The MORPG, that is. I have to apologies to anyone that might’ve been really looking forward to this; I have a tendency to work in bursts separated by large gaps of disinterest. I’ve never abandoned the idea, however. The hard part is deciding how to proceed, so I’ll layout my current thoughts here and hope that some of my readers have some thoughts or ideas.
The initial idea came cutorous of Liliy, who suggested I turn my attempt at a homebrew table-top RPG, Unity, into a forum-based RPG. From there I expanded on the idea and toyed with creating a forum akin to Gaia Online, with customizable user avatars and various RPG elements. I could probably do that on my own if I spent the next couple years doing nothing else, but that idea was eventually scaled back and then put on indefinite hiatus.
Since then I’ve kind of kept thinking about what should be done with this—and how to go about doing it—on and off. My most recent idea is to scale things way back and try to stick to the original idea of turning Unity into a structured, forum-based RPG. Here are my current thoughts on what I’d like to do with this, in no particularly structured order:
- Instead of having one massive forum dedicated to a single game thread, the MORPG would house multiple games, each using the Unity ruleset for structure. Each message board would be one game universe (a game board), with the board moderator(s) acting as narrator’s/game masters.
- All Maikeru On users would be eligible to submit game ideas, which would be approved by global moderators. Once approved, the game board would be created with the requisit rule outlines, such as starting Character Points, setting description, advancement, etc.
- All Maikeru On users would be eligible to play in any open game. Joining a game would require creating a character (using the options defined by the GM prior to game board creation) for that game, and users would be restricted to one character per a game.
- There would be no out-of-character posting in game world boards. A dedicated OOC area might be provided for each new game board or a general OOC board would be provided. Any OOC posting (outside approved areas) would be punished by character deletion.
- Some kind of thread locking mechanism would be nice to prevent multiple, conflicting posts from popping up in game threads.
That’s what I have for now. I think this is both much closer to Liliy’s original thought and a generally better idea than what I originally tried to do, which was essentially trying to build a CRPG like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy in the form of a web-based play-by-post game. Unity should provide the flexibility and ease of use to support any kind of game while providing enough structure (combined with the “always in character” requirement) to keep games from devolving.