To start things off...
Copy+pasting from the WP's board where
tpc and I began talking about some various RP ideas, so here:
Well ok, they're probably lousy ideas that need a lot of work to make them acceptable, if not barely acceptable at all lol. Don't burn me at the stake.
What if we made a game out of it? I mean as in a fun sense. There are different ways we could supplement or modify the regular process of RPing.
I'll list the two big ones that may or may not work...
1. What if we "level up" ourselves as writers? What we need to do is to actually go out and make posts in RP. The more we engage with a specific character, the more points we can gain. Of course, to avoid spamming, the minimum to qualify for a RP level point can be set to something like at least 3 complete sentences (not "See Jane run. See Jane fall down. Jane cried.").
It would be simply a tally of how much RPing you do, maybe a weak incentive to encourage RPing tho.
2. "Life is a deck of cards." - Randomized RP idea
What if instead of creating our characters at our own whim, we were given ours to write with? To avoid making this such a drag, the intended length of the RP is fairly short (like 2 weeks maybe?), and you're not stuck with Disgusting McDisgusting forever.
The "card"
It can be a brief dossier with room for the writer to extrapolate and fill in.
Or maybe it's a single characteristic with some info on each card, and you receive a hand of cards. You would have to try to mesh together the cards into a character that makes sense (mostly). It can be something simple like "short in height" or complex like an awesome powerful characteristic but also has handicaps involved to balance it out.
Or even maybe a card that affects not the character but the writer himself for that duration of the RP, a card that reads as "You may not use the article 'an' in any of your IC posts."
Perhaps If a player doesn't want to play the hand he was dealt, then a trade between he and some other player is allowed. A limited number of cards?
Anyway, I was just thinking of making the RP writing itself fun and maybe encouraging in diversifying in one's writings.
Edit: I wanted to share a 3rd one that's for specifically for the Alt-Hists.
I noticed that a lot of the drag in playing an Alt-Hist is sometimes it's the vast amounts of research on the country, era, tech, etc... and a person can end up having to wade through a bit too much at some moments, then he proscrates on posting his turns. It happened to me a couple of times which was purely self-inflicted, I admit.
So why not ask around for what sort of type of a scenario that we would want to play? Mind you I mean a generic vague scenario like...
"An emperor lost the mandate of heaven (or whatever), thus the empire fell apart and various fragments fights over the imperial city and its throne"
"Since the dawn of the century, distant lands were being discovered, so navies in many kingdoms were furiously built up, treasuries emptied in anticipation of realizing vast riches to be gain overseas."
It would take place on an Earth-like planet, but the nations are drawn into existence from imagination (aka Nation States, kind of). Each player could come up with a fictional culture, etc... histories might not work out together but presumably it's because the historical record is murky and the various historians from the areas of the world are all getting at least a couple of things wrong, that sort of thing.
4th: what if we drew up our own maps of Dippy? Teaming up can be allowed, ofc. Maybe we could see if we can create reasonably balanced, fun maps to play on.
The idea that can be done the quickest is 3 - we can set a tech level, and the balancing lies in the political systems and culture.
Two looks good, though prep. Plus, any random setting could spawn a weird ensemble of characters. A murder mystery RP, perhaps?
Of course, those ideas were for "down the road", not necessarily readily available at this point right now. I'm just brainstorming here, seeing if any of those ideas have appeal or not.
As for 3, yes that's the general idea. Although some people might like to play in a different tech group if they wish for a particular reason. It's like drawing up a new mod of Civ, trying to start off from a vague idea of what sort of scenario that it would be all about: colonizing? Close-quarter conquests? Unification? Religious wars? Wonder Races? Greek style city leagues warring with each other? Thassalocracies fighting for merchants and trade routes? That sort of thing...
Then ofc... NS here gave me the idea of where we would do an Alt-Hist from scratch, just pure ficition.
