On 2006-01-12, Mark W wrote:
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I'll pipe up as someone else who's done this, although not in the same way as Christian talks about. Back in the prehistoric days of the interweb (I'm talking my college days, 1986-1990), there was e-mail, and there were local BBS-style systems connected by FidoNet. We used to do rp on the BBS by writing these big masively intertwined narratives and posting them on the campus BBS. There were two main kinds of product: single-author stories using a stable of shared-universe characters created by the group of players in previous play, in which you were pretty much "anything goes" as far as using somebody else's characters; and braided narratives assembled round-robin-style, usually with massive coordination through e-mail and offline conversation. There was NO character identification, really - we tended to spin up characters as needed for the storyline and furthermore, we'd re-write them pretty regularly between stories. Later on, I tried to get into the MUD/USENET style of play that Christian talks about, but I found it difficult to get anything done without massive overhead - I think because the scale of the "games" meant that you had to manage negotiations with too darn many people at once over events, characters, and locations. All too often, you'd tick along nicely for 24 hours and then somebody would storm into the thread insisting on rewinding continuity back to where he went home for the weekend and lost his net connection. |
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