Themed RP... Gor can't be the best act in town, can it?

Well, you'd want to ask Samuel Frost about his Shadowrun game (which was run pretty much like a RL tabletop game, just in SL), but my own experiement went like this.

I was using the game Unknown Armies and the sample scenario Bill in Three Persons. UA itself is a modern-day game of "transcendental horror and furious action", to quote the website. I chose this for several reasons:

UA's system is dead easy. Each character has a set of (player defined) skills, ranked from 1 to 99. You roll a number from 1 to 100 and try to get as high as possible without going over your ranking. There is some additional fun with "flip-flops", "cherries", and madness tracks, but that's most of what you need to know.

Similarly, the setting itself is easy for people to comprehend (here! now!) and allowed me the widest variety of pre-made props and avatars in SL.

I ran the game using a "VR Cube"; a big 40-meter square cube using Quicktime Cubic VR environments as a sort of SL holodeck. Hamlet Linden interviews the creator (and myself, incidently) over at The World Inside the World Inside. I had a variety of environments somewhat suited to the scene, and while I described most of the action in traditional GMing style, I would change my avatar to reflect the "primary" NPC in each scene.

The upside was, it seemed to be great fun for all involved. The downside was, I found a lot of people in SL have no conception of small-group, rule-bound roleplaying in the form of RPGs, so I had to take half my time explaining the basic concepts. Also, it required a lot of prep time... but if you were running a continuous game, or opening it up to be even more LARP style in a single prebuilt environment, it would be significantly less. I was going for extremes because, hey, experiment!

Putted simply: Include sex in your RP, and it will become full of energy, imagination, and strict rules as well as multiple sims very, very quickly.

Kinky sex is an additional plus over regular sex, by the way.

I've heard of Gorian sims. Can somebody please post the names of some of them? I would like to check these places out.
Thanks

Do a Find for "gorean" in SL - there are lots of them.

You don't mean showing ankles, do you? Most improper!

Gor may have sex, but Exalted has stoner dinosaurs that pee heroin.

Ankles AND wrists!

And yeah, Camille has a point. Since SL is a platform, I think it's generally used by most in it's basest form which is just outright chat. Besides that it takes orginization, time, money, and people to get a RPG enviornment going. And those people are all going to need dedication to the roleplay. Which doesn't tend to happen to much in Second Life unless the roleplay guarentees that you'll score with a boxomy submissive.

SL is a rpg to some. To me for instance. My character is Jonas Pierterson. In world, I am that character.

As I said before some opt out to use it as a platform, but I won't continue that debate in this thread.

I began a themed 19th century sim Friday evening - my first attempt at such a thing. A small nation-state with bigger aspirations than territory.


The sim became available to me Friday, it was open to the public Sunday and was full by Tuesday, now with a waiting list - wow - what happened!?

To my pleasant surprise I was instantly bombarded by IM's and questions on the street for where to find clothes and such; people *really* got into it.

I've met extraordinary professors and lady victorian mice, shopkeepers, gothic landed genty, scientists, tinkerers and practitioners of witchcraft.

The steampunk community (which I'd never met before) are present with a vengeance, setting up some incredible things, and I can barely wait myself to see how it develops.



This is just one data point - but it seems that themed sims work beyond wildest expectations.

Last week, I was wondering if I'd be financially stuck with a 195 USD / month white elephant. This week I'm wondering how fast I can add more sims. Will it fade in a few weeks? Is there a huge pent-up demand? I honestly don't know.

To add icing to the cake, the positive energy generated by people doing their thing is the most rewarding experience I've had in Second Life so far. I'd recommend the experience to anyone.


...and yes, I've seen a few ladies flash a bit of ankle in the sim already *wink wink nudge nudge!*

It would be refreshing to see more of this kind of thing. The element of excitement found in touring the laggy malls and casinos with lifeless camping avs only lasts for so long.

Yar I was thinking the same thing, its kind of odd since SL has great potential for many themes for roleplay. There are some place but is really seems Gor has invested SL and IMO in a bad way. But thats just my opinion.

Ooh, exactly the same thing happened to me. I created my SL account back in October of last year, and wandered around for a few hours with my ugly-@ss freebie avatar and just thought 'meh.' I felt the player-created content was cool but didn't see any reason to wander around in what seemed basically a directionless environment.

But then I got involved in another game with a small but very involved roleplaying community (but crap graphics) and a few weeks ago I started wondering, "Hmm... I really wish I could have this kind of RP experience but with a bigger player base and a more attractive avatar..." Second Life immediately came to mind, so I logged back on, invested in some L$ and gave it a second go. Things are turning out well.

