Help Me Make An RP

[TheColorPurple]

Hey folks, I'm crafting an RP after my last RP went awry back on Space Battles.

I'm hoping that we can brainstorm together and come up with something genuinely good and I'm making this thread to also help me with coming up with ideas and seeing my progress. If anyone wants to help me out, they're free to do so. Here are the ideas that I have so far:

RP Ideas

A list of roleplay ideas for Internet communities: The Adventures of Bendak Starkiller: You participate in an RP where you’re a part of a crew set in the Star Wars galaxy and taking place hundreds of years after the Skywalker Saga. You travel around the galaxy going on adventures and helping peo...

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Right now, I feel that the my "Ottoman Isekai" and "The Adventures of Bendak Starkiller" are my strongest ideas.

Of course, these are merely the germs of ideas that I just came up with today; more changes and additions will indeed be forthcoming.

 

[sportoner]

1) On Adventures of Bendak Starkiller: Will it use self-made RP system or base on other system?
This RP seems nice. Star Wars setting is good for adventures. The episode approach to storytelling makes plot dynamic and structured.
Watch out for boring generic villains. They will ruin RP. They must have an inner conflict. I recommend to incorporate the Force in the conflict.
In galactic-scale adventure Force is necessary plot element. Villains can't be indifferent to the Force. They can hate it, embrace the Dark side, view it as a tool. But they must be connected to it.
2) On Ottoman's Isekai: What do you mean by Disco Elysium-type approach?
In this RP Ottoman's culture is a selling point for me. I will prefer if the other world will be deeply connected to Ottoman Empire. Spiritual link, physical link, magical link - all are good.
This RP requires from players knowledge of Ottoman Empire's inner works. Average player doesn't have it. So you have to write a brief introduction to subject. Or make players study it themselves .
3) Implementation of Multiverse MC Isekai idea will be hard. Different RPG characters have different conflicts, motivations and origins. Bundling them together is a complex task. You have to know details of these settings. Complexity of it rises exponentially with the increase in settings numbers.

 

[TheColorPurple]

1) On Adventures of Bendak Starkiller: Will it use self-made RP system or base on other system?
This RP seems nice. Star Wars setting is good for adventures. The episode approach to storytelling makes plot dynamic and structured.
Watch out for boring generic villains. They will ruin RP. They must have an inner conflict. I recommend to incorporate the Force in the conflict.
In galactic-scale adventure Force is necessary plot element. Villains can't be indifferent to the Force. They can hate it, embrace the Dark side, view it as a tool. But they must be connected to it.
2) On Ottoman's Isekai: What do you mean by Disco Elysium-type approach?
In this RP Ottoman's culture is a selling point for me. I will prefer if the other world will be deeply connected to Ottoman Empire. Spiritual link, physical link, magical link - all are good.
This RP requires from players knowledge of Ottoman Empire's inner works. Average player doesn't have it. So you have to write a brief introduction to subject. Or make players study it themselves .
3) Implementation of Multiverse MC Isekai idea will be hard. Different RPG characters have different conflicts, motivations and origins. Bundling them together is a complex task. You have to know details of these settings. Complexity of it rises exponentially with the increase in settings numbers.

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What I mean by "Disco Elysium" (in reference to the CPRG that I played recently) was that it would be weird and quirky, kinda like Majora's Mask. It would be kinda like dark fantasy, but have a sense of humor itself. Not take itself too seriously. I agree with what you say about having there being a spiritual/physical/magical link of some sort.

As for general knowledge of the Ottoman empire? I would just say to leave that to me. I'll try to get everyone up to speed here.

 

[TheColorPurple]

New update to my list of ideas:

Fallout RP Set in Navajo Country:

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Set around the general area of the Navajo reservation, you defend the former reservation from the New California Republic as well as other forces ready to take the resources and the lives of the people living there. RP takes place around the Four Corners region of the United States and maybe a bit beyond.

