Taking the P&P RPG to new places: Twitter!
I had a fantastic (to me) idea just a short while ago. Specifically, hosting an RPG via Twitter! It’d probably be steampunk (because that’s sort of my thing although I could do something else) and would be most fun if it were free-form. That requires a certain level of ability and restraint on the part of the players, but I hope for that level of RPing anyway.
Read through this post and if you’re interested in possibly participating in something like this, drop me a line.
So, here is what I had in mind for the logistics side of it. The players would each create a new Twitter account for their character, with the character’s name or something similar and a brief description/background in the bio field. I would keep a simple HTML page with a list of who is in the game and links to their twitter page to facilitate both making sure the players know who is playing, and spectators following the whole thing. I should probably stick a quick description of the setting etc. on it as well. Anyway, each player account would follow all the other player accounts (and only the other player accounts), and would link to the HTML page of the player list as their webpage. Depending on precisely how the scenario is set up, there may or may not be a master GM-type account as well. (If there was, it would be mine, of course, as I would be the host.)
The setting I envision starting out as a fairly generic alternate-history Victorian era locale, probably England (because again, that’s sort of my thing), which then could (i.e. would) be elaborated upon and developed further by the players as they create backstories and progress through RP. The method of uniting would be open for discussion; possible ideas are a secret service, an underground rebellious movement, or a group of adventurers heading off to an exotic locale like Africa.
The mechanics of the RPing itself depend heavily on what the scenario bringing all of the players together is. There’s the two most common methods, of course, which are simply roleplaying as first person speech/action, (What are you doing?! *lunges for the door*) and roleplaying as third person prose (e.g. novels/most forum RP). But, due to the nature of Twitter, I had a third idea which could be extremely fun in very specific settings – such as the secret service. It would of course remove a lot of the “action” from the game, so I doubt it would be popular, but I’ll fling it at you all anyway. The tweets would be messages! Like telegrams, or sent by pidgeon, or radio messages (what kind depends on the setting of the RP and the situation, of course). I thought it was a nifty idea, at least. Messages to a specific person would be sent via @name or could even theoretically be DMed although that wouldn’t be as fun for the readers/other players.
ADDENDUM
Some input from other people (including hergeek’s excellent suggestion in the comments below) has spawned a fantastic adaptation of the scenario in my mind which, amongst other things, allows for the combination of any or all of the above scenarios and methods! I shall elaborate, of course.
Instead of simply one alternate universe, we can have several! Think of them as separate groups of players. They can all follow each other and RP as normal via Twitter – but they can also communicate interdimensionally (!!) via some method (I like ‘aetherograph’). This would be accomplished via sending a @message to a specific account I’ll have to set up for that (and which all players would need to be following), which will then post the message in some method akin to “Message for [group name]: [message]“. Of course the messages to other groups will need to be disregarded for RP purposes but I have faith that any interested players would be able to avoid metagaming.
The messages could be fed to the webpage with the player list info mentioned above, and then periodically I could write a “news brief” of sorts with an update on what a specific group has been up to.
ADDENDUM THE SECOND
It is, of course, entirely valid for a single person to decide to RP from their “own” dimension and thus participate entirely through the messages and any discussion re: “news briefs” with me.
Your idea of making the twitter a messages-only style RP is actually an idea I had to tell a story between a group of people before so I am definitely down for that or the more traditional speech/action methods. I don’t dislike the more prosaic method of RPing but I don’t have as much experience with it and it seems more difficult to make that work via Twitter given the character limit and the fact that I tweet from my cell pretty often.
At any rate, however you decide to set it up this sounds like a cool idea. Hopefully you’ll forgive my relative steampunk noobishness though haha.
Intriguing idea. Especially the part about having the correspondence carried out via “etherograph”. It would almost have to be in the pervue of the GM, i.e. you, to have a webpage where the basic idea/concept/backstory would be explained and then the Twitter feeds come directly into the page. Then you would have to update it with new more detailed information as the situation warrants.
I’m intrigued. Consider me interested.
Love it so far! Perhaps on the website that Her Geek mentions, we could have some type of puzzle (Flash) that must be solved to get an adapter for your “etherograph” to work on all levels. (I love treasure hunts.) Note: I am not a RPG person – so, I don’t know the normal rules (don’t know what metagaming is). But then, I never cared for “normal rules”. Anyway, there might be a way for players to collect certain items along their adventure (even if it was via temporarily merging with a collective Multi- verse.) Ever watch Charlie Jade…