A Different Sort of Superhero RPG

The Game Room
1

Howdy, folks.

Are you a fan of the DC Universe? Do you thrill at the thought of taking on a role as one of the iconic superheroes thereof? Am I sounding enough like a generic sales pitch?

I’m a moderator on a DC-Universe-based Livejournal-homed RPG. It’s… a little different from your typical RPG. There’s no GM. There’re no dice. It definitely favors the ‘roleplaying’ more than the ‘game’, really.

It works like this : Every member of the community has characters, for whom they are, effectively, the supreme decision-maker. I play Blue Beetle, I decide what happens to Blue Beetle. We use LiveJournal to do play-by-post collaborative storytelling. If me and Superman’s player want to have Superman and Blue Beetle team up to take on Metallo, then we’ll discuss beforehand what we want to see happen, a little, and play it out. If Metallo has a player, he’s involved, too. If Metallo doesn’t have a player, somebody plays him as an NPC for that scene.

We also do bigger plots - story arcs that are multiple scenes. Any one of our players can propose an arc, and if there’s enough interest, carry it out.

Conflict resolution is entirely consent-based.

We’ve got more than two dozen players, and we’re looking for more. Especially JSA fans.

More information can be had at :
JLA Watchtower RPG — LiveJournal - the main community where you can read some of the scenes that are in progress or that have been completed.
jla_watchtower - Profile - the community’s information page, which shows which characters are taken (though a slight update is pending) and links to the application page.
http://jlawatchtower.wetpaint.com - the community’s Wiki, which is as of yet incomplete, but offers some information in a much more easy-to-read fashion.

Or you can ask me questions here - even if you’re not interested in playing, I’m happy to discuss how it works, etc.

2

Wow, okay - underwhelming initial response there - bumping once, and hoping that was just a fluke.

3

This sounds super cool. The only thing stopping me from joining in with you all is my lack of an LJ account. I am not totally sure I want one either, but it is something to think about.

4

It’s lots of fun. Honestly, I play in several similar games on LJ with different themes, and between them, I probably have around twenty journals - each a different character.

Which characters are your favorites?

5

A ton of them really, but at the moment, gun to my head, I would say Ollie Queen aka Green Arrow. The verison of the character before he died and was resurected as written in the early 80’s by Mike Grell over other versions, but Green Arrow was always my man.

I am also quite the fan of the Batverse, the villains in particular, but I assume that most of that area is taken up. Ra’s al Goul would be fun to play if he isn’t taken. He would cross out of the straight Batman arena well.

It has been too long since I have read JSA for me to be able to confidently play any of those characters. I might be able to pull off Wesley Dodd (Sandman Mystery Theater version) but I think that is a bit outside what you are looking for.

6

Just took a closer look at the cast page…

You have freakin’ Connor but you don’t have Ollie Queen! Conner! GAH! That may be enough to get me to join right there. Shamefull.

So how does this work, the “Cast Members” are PC’s. The open characters are NPC’s that are looking to become PC’s? Are characters that aren’t on either list eligable to join up (i.e. Ra’s or the *real * Green Arrow?)

7

Glad you asked. The cast list fluxes as players join or leave the game. For example - in the past, we have had both Green Arrow and Ra’s al Ghul as PCs. Both of those players retired in the last year, due to personal time constraints. The Ra’s player did an interesting character arc before leaving - culminating in Ra’s death and ‘redemption’ - purged of the damage the Lazarus Pits had down to his sanity, he had abandoned his evil ways. Of course, things can always change…

So, anyone on the cast list has a current player - anyone not on the cast list may have had a player before, but currently doesn’t.

Green Arrow’s had some interest lately, of course - he is a fun one.

In the Batman Villain department - We have the Joker, and the Riddler, and KG Beast; Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Black Mask… Hugo Strange, Lady Shiva, Mad Hatter… and Two-Face. Well, and Catwoman.

Still plenty of others available, though - Penguin, Scarecrow and Poison Ivy come to mind, as the big ones. I’d love to have Jonathan Crane around again - his prior player departed just last month, but we had some fun Bat-villain interaction before he left, here :

8

CandidGamera, I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack. If nothing else, it’s at least a bump. :slight_smile:

I also agree that this sounds super cool… this is the same sort of free-form roleplay that I used to seek out on MUSHes a few years back. But MUSHes being a real-time, chat-based sort of application, it added up to about a 90/10 ratio of waiting around for something cool to happen vs actually roleplaying. So, I stopped a long time ago… but I’ve missed it.

I’d jump in something like this in a heartbeat. A LJ-based roleplay community is an awesome idea. But… I know next to nothing about the DC universe. I’ll definitely lurk around the LJ community to see what you all come up with though.

