Tips For Creating A RP

I spent most of my role playing years in what I knew best as free-form role playing in public chat and only found solid, story-structured role plays on AOL for about a year and this was 7 years ago so needless to say I have only role played for maybe a total of a few months over the past 7 years; free-form or otherwise. While I have not been able to be on as often as I have liked since joining, I have not seen such promising role play since joining the RPG site nor have I ever felt more compelled to try to start my own role play.

While I haven't really role played in years, I have never stopped writing so I only feel a tad bit rusty during RP interactions. I have never been a GM or even a co-GM for a role play but I feel pretty confident about my story structuring. What I am finding the most difficult to grasp about starting my own role play is how to structure a story or even an outline while allowing my Players to maintain free will in their posting. I find it difficult to imagine working an entire story around the reactions and styles of others who at the very most will differ very much from each other.


I'd also like to keep this thread open where you can post up your own questions for being a GM or even if you'd like to offer random advice on the subject.

Thanks a lot, everybody!

-RogueMinstrel

While I'm not a GM on gateway, the first advice I want to offer you is that so-called 'story-structure' really isn't that high on the list of GM'ing. You have an idea yeah sure fun blablabla, but first and foremost you must remember that you're primarily playing a game, secondarily writing a story. Something GM's forget is even though they may be very excited about their plots and whatnot, their players are much more excited about their own characters. As long as you keep giving them enough reasons to remain excited, your story could be absolute chaos and shit and your RP would still be successful. Vice versa, you could have an amazing story and your RP could be dead in 2 days because your players lost interest. A game is only as strong as it's playerbase. So the thing you want to focus most on is getting the best out of your players. Plot is merely one of the many, many tools you can use for that.

One of the hugest killers of roleplays isn't a bad idea, no interest, or anything like that. Sometimes, the thing that dries up roleplays and makes them wither away in the dust is bad story structure!

Google the Hero's Journey! It's a great starting point, a sort of helpful skeleton for starting a story. Generally, you establish your characters in their ordinary world, have something happen to bring them out of it, and send them on their journey. Understanding story structure is highly important. I see far too many roleplays that have a promising premise, but not enough story to them.

There is a Gobi Desert, I like to call it, when a GM has players lined up with interesting and multifaceted characters, but then nowhere to lead them. Immediately when you start the roleplay (and, of course, this requires a great deal of communication between players) set up checkpoints, if you will, along the way. Let's say, just for the sake of example, that you're doing a zombie RP, and the group has met together, and they need to get to the local grocery store to stock up on things. That's your first challenge, set up there -- your gatekeeper, if you will, if you're still following along with the model.

You have a point A and a point B, but you still have room in-between those things for your characters to interact freely, maybe get in a few scuffles, that sort of thing. In a way, it's like improvisational comedy. There's a setup, notes that need to be hit on, and in some cases end points that must be landed. What happens in the middle; that's the meat of it.

But yes. Talk, talk, talk, communicate with your players. Include their vision of the happenings into your story, as well - or at least take it into account. You can have fun and lead them along as much as you like, as long as they know, in general, which direction they're headed.

Hope this ramble helped!

-VV

One can have a great roleplay without any story structure, but it's pretty hard. Especially if you want a quality RP that lasts. Don't get me wrong, I love to just make an interesting world and let players loose in it to have their own adventures. However, when I do this, I know darn well that it probably isn't going to last that long. There are exceptions to that rule, of course (I had one such RP go for like 70 forum pages and only stop because most players had IRL things preventing them from continuing), but generally you'll want some kind of a plan.

There's a happy medium, though. You are right to be concerned about maintaining players' free will. The first thing you have to remember in going into GMing a game is this: the players can and probably will inadvertently stomp all over your plot at some point in the game. Maybe several points. And that's okay. A GM has to be flexible. The players are telling the story too, and getting railroaded is never fun. For this reason, game structures should be kept fluid. Always be prepared to push planned events forward or back, modify them, or potentially even cut them entirely based on what your characters actually do. Even if you really super liked the the way that you planned them originally. Sometimes things just have to change.

Additionally, your best bet is to incorporate branches into your plot. Try to anticipate different ways characters could come at a situation (even better if you already have profiles for the characters in your game, but if not, get some general ones down first, and you can always modify your plans later) and cover your bases for each. Envision different ways a situation could turn out. If you're clever enough about it, even wildly different actions can lead smoothly into the same event. Or maybe they lead to very different events that change the entire course of the game. Or, more likely, maybe they lead to different events that you allow to take a life of their own before you direct things back to a planned event later.

Just remember that, even this way, you cannot anticipate everything. Ever. I once had characters burn down the school in a school RP. Seriously. I could have nipped it in the bud when they started the fire, but it was just too good. You don't know how hard I laughed. However, you should be watching for things like this and trying to handle them IC as subtly as you can if your PCs aren't doing anything out of character and nothing that's technically impossible but are threatening to derail you in fantastic ways anyway. Sometimes you can cut their options and/or nudge them back on track without being too invasive. If you do have to get invasive to prevent something happening, rethink whether it's really worth railroading like that and try juggling or cutting events and rejiggering the expected path to the next one instead. No one likes being shoved. If a character has to go right when you wanted left, don't waste time on trying to force them to go left; let them go right and figure out how you can get them to circle back around without their noticing.

In summary: come up with specific events you wish to happen in the story. Be open to changing them or moving them around as often as necessary. Try to come up with different outcomes for the same events ahead of time so you have a bit more to fall back on when (not if :P) things don't go exactly the way you planned. Don't try to force characters in a direction they obviously aren't going to go in; be ready to incorporate your players' characters' actions into the fabric of your plot.