined skill list and earn points? Meeehhhhh. Not really. Do I see the benefits? Yes. Is there a middle ground? Possibly. But what? Sometimes people have a character idea and want to play them as they are (older, experienced, not always a young newb with no skills). How do you allow that without breaking the game? That was one thing that Mizahar required: you came naked into the world and had to make your own way, no matter what. It was an amazing player equalizer, but it did really require dedication if you had a character goal in mind. You had to grind your way to your goal ... in words. Sometimes, that's cool. Other times, it's really not.

Keeping players involved by both inviting their own storylines as well as providing players established quest directions are very enjoyable aspects to role play, in my opinion. It's fun to make up folks and write as them, but it's even more fun to have a purpose, a cause, and a direction. I feel as though sometimes that was the difficulty of old Thorns: the direction was shrouded in mystery and only revealed as sparks in the dark. Some of that is tolerable, but having sub-story lines that are defined and active would definitely help build an involved player base whose characters are part of what's going on around them.

I loved the writing resources, the focus on making characters you loved, and the encouragement to interact with other PCs as well as with moderator's and their NPCs. This created a really fabulous social life in-game as well as in their chat. Really, chat as a plotting device was encouraged and worked well. Chat as a way to come up with a character and find direction was a big help for newbs. Moderators regularly made themselves available, and that was something I also felt like Thorns has historically done well at. No issue there.

In terms of a forum structure, I think that making an OOC section with some plot requests, character matchmaking, character development sub-forums would be helpful. I think that breaking the neighborhoods of Thul'Ka out into sub-forums would, ultimately, be a benefit as we continue to grow. Eventually, expanding into the rest of Mugroba is obvious, right? New cities, desert areas (elsewhere; wilderness A; desert B) and the Muluku Isles (even the surrounding ocean as a playable area) are all possible expansions as things grow and change. Having that mental structure in place somewhere, say, in a Google Doc, would be a good thing. Knowing where to go next, what to open to play and when, with what storyline leading to it, would be a thing to do, of course.

All that to say there were some good things about Mizahar that I respected, but there was plenty of bad that I put up with in my desire to continue with some kind of writing, some kind of RP. I'm sure there are a dizzying array of other RP sites out there with their merits and flaws worth discussing, but I felt the need to write about some highlights and shadows in order to express how much I feel like there is fabulous potential. Here. For reals. Because we have big hearts. 

I think the hardest part is both fun and hard work: plots. Real, tangible, active, living, story-defining plots on both a grand scale that unfold regardless of player participation as well as on a smaller scale with the invitation to keep people involved. That's the only way to keep the blood flowing, to keep the words from freezing on the digital pages. This part is hard; I was a moderator on Mizahar for the entirety of two months. I couldn't do it. It was too intense, but the large scale of the site was absolutely dizzying. Thorns, Thul'Ka, not so much. It's doable. We can do it, together, as the roots, and build from here on up. And, as the cliche goes, if we build it, they (whoever they are out there) will come. And enjoy.

Char

I also like the idea of sub-boards for different neighbourhoods and subaccounts are always a handy thing. I also like the idea of taking a little more direction from mods. Freedom is great and people should be able to play their characters as they want, but the opportunity to write towards a goal set by mods sounds really fun to me. I like challenges big and small so special threads where players are asked to join in if they like and make something happen or reach a certain scenario would be good or mods could ask specific characters or groups of characters to reach individual goals. I think that's something I would enjoy alongside the normal threads.

Jomira

On the more technical side of things, it would be cool if an auto-updating Yellow Pages also included in index of all story threads that character has posted in (so a self-managing timeline for each character). It would also be cool (don't know if "possible," but this is about dreaming big, right?) if those timelines organized themselves according to which GAME DATE each thread took place on (as opposed to the real-world date the threads were created on). On archiving system in general that let you drudge up threads by both post date AND game date would be ridiculous (awesome).

Also the wiki should include badass illustrations of literally everything.

PS: My current favorite thing about this forum is it auto-saves your posts. GENIUS. BEST THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO PLAY-BY-POST.