Well I haven't made an RPG in a while with the failed Ultimate Medieval V2 its time I make one.
This RPG will be open world with some character interaction but not a lot. Your character can be anything and I will give you skills based on how you describe your character.
There won't be a story in the op but instead every character gets their own storyline. In the first post bye I will tell the player there storyline based on their bio and other factors.
Proto type character sheet:
Name:
Age:
Bio:
Race: (This can be anything, Human, Elf, Robot, Alien, etc)
Powers/Abilities: (Special skills like gun proficiency or magic)
—
Lvl: 1
Xp: 0/15
Health:
Inventory:
Skills
Tell me if you want any extra information. Feedback is appreciated
What time period does this take place?/I agree with Pablo. Time period? Robot and alien put this maybe in the future, but I'd like your word.
It would be different depending on your character. For example if you were a robot or something your story would take place in the future while if your character is a guard to a kingdom it would take place in the medieval age.
Unless you've written down a conceivable story with characters, a plot, choices, locations and a conclusion, this is absolutely not going to work. At all. Vague RPGs fail. The player will get bored of you having to make up stuff because you weren't prepared for whatever they did. Sure it seems like a fun, easy idea now, but I can't see this lasting more than 10 pages until the posts are reduced to "I talk to the cyborg" or "I attack him again."
The whole idea of the RPG is the player creates their own story. Depending on there character I will give them a time period/setting/whatever. Other than that its up to them to develop their story and their character. From my over 1 year of experience creating RPGs this does not seem like something that would fail after 10 pages.
This is also a serious problem. You will not succeed if you plan to have a story for any character of any species in any timeline with any skills. You need a time, a location, an atmosphere, and default weapons/powers/abilities for people.
Like Is said above and in the op I will give players their own time/location/atmosphere/powers/abilites. In the Powers/Abilities section of the character sheet the player writes something like fire magic. In the repost I will fill out the skill section of the character sheet with one or two skills like Fireball [5-9 Damage, No Cooldown, Fire Magic]
If you want a successful RPG,
1. You have to plan a LOT of things. As the GM, you are responsible for the story staying on track and the world being alive. If this is an RPG, you are in charge of the stats changing correctly, fairly, and equally for all players. You cannot "wing it" and make up the numbers as you go.
2. You need to have one story/plot, one setting, one timeline and at least one central ending for everyone (multiple endings are always fun though). Players need to know what to do. No RPG has ever dropped a player into an open world and told them to go have fun without an actual objective or clue or something.
3. You have to stay up to date on the RPG. You can't check on it every other day or just once a week. You need to be checking in on it frequently to make sure players aren't frozen in time, and if you don't plan ahead, you'll find yourself checking on it less and less
I am aware of all these things, this is not my first RPG. I will plan ahead, I will check the RPG often. I do think an RPG is fine if it has multiple storylines for different players.
Make sure you double-check the How to create an RPG thread as well.
I have read that when I created my first RPG and a bunch of times after that.
@MattEmAngel You seem to be getting the impression that I will be making up everything as I go and there will be no story. This is not correct it will just be a little different from most RPGs because i'm getting a little tired of a conventional one.
No, that's an RP. RPs are about giving a time, location and setting and letting the players write paragraphs of information to develop their character. An RPG is a game. There is no real character or story development, and the story should already exist. Hence the name "Role Playing Game." If you want to have people write their own story and develop their own character, you need to open an RP.
However,
1. RPs have little to no actual combat, but you can control it to a limited extent. You can decide if their attack hit or not and if it has a cooldown. After that the player decides the outcome (usually).
2. RPs take a lot of writing from the players. I'm talking a paragraph or two at the least. They have to be aware that two or three sentences is not good enough. To actually "write their own story" and "develop...their character," they need to be good at writing.
The reason I didn't call it an RP is because of a reason you said, RPs have little to no combat. This RPG/RP is about 50% combat so its not an RP but I guess it isn't an RPG either. I'm just going to call it an RPG because I think it's closer to an RPG than an RP.
I'm going to side with nivlac, an RPG like this is totally possible. I ran a nation RPG similar to this, just with nations instead of characters, a couple years ago and it worked well. I also participated in one similar to this in that it's very much about your decisions and combat at the same time, but it was somewhat more rigid in that the GM had a set list of perks, but there were about three sets of eight unique perks so there was still many options.
The big problems with this from my experience is that,
1. It's a lot of work. If you haven't planned it out, you'll be coming up with stuff on the go, and making a good narrative as you go along is hard.
2. It's hard to keep track of. To do this, you'll have to keep track of each character's personal story, which can be hard to do when the character is fifteen posts in and fairly similar to three other characters.
Something else to keep in mind is to keep this open ended. Both my and other game I participated in tried to make more rigid rules later on to keep things more organized, and in both cases it ruined the fun of it.
1. It's a lot of work. If you haven't planned it out, you'll be coming up with stuff on the go, and making a good narrative as you go along is hard.
2. It's hard to keep track of. To do this, you'll have to keep track of each character's personal story, which can be hard to do when the character is fifteen posts in and fairly similar to three other characters.
Something else to keep in mind is to keep this open ended. Both my and other game I participated in tried to make more rigid rules later on to keep things more organized, and in both cases it ruined the fun of it.
1. I am aware of this but with this kind of RPG its hard to plan ahead that much.
2. I can always go back and read posts again if I get stuck.
Yah I tried to make an RPG similar to this a while ago (FG Medieval) and it ended shortly after I tried to make more rigid rules. I'm going to try hard to not make new rules and especially not rigid ones.
To All:
I'm probably going to begin production on this after my camping trip. My camping trip will be from tomorrow (friday Sep 25) to Sunday Sep 27 and I won't be able to post then.
I think I could enjoy a game like this. Also, I tried to do a vague evolution rpg like this. It was doing good until I couldn't make time for it.
Name: Storm Dragon
Age: 20
Bio: Storm was born to a noble family of vampires. Her dad was a werewolf who kept his love for Storm's mom a secret. Because of this Storm has had do her best to not let her family know that she is half of one of the races that vampires hate most. The only ones that know her secret are her mom and her dad.
Race: Werepire(half vampire, half werewolf)
Powers/Abilities: Shadow magic, shapeshifting
—
Lvl: 1
Xp: 0/15
Health:
Inventory:
Skills:
Let me know what you think of this character and if I need to fix anything.