Now, my hijack-- It’s been my experience that folks who free-form roleplay online usually do so in several different places. Do you know of any other LJ communities like yours, set in different universes? Or any suggestions for resources I can use to find some? I searched around on LJ a bit, but it’s very hard to seperate the wheat from the chaff with LJ’s search tools.

9

So it would be cool for me to either pick up one of the no longer used characters or to start up with one that hasn’t been used at all yet? (Say Penguin)

What about the characters like Alan Scott, are they open to be used also (That list is just NPC’s at the moment right?)

10

Another question- The idea sounds quite cool… (And I’ve got an LJ account from a long, long time ago…) But I’m not sure about… Well, I’m a casual comic reader. Am I going to get lost in minutae / blasted because I don’t know details? Essentially, how ‘noob-friendly’ is the game?

11

Sure, we encourage people to read and enjoy what’s going on. :slight_smile:

I absolutely do know other places. Here are some LJ communities where people go to advertise their RPG communities :

I’m in a few superhero games, and an Angel/Buffy game, personally. There are also “nexus” communities where different fictional universes blend.

12

That’s right. There is an application involved - so myself and the other moderators can see a potential applicant’s writing style, grasp of character voice - but it’s fairly easy to do.

I think the Penguin used to have a player a couple years back (the game’s been running for four years or so) but hasn’t been played in recent memory.

The way we handle NPCs - and I’m glad you mention Alan Scott specifically - is that we use special community-shared journals to play them where necessary. Anybody who doesn’t have a player is open to be NPC’ed, but it’s good form to ask around and make sure nobody else has the character tied up in a plot.

The characters in that list below the cast list are special because previous players have left the community their character journals… which basically means that instead of using our jla_extras journal with a hundred people in it to play Alan Scott, we use the lanterns_light journal that was donated to the game. If someone applied for Alan Scott, and was accepted, we’d offer that person the journal.

13

One of our most prolific players - prolific in terms of how much he writes for the game and the number of characters he plays - came to it with no DC knowledge whatsoever other than the JLU cartoon. He adopted Wally West, John Stewart, and Plastic Man. Now, we’ve even got him playing some of the obscure guys.

As long as you have a feel for a character’s voice, other folks can answer the continuity questions if they come up, and are generally happy to do so. :slight_smile:

If you have a particular character in mind, though, it might pay to read what has been done with that character on the community - not necessarily all of it, but enough to know what the character’s status is. We use LJ’s tagging system to tag posts with the names of characters that appear - and if you have a guy or two in mind, I can even provide links.

14

The more I read about this the cooler it is seeming. I am having trouble figuring out how to find single storylines. It may just be that I am not familiar enough with how LJ works. I am going to poke around a bit more. Penguin doesn’t seem to have been used much at all from what I can tell, and that is kind of a shame.

One more question, you mention that people have dropped out recently becuase of a lack of time to play…how much of a time commitment (daily/weekly) is it?

15

I’m happy to guide you through LJ’s interface, and answer any questions to the best of my ability.

Phase Two : Having a Ball - JLA Watchtower RPG — LiveJournal <- This is the newest post on Watchtower. Notice, near the top, it has ‘Entry tags’. Currently, it is tagged with ‘riddler’ - because the Riddler appears, and ‘who is batman?’ which is the name of the plot. If you click on either of those tags, you will be taken to a filtered view of the community - showing only posts with the tag you clicked on.

So, clicking on ‘who is batman?’ will display all the posts in the ‘who is batman?’ plot to date.

The Penguin, even when he had a player, was never all that active. It IS a shame, because he’s a good character.

Activity levels vary widely, as does the time commitment. We have no enforced minimum amount of posting that people are required to do. We do use a fuzzy guideline that we will email people if they’ve been inactive for a while - just to see if there are problems, or a lack of things that interest them, or time constraint issues.

Generally, the more characters you have, and the more important those characters are, the more we’d like you to be around and available. If you’re only running one character, and a third-tier one at that, then we’ll probably check in every few months or so if we don’t hear anything. (One of our players does fall into that level of inactivity, but her characters just aren’t needed often, so she can pretty much show up when she has time and the inclination.)

Some weeks, if you’re not involved in any plots, the only time the community may take up is however long it takes you to read the storylines that interest you. Even when you’re actively involved in a plot, it’s not that big a drain on time, because it’s play by post. You post your response, and wait for the next person to go, when they’re able. I do a lot of my playing at work.

Now, if you’re running a plot of your own, that may be more time-intensive. (I’m running three right now, plus another on another game, plus updating the game’s Wiki… so I’m putting in a couple hours a day. But I’m an unusual case.)

Does that help?

16

I’ve read the thread and looked around on the website, and I’m feeling excessively thick. Could you give me the basic rundown of how this works? I want to play, I pick a character (picking one I know of from Wikipedia… Black Canary), I apply, and get accepted. Then what? Can I jump into an ongoing story? Do I ask permission? Do I sit around waiting for someone to think that Black Canary might have a role to play in their story?