A confederation makes up the areas of the Four Corners in and around the Navajo reservation and the players are invited to make up their own statelets, communes, towns, etc. for their respective characters. Each character represents his or her part of the confederation. In the end, you cannot choose who the main enemy is and you also can't be a bad guy for the most part, so players may feel that they're walking a tight line. RPG system will be based on a mix of FATE Core and possibly the RPG system in the Fallout series.

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Thoughts? I'm hoping that this will get more traction as it places emphasis on player agency except regarding the general morality of the player characters. I feel that this would be pretty popular, though you won't necessarily be playing as a lone wolf.

 

[kittygirl]

Thoughts? I'm hoping that this will get more traction as it places emphasis on player agency except regarding the general morality of the player characters.

Click to shrink...

The Fallout: Navajo Reservation RP idea is pretty solid IMO. I liked the Fallout games, and you've got some great ideas, the first of which--IMO--is you're giving players a task that would feel meaningful, defending the reservation, right out the gate. The second of which is individual characters having their own little communities. The third is prohibiting the 'bad guy and lone wolf' archetypes, as we feel antisocial characters only work in a role-play if they, like, can work together with other people as a team.

Your "Adventures of Bendak Starkiller" RP also sounds pretty good. Dividing the stories into 'episodes' with an overarching story arc sounds appropriate to me. Star Wars is a decent action-y setting a lot of people know, so you've got notoriety.

The "Choose Your RPG Protagonist" is pretty amazing. This we feel is your best idea. Allowing players to slot in their own RPG characters would seem to me to make players incentivized from the beginning to play smart, cooperate as a team, because they've got their characters they made meaning a deeper connection. Maybe. Maybe I'm too attached and pathetic when it comes to my Miss Prissy Pants RPG ladies.

Anyway, those are our thoughts on your ideas:

"Fallout: Navajo Reservation" RP: 8/10.
"Adventures of Bendak Starkiller": 7/10.
"Choose Your RPG Protagonist": 9/10.

My ratings in case you don't wanna read my feelings about your RPG ideas. You have a solid grasp on unique settings and 'hooking' a player with an interesting premise. Some pit falls we can see:

Players may try to play a Lawful Dumb good guy who behaves like a bad police officer to get around the "no bad guys" rule in the Fallout: Navajo Reservation game.

Bendak Starkiller's Adventures may get old unless you can switch up the stories, characters and events in interesting ways, which is fun for players and the GM but also tires out the GM's creative reserves. A remedy to this we would recommend is to write down an outline basically for your episodes to detail what they are and how many you want.

Choose Your RPG Protagonist: This one has the potential to be a genre-fusing headache. Or people may get into debate death matches about who would win in a fight or something? A remedy we considered to chaotic free-form settings is that the characters' interactions and in-built motivations and challenges from their respective settings can be played out in the new setting to generate easy challenges for the characters to deal with. Requires some of the same creativity and risk of burning out as the Bendak Starkiller RP.

🐱 Hope my advice and critiques are welcome. If not please let me know.

 

[TheColorPurple]

The Fallout: Navajo Reservation RP idea is pretty solid IMO. I liked the Fallout games, and you've got some great ideas, the first of which--IMO--is you're giving players a task that would feel meaningful, defending the reservation, right out the gate. The second of which is individual characters having their own little communities. The third is prohibiting the 'bad guy and lone wolf' archetypes, as we feel antisocial characters only work in a role-play if they, like, can work together with other people as a team.

Your "Adventures of Bendak Starkiller" RP also sounds pretty good. Dividing the stories into 'episodes' with an overarching story arc sounds appropriate to me. Star Wars is a decent action-y setting a lot of people know, so you've got notoriety.

The "Choose Your RPG Protagonist" is pretty amazing. This we feel is your best idea. Allowing players to slot in their own RPG characters would seem to me to make players incentivized from the beginning to play smart, cooperate as a team, because they've got their characters they made meaning a deeper connection. Maybe. Maybe I'm too attached and pathetic when it comes to my Miss Prissy Pants RPG ladies.

Anyway, those are our thoughts on your ideas:

"Fallout: Navajo Reservation" RP: 8/10.
"Adventures of Bendak Starkiller": 7/10.
"Choose Your RPG Protagonist": 9/10.

