[url=Pen and Paper RPG dying??]http://www.gamebanshee.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-14213.html[/url]
In short, the above mentioned thread was a series of questions and concerns from TRPG (t=tabletop) players about the slow of sales or popularity of TRPG's with the growing popularity and ease of PCRPG's.
Basically, their reason for why people stopped playing boiled down to one issue:
PCRPG's are more convenient and less time consuming.
Ok, and that's why people started to play TRPG's through Forums.
But then again...that's not all that great is it?
If you use a Forum, you end up with all sorts of shortcommings,
- You have to make a seperate OOC (out of character) thread from the IC (in character) Thread
- You have to trust the players to actually Roll the dice without cheating
- You have to post any pictures on your own webspace and give the link to the other players
- You have to post your character sheet on your own webspace and give the link to the GM(DM).
- You have to re-upload your character sheet to your webspace everytime you change something of major importance
About the only thing convenient about Forum RPGing (Play-by-Post, or PbPRPGing) is that it's there when you can get to it and you usually only need to spend anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes a day depending on how much you LIKE to play it.
But with all those negatives listed above, it's convinience of time is completely lost.
Until now.
Myself and a small team are underway with a project that is presently in Alpha Testing.
It's slow gowing, but it's moving forward at a pretty good rate.
What are we doing?
Re-viving TRPG's back to life by making a Forum that is built from scratch to support playing TRPG's on.
What this means, in case you might over look it, is that you will be able to play DnD, Star Wars (d6 & d20), Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Whitewolf stuff, GURPS, etc... etc... etc... whatever...on the Forum with FULL support in doing so.
What does full support mean?
It means that
- you have a dice roller that is specially designed for EVERY RPG we can make one for, and a General Dice Roller for the ones we haven't been able to yet (the general dice roller is outstanding though! I'd almost use it over special made for system dice rollers)
- you have your USER account, but EVERY character you have made has there own PROFILE and Alias!
What does that mean? It means that the little thing to the left of this message that has my name on it...that thing. It changes with EACH character you have, but you are still logged in as YOUR account. Each character profile gets a different Avatar of your choice too. - you have a SAVED character sheet for every character you have and it's saved in the characters profile. (in Alpha testing this is no more than a blank field for the user to fill in, but we're working on upgrading that to a full on character sheet for each system)
- IC/OOC support that is FILTERED. Meaning: you don't have to create a new thread to have OOC talk. You simply click the filter on to see the OOC with or without the IC posts as well.
- GM(DM's) will be able to give their players experiance that is saved directly to the character sheet via a click of the mouse.
- Game threads will (hopefully) come with storage space for files that the user group might need for the game.
- GM(DM) acts as a Thread Moderator for the game Thread.
And I'll keep you guys up to date in the future, if anyone is interested, on what our release date is for this thing.
Right now, we still have months to work on things.
It's moving fast, but when your goal is to support EVERY RPG out there in a Forum...yeah...that's a rather large goal!
{And the reason I'm not saying where to go, or anything like that is because we're in Alpha Testing...meaning...we aren't ready for you to see it yet. We want it to look better before anyone does.
}
