I'm looking for some ideas on how to structure a mud where you include forum RP as part of the game. Think of this as a cross between forum RP (PBP for play-by-post), a mud, and possibly a persistant browser-based game (PBBG). Or, you could call it a PBPPBBGRPI
. Bear with me -- it's just that I've never seen this done so that the forum/web game and the mud were each first-class citizens within the game. Hence my vocabulary is a little incoherent.
Anyway, at first glance it seems like for the forum RP to mechanically affect the mud you need some kind of tokens or points earned within the forum RP. Furthermore, unless you want the administrative overhead of a judge for every forum RP thread, you would need some automated process to reward points and/or effect mechanical changes in the game state. That seems like a pretty big problem at first. I don't want to judge the quality of RP itself, just somehow judge the mechanical effect of that RP on the game state. Are there any examples or ideas out there for that?
For a PBBG it would be more straightforward -- you would code a game that could directly affect the mud game state.
Some more issues -- how do you deal with the flow of time between an asynchronous game (the forum RP) and a synchronous game (the mud). Do you somehow structure the forum RP into weekly or daily turns and integrate that with the mud?
Now, the interface. While I would want browser-based access to the mud, I think it also would be cool if a player could play the mud with essentially no knowledge or interest in the forum RP. But then you would want a two-way flow of game state between the mud and the forum RP, otherwise you lose a lot of potential dynamic play between the two forms. How do you flow game state from the mud to the forum RP? For example, if I defeat a boss in the mud, do you need some judge to manually write a forum post? Do you post some generated story with a bot (sounds too spammy, no?).
Lastly, if anyone is interested in developing this 'for realz', please contact me. I think this could be pretty damn cool. Furthermore there is a
very large portion of 'text game' players who are RPing in forums and have never looked at (or will look at) a mud. If muds and forum RP could be set up to play off each other in a shared world I think that would kick some serious a#*.