My ratings in case you don't wanna read my feelings about your RPG ideas. You have a solid grasp on unique settings and 'hooking' a player with an interesting premise. Some pit falls we can see:

Players may try to play a Lawful Dumb good guy who behaves like a bad police officer to get around the "no bad guys" rule in the Fallout: Navajo Reservation game.

Bendak Starkiller's Adventures may get old unless you can switch up the stories, characters and events in interesting ways, which is fun for players and the GM but also tires out the GM's creative reserves. A remedy to this we would recommend is to write down an outline basically for your episodes to detail what they are and how many you want.

Choose Your RPG Protagonist: This one has the potential to be a genre-fusing headache. Or people may get into debate death matches about who would win in a fight or something? A remedy we considered to chaotic free-form settings is that the characters' interactions and in-built motivations and challenges from their respective settings can be played out in the new setting to generate easy challenges for the characters to deal with. Requires some of the same creativity and risk of burning out as the Bendak Starkiller RP.

🐱 Hope my advice and critiques are welcome. If not please let me know.

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Okay, there is a lot to unpack here, but first, thank you for the solid reply to what I've written so far! It'll probably be a while before I single out and develop an RP, but thanks for the time and effort you put into your post. I'm hoping that I can try to narrow down my final choice for what my next RP will be like, though I may have one or two ideas that I could work with....

I agree with the "Lawful Dumb" good guy problem. It might be an interesting idea if done right, which it normally isn't. The problem with bad guys in RPs is that they tend to devolve into lone wolves that don't work with in-universe and out-universe, as you basically said already. I think that I'll have to elucidate some extra barriers, though I don't want to be TOO restricting. The Choose Your RPG Protagonist RP will also have to have some ground-rules and the RPG characters will have to be mostly level with each other, barring any story reasons for why they're weaker/stronger than their original selves.

I'll get to jotting down ideas for the 3 - 4 episodes of Bendak Starkiller adventure RP, but what did you think of the Ottoman Isekai idea?

 

[kittygirl]

I'll get to jotting down ideas for the 3 - 4 episodes of Bendak Starkiller adventure RP, but what did you think of the Ottoman Isekai idea?

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We haven't been exposed much to the Ottoman people and alternate history ideas are typically not what we do. But let's look again and see if I can scrape together something useful.

Alright, this one is pretty interesting-sounding from the description, and from what we've heard of Disco Elysium it's like a decision-making RPG with stats and abilities that talk to you? So if you can capture some of that irreverent weirdness (unless we just misheard, like, we only heard about it from online) then your RPG would probably be successful. We like 'real world versus magical world/the masquerade' type things where the real world pierces the veil of the supernatural.

To avoid players attempting to stack overpowered powers, if they are allowed to select supernatural powers or special skills, we would recommend for every plus so to speak you also have a minus. Like if your character has a skill that increases Firearms Accuracy maybe it decreases Persuasion ("Shoot first ask question later" kinda thingy)?

"Anybody can come from any nation" isekai sounds pretty interesting to me too. Altho if you really like the WWI-era Ottomans idea then I'd say go for it. You may have a more difficult time finding players since while RPGs about say, fictional stuff like Star Wrs or Fallout are pretty popular, alt. history RPGs seem to have a smaller circle. But not so small that we would think you can't find players and once you do, provided things go smoothly, we feel they'd be loyal. You had a unique idea here too.

Ottoman Isekai/Any Nation Isekai: 8/10.

 

[CoreBrute]

A thought that occured to me when I saw the multiverse MC Isekai idea, was about an old fanfic I read set in Dragon Age Origins, but all 6 origins were represented by a warden with a unique personality and skill set. Something like that, where everyone is a different origin but from the same game (like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or Pokemon) all ending up having to work together. It means you avoid the issue of all the different genre power balances of different settings, since everyone will come from the same baseline setting. Just a thought.

EDIT: Just found the fic, it's called All Roads Lead to Denerim.