I did briefly dabble in the Gorean stuff myself... I accidentally wandered into Panther territory in the Lydius sim, where I was immediately captured, caged, and rolled into the ocean to die. Not my idea of a warm welcome, and I haven't been back since. (And yes, I did read the warnings at the front gate... I was just following green dots on the minimap at my peril.)

The Goreans clearly do appear to be the most organized roleplayers I've encountered so far, but I've met a number of interesting characters in other circumstances.

Judging by the comments of many in this thread, it appears we have many ideas of what 'roleplaying' really is. For me it just means playing a character that lives in different circumstances from the real me, and may or may not do things I would do in real life. I don't feel a strict rule set or even the participation of others is required for fulfilling roleplay. If you do your character well, other players will react to you regardless of how much real-life stuff they inject into their own play.

But to address your initial question... someone else already mentioned furries. I've met some really committed players who almost never seem to speak out of character, and I've been impressed by their dedication. I've also met others who aren't furries (anthropomorphic animals that often wear clothes and walk on two legs) so much as just animals that can talk. Again, these folks really tend to invest a lot of time in their characters, and no matter what they're doing, they always seem to inject a bit of the character into what they say.

But I've had numerous 1:1 encounters in all kinds of sims where people clearly had their own role-played backstory, attitude, and motivations and it's been quite fun to play along.

Another thing... I was a little uncomfortable here at first by the way many players seem to switch between in-character and out-of-character banter so often... sometimes the OOC stuff sorta killed the RP for me. But I'm getting more tolerant of it... I try to limit my own OOC talk to IMs but I don't worry about how other players handle it too much anymore.

Okay I love that..... hope you dont mind that I will use it as my sig

I really miss live freeform rpg but even when I did it, it was in yahoo groups so it still had a turn based feel because people would log on and post their turn then log off. Most people would then tag someone to respond and a day or so was given for their response to appear and yet another tag for someone else to respond.

I've observed live play inworld but it was disorganised due to including inexperienced players that just stood around giving one or two sentance posts..and without a history for new players to read to understand the dynamics of wha has gone on before it makes it a little hard to jump right in unless you're doing some little filler post like open thoughts and comments that invite basic new interactions to try and come into the new RP.

Because there seem to be so many new RPers inworld I find a lot of god-moding as Mary Sueism as well. The only time I have ever had a successful live RP inworld was during a 3 hour murder mystery dinner where we were assigned a character with history to take and make our own so long as we followed a storyline progression.

It's hard to all congregate together in live roleplay as we have quite an international mix in SL. Many, like me, are also once-a-day posters. We work and then come home to something like this to relax a little after work. Post..then move on to other things inworld..but all on our time. Has anyone ever come up with a way to meld freeform forum RP with SL? Something with an archive for notecards.

1)Create your exciting, well written, SPELLCHECKED(lol) post in a notecard.

2)Drop notecard into "freeform RPG board prim".
RPG board "posts" the title of the notecard on a board. Title can read: Forest/secret meeting/tag Bobby

Then whenever Bobby gets inworld, he can visit the board...see it's his turn and compose a response.

Posts would jump around a little as in any forum posting seen in yahoo groups.

if you're handy with coding you might be able to code rooms to better organise the dropped posts depending on which part of the rp world you are playing in.

You could even have an object..instead of archive notecards, just archive text given in chat which would limit you to the current local chat character number.

First it could ask for the title of your post
then the actual post.

The object could then archive and display the title you gave and anyone coming by that wanted to read it could verbal command the name of that title and have it be spit out in a whisper for them to compose a response to...

again it would ask for title of post then the post to be archived and the process started again




Just some ideas. I'm not a coder and have no idea as to feasibility. : )


(because I like high-adventure in rpgs it's amusing to see someone post that they(for example) are zooming through the clouds to intercept...whatever while they are AO standing like a fashion model. I prefer my forum rpg for serious posting and themed sims as the OOC hang out for meeting with other rpgers and building a community from there.)

RPS - love that game, HUDDLES makes the coolest RPS HUD!

Anyway....

Has anyone checked out what is going on with the pirate stuff? I see all kinds of learn to be a pirate events and I know they stage naval battles and such with pirate ships and all that jazz. Just curious how immersive they are with being pirates.

