"Living world" only campaigns.
You know, the ones that are looking for 999 players.
The ones that die within a week or two. Or, if they survive past then, they let the first few players exceed everyone else in level and lord over newcomers.
Why are these so cancerous?
RPGs are fundamentally about small scales or a few individuals.
You could sooner push a boat cross the land than change that.
I remember participating in one about wh40k
Got frosted over right when my wyrdboy casted FIST at nurgle-worshipping foes that got constant metagaming reinforcements
I could see this work if you had a few dozen friends who share your creative vision. On paper, it seems really cool.
Unfortunately, I don't even have a few friends.
Because they attract the scum of the scum, people who can't even write an application on Roll20.
Isn't the Roll20 application process cancerous on its own?
I played in one of them. It was in a naruto-setting of all things. I played in it for at least 5 years. I have no idea why I did that.
The only living campaign I've heard of was a Pathfinder one being run through the local university RPG club. I avoided it only because I don't like D&D.
> GMs got together, made a setting. Using Google Docs to share details with each other.
> Everything was focused on a single city beside an uncrossable river.
> First session, one of the GMs railroads his group into crossing the river.
> All but one of the GMs were running PCs in the sessions run by other GMs. Leading to a lot of GM favouritism.
> A few months later one GM, the one that didn't have any of the GMs running a PC in his sessions, breaks off because he found out that none of the other GMs had even looked at the shared Google Doc in over a month. They were all running weekly sessions.
> He was the only good GM amongst them. The players in the other games only put up with the other GMs because of the gimmick of the shared campaign. Once they learned that the world wasn't being shared, those players stopped turning up.
Think about how many single GM campaigns fall apart because the GM isn't good enough at GMing.
There are two more ways a GM can be a bad GM for a living world campaign:
- GMs who aren't capable of running their own campaign and think that leeching from the "Living world" will help them keep players.
- GMs who are used to how much power a GM has over the campaign and can't handle that power being limited by the other GMs.
Some overlap exists.
The good GMs who can handle a living world campaign find them ruined by the GMs who aren't suitable. They think to themselves:
> Fuck living world campaigns, I'll stick to what works.
Then, next time someone tries a living world campaign, those GMs don't take part.
What is the appeal for a living world campaign for the players ?
If it's done well, it just means you've got some other powerful group also wandering around doing stuff. A group you're not going to meet easily due to scheduling issues. Something that could be easily simulated by any GM.
One of the D&D podcasts had a 30+ year living campaign DM featured.
They'd even have blood bowl seasons in the campaign world with the players on teams.
Still sounds like shit.
Is there any way to make them good?
They can work if all the GMs can handle it.
On b-byond?
Excessive amounts of effort and strong central leadership.
It also helps if most everyone has an idea of where the plot is going and is okay with that.
No. It was one of those free-form forum based games. Exept that it wasn't free-form and had rules that noone bothered to learn exept for a few individuals (About 10 on 150 or so players). You can propably already guess what kind of quality was in there.
>I teleport behind you a fuck you in the butt!
>No, I teleport behind you and fuck you in the butt!
You joke but it was almost that bad. There WHERE rules for teleporting behind other people. If you had double the amount of speed than someone else then they would have problems seeing your movements. Have 4 times the amount of speed than your target and you where basicly invisible once you started running. And oh boy, let me tell you about how they got their groups together. A group was basicly a team of 3 players + 1 DMPC. But one doesn't form a team out of the blue, first you'd had to wait until an event that happened every 6 months or so and had to apply for a position by writing a goddamn test where they ask you basic questions ranging from ''What is rp'' to ''How does chakra work (aka explain magic)''. You'd get to 500 words easy just for that.
I just puked a bit.
Were there rules for anal penetration as well?
But I can go further!
See, your usual game has set stats, right? 3 dots in dex, con 15, 20/20 hp, right? That one didn't have that. Instead, you had strength, defense and speed alongside stamina and chakra. When do you level up or raise them? Every. Single. Day. You see, beeing forum-based, it actually had a system for training like a browsergame. So everyday you'd get a tiny increase of one of those attributes. Now, how do you calculate your actuall to hit for example? You don't. You had to input it into a calculator that puts your 150 speed against someone elses 100 strength and 150 speed for a % number to dodge. THEN you'd get a % number to block which might happen if your dodge fails.
Hp? Nah son, it didn't have it. You would lose stamina but it was usualy about points called BP (Bleeding points) And EP (Some I don't remember Points). Bleeding makes you bleed out for a certain amount of stamina per point depending on where you got hit (lower arms, upper arms, lower torso ect) while EP means broken arms, inner bleeding ect. So your stamina didn't mean jack shit in the end. It was a mess.
...
It wasn't anal penetration rules, but one of the clans (think merits or bonuses during character creation) had those chi-blocking fightingstyles. If you'd do hard to hit attacks, then you could have technicly shut down someones anus (that wasn't in the rules but I'd be suprised if one of those cunts DIDN'T try to do that at some point.)
Also, a pic of said calculator so you know I'm not bullshitting. Sadly, it's in german but you will get the idea.
Spoiler that shit man.
That's purely individuals.