How much is predetermined? Take the “Who is Batman?” plot I see going on. Did Batman and Riddler agree what was going to happen beforehand, scare up a couple of extras to play the mooks and damsel in distress, and then act it out? Is anything unknown to them, or is Batman’s player well aware of what Riddler’s scheme is?

17

I think I am starting to get a feel for the place, I have been reading the backstories of Riddler and Catwoman. There is some interesting stuff going on, but I was wondering the same thing as priceguy. How do you guys organize this?

Let’s say, hypothetically, I was going to apply as Penguin (and I am thinking about it, I like that he hasn’t really been used and I think I have a good feel for ol’ Oswald.) What happens then (assuming I am approved)? It seems wrong to just start popping into other folks storylines, but I am not sure I would want to run my own. How does that sort of thing work?

18

Good questions, all.

Getting involved : If someone’s running a plot, they’ll generally make that fact known to the other players, and ask for interested parties. So you can stick up your hand when someone asks. Or you can put out your own plot idea for volunteers. We also do individual scenes that aren’t really part of a longer arc - more like slice-of-life stuff or just random, fun character interactions. Someone might want Hutnress and Black Canary to team up and fight a minor villain, or go have coffee - in which case they’d email you, or otherwise contact you. Or you, as the Black Canary player, could contact the Huntress player.

There are also occasionally “open” or “semi-open” scenes - where the person who put up the scene says “anybody can show up here” or “anybody in the Justice League can show up here.”

We (the players) communicate with each other through E-mail, through AOL Instant Messenger (most of us, anyway), and by the use of a special LiveJournal community whose posts are (mostly) only visible to members.

Plot Awareness : There are generally two ways to go about these sorts of things in this environment. You can keep the details secret, and be flexible as to the flow of events, or you can more tightly plan things, but clue the other participants in. You can’t be completely secret and completely rigid, otherwise you’re not really writing collaboratively anymore.

In the case of ‘Who is Batman?’, I can answer definitively, because I play the Riddler. I gave the Batman player an outline - here’s what I want Riddler to do, here are the basic set-ups for the crimes he will commit, and I’d like for him not to be successfully caught until such-and-such happens. After I made sure the Batman player didn’t object to anything in the outline, I set up the first scenes.

One of the other characters appearing is Julie Madison, a former girlfriend of Bruce Wayne’s. For Julie’s player, I didn’t have to relay so much information - just that Riddler was planning to kidnap her, if that was allright, and they’d get some screentime together as the Riddler waited for Batman to come rescue her.

So there aren’t too many surprises in that plot for the people directly involved - but the rest of the community who are reading it don’t know what’s going on.

And yeah, I’m feeding the Batman player the answers to the riddles. :wink:

19

See the lengthier reply to PriceGuy, but I’ll expand a little here.

The first thing that would happen after being accepted as the Penguin would be that the mods would put up a post on our private OOC community, introducing you to the other players. If you have AOL IM, we’d let the other players know your ID so they can contact you with ideas - we also keep a contact list for the players’ use with e-mail addresses for everyone, at a minimum.

You would meet the other players, maybe describe how you see the character, and tell us what kind of things you’d like to see him do. People who had ideas along those lines, or particularly well-suited ideas for the Penguin would drop you a line to get him involved - or you might see someone put up an OOC post describing a plot idea or scene idea that would be interesting to you, so you’d speak up there.

The Penguin’s an interesting case - because you can play him as out and out villainous, or the more subtle ‘mostly reformed’ businessman incarnation who runs the Iceberg Lounge. The challenge with out-and-out villains is getting screentime - heroes get far more of the purely social scenes. Villains tend to show up less frequently.

Typically, though, the game bends a little towards new players. For example, we’d barely used KG Beast at all before someone applied for him - once we had a player for him, we’ve contrived a few scenes to get him more screentime by involving him in existing plots in small ways, and planning more stuff down the road.

So, I’m betting if we got a ‘legitimate businessman’ Penguin, we’d start seeing a lot more scenes set in the Iceberg Lounge. :wink:

20

Really? That is totally cool! I was just thinking last night that the person who is playing the Riddler has really nailed that character. Good job on the storyline too. I am liking it.

OK, I am sold. I will probably drop off an aplication to play as Penguin in the next couple of days.

I am thinking of playing him as mostly reformed, but very much still power hungry. I see him as setting up his chess pieces and making little moves here and there; waiting very patiently until the time is right to make a big move.

I also want to play him as being very dangerous, but totally sane. He may have been an Arkham resident in the past, but that wouldn’t really be the right place for him anymore.

I have more ideas but I will save them for later. I am excited, this sounds like fun.