Not at all. Really, there's a lot of stuff that's just plain cool in Exalted; technically, it even has the sex (as just about any sentient thing in the world can mate with any other, if only in a metaphysical fashion).

If I had the $195 a month to blow, I'd set up a Creation sim, like White Wolf's own Jade City MUSH for Exalted; it's a pretty fun world.

One reason I don't go with freeform RP unless I know people well enough. (Which doesn't help people who prefer freeform, I admit, but see, rules DO have a purpose! )

I dun think this ol phoenix (or any of my characters) will ever find an RP home... been trying since October 2004 and SL fantasythemed/freeform RP groups just never last.

I've been a fan of steampunk/cyberpunk since my teens......

Where can I find more info on your sim? PLease IM me in-world!

Thankies!

I wish someone would build Disc World.

Wish I had the time and cash to build it.

I know of one Fantasy RP area in Bruin that Jakkal Dingo runs, but I don't think its totally up yet, although people can visit the tavern currently. ( yes, its based on the good old free-form fantasy tavern RP) I've been itching to put together a Fantasy/asian flavored RP but alas, I have no idea where to find players for such a thing. I've also been trying to think of exactly how to structure it for plots and whatnot. Yes SL lends itself well to RP, but at the same time, its a lot more involved than just typing * my character goes and does X and returns with Z *. You have to work out so much more and create real things to make the RP more emersive. Its a whole lot more work than simply setting it up on a forum or IRC chat. Heck even a Muck is still less involved. One type description and you are done, rather than having to craft the scripts, textures, animations, and prims of every single object, room, and feature of the RP area. Its a lot of work for one person! ( the GM presumably..)

I personally prefer a more collaborative storytelling approch rather than rule heavy table top online in general. I personally would probably enforce some kind of limited rules for quality of life and to remove the twinks ( usually some kind of character sheet and a list of common sense rules), but other than that, I like the freedom to create and I like to see what other people create.

On the note of RPers in general, I've run into a few, although most of them were furries or tinies or in fantasy themed places. They were not organized, although they did RP.

It would be interesting if there were a centalized area for RPers to go and find other RPers, or some kind of directory/group or something somewhere. Anyone know of such a beast?

If anyone is interested in my Asian Fantasy RP, they can send me a PM or IM in world.

I've been doing MUSH RP now for about 14 years, and have been trying to organize RP on SL. To that end, I put up a SL Roleplay site (http://slroleplay.3verse.cx)

Basically, every theme is going to need different things. I'm sure some of them need more scripting things to track stats and such, while a whole lot else could just stand to have an agreement to a theme and run with it. Say, I'm focusing on Amber, which will only need non-mod notecards with stats people can show others if there's a need (the diceless RPG is very simple that way), a collection of themed sims for RP stages, and a lot of character development and communication.

So my aim with the SL Roleplay site is to offer a place where all themes can have a place to tell their character stories, announce in-character events that people can RP about, other events, organize character backgrounds, and possibly GM larger plotlines. There's also a database for themed sims and builds that can be used in play, as well as a wiki for compiling information on themes. So anyone from whatever theme can use it. Or not. My site isn't the only way, or the end all of RP on SL, but I had the ability and knowledge to put it up, so it's there to be used if you find it useful. I'm also willing to help organize efforts and put in work there if needed. This is all FREE, btw, the only expenses you'd have would be stuff for your own RP in world if you need it.

I'll be making more announcements on it and the Amber RP specific. Been working on finishing up the castle and writing info files, and running around collecting themed sims and builds to include. But there ya go!

I'm actually in several groups dedicated to an old group of roleplayers from a horror-themed text-based game that sorta migrated to Second Life. While there's been a lot of fun building and making things related to the old place, no actual roleplay has occured in any sort of strong organization simply because of the incredibly small text buffer makes any sort of intricate conversation or posing very annoying. Posing (/me command) is unavoidable, you can't make animations and interactions for everything you can think of. Since the game we're from had no combat system or EXP or anything and was driven entirely by writing and agreements with the players, this is an issue.

I'd love to see the text buffer lengthened substantially, then maybe others like my friends and I used to slapping large chunks of text back and forth at each other might put SL to more serious use. SL can add visuals as an enhancement to the text, but can't *replace* the text.

Yeah, it takes some getting used to, especially if you're from the text-based environments. MUSHing can get about half a screen of prose each character "pose", so in SL... not so easy. Sharing tips and tricks as we go would help, as on the fly actual visual poses are hard to come by unless you have just the right gesture or animation ready.