@Faraday — my pace concern is not about the tools, and more about cultural clash. I also do MMORPG RP, which is often conducted outside of the game via forum or Google Docs; within that community, the pace of a scene is often measured in weeks, if not longer. Which is fine, that’s a totally okay thing, but I do suspect that moving entirely to a web-based format would draw that playerbase, the folks who look first for wholly web-based games, and that their expectations of pace and those of the MU* community would be at-odds. And I will admit, selfishly, I like having all my games in one client (separate from everything else I’m doing), and all my logs in one place (because Atlantis autologging is my friend).
I’ve tried before to get MMORPG RP friends to join MU*s, and their response generally is “This is awfully fast-paced. I can’t do it alongside anything else—I can’t go play a game while I’m RP’ing, not easily—and you guys try to finish a scene all at once. It’s so high-pressure!” They never stick, even when they find a theme or premise very interesting.
So that’s my concern about clash of culture; if you build a predominantly web-based RP tool, you will attract predominantly web-based RPers. And if that becomes the pace of things—like Storium games tend to run at—I do think it means you may need to bid farewell to a chunk of the existing MU* culture. (Which may not be a wholly bad thing in terms of bringing fresh blood to things, I grant.)
Now, I’m going to contradict myself—to channel the part of me that does do Secret World and Star Citizen RP off in Google Docs and on forums—and admit I also like the idea of web-based ‘scenes’ you can start and end and RP in from the web in little bursts, because there are times when I’m, for instance, on vacation and I won’t have time to sit down for a 2 hour stretch to scene, but I might still want to RP and can throw a pose into a web-based scene now and then. Having that still tied to the game (for any use of stats or other things) could be very nice compared to Google Docs.
But beyond that? My greater want is to not be cut off from the game when I can’t have Atlantis running.
I want to be able to glance at the bboards on my phone when I’m at work, so when someone on my social circle’s Slack server goes, “Oh dang! That bbpost just threw serious shade!” on #arx, I can bounce to the game’s website and read the post rather than having to ask someone to copy and paste it, or try to log in and deal with people paging me and channel spam and everything else when I wanna read just one post. (Witness my Paxboards system, called out above.) If someone on the Slack’s #bsgu channel goes, “Wow, this Marines scene is intense”, I like the idea of being able to pop over and skim the scene as it’s going, if it’s public. (I love Arx’s live event-logging system, for this reason.)
That’s my $0.02 (including sales tax where applicable), at any rate.
