Caravan Riders

So I've been thinking about trying my hand at world building again, like the Eternal Sands roleplay I made a while back. I pretty much fizzled out on that one coz I was biting off way more than I could chew (trying to RP in several storylines at once was a bad idea), but I KNOW I had something good going on there. If only I had thought things through better...

Anyways, Caravan Riders. There's this big ol' continent with 3 regions (I'll decide on names later). Players take their pick of which one they want to start from (there will be info dump) and go from there. Characters can be either merchants or supporting characters. For each merchant, they'll have their own, er, 'location' under whichever region they start from. So basically there's the 3 regions and under them it'll be '[merchant's name]'s Caravan'. Now you don't have to stay with whatever region you start out in, travel between regions is totally allowable. It's just point of origin > merchant's caravan, and the merchant can trade in whatever stuff you want.

The RP being in a fantasy setting, prices and items can vary widely, so there'll be some info gathering to do as well as buying, selling and negotiating. I'm thinking that this RP ought to be more focused on character-driven stories though, because supporting characters can come from all walks of in-world life for whatever reason, helping out or causing complications for whoever's caravan they hitch themselves to. Then there's the merchants' own stories and reasons for roughing it around the continent to peddle their stuff, as well as whatever happens to them during their journeys. So by stories, I mean something like a veteran adventurer who gets roped into the caravan business because he/she has debts to pay, or some village kid just wants to see the world and lives as a wandering merchant to fund his travels, stuff like that.

As for me, I might throw in a few supporting characters here and there, but for the most part I'll be a generic narrator. Just like with Eternal Sands, I'll be info dumping a lot (mainly in the OOC section), but as a narrator, I will try to help explain things a bit in each post so you won't HAVE to check the OOC section each time you wanna make a post. Things will be simpler for me because I won't have to spend ages making my own characters and responding to every single post. I'm counting on different people RP'ing with each other while I world build and do the odd narrating. Oh yeah, and there will be magic and different races.

So to anyone who's bothered reading this far, what do you think? I'm just spit balling ideas right now, so if you got an idea or question or thought to share, then please fire away. I'm so psyched about making this RP, I think I might just write a short story too.

I'm a bit rushed for time, but I don't want to forget having read this and not responding. Plus, I feel like this sub-forum doesn't really get enough love/attention. Games here are meant to be discussed, critiqued, etc. Otherwise, it's no better than the advertising section. :/

So, good on you, Strude, to offer ideas! Haha, look at me, praising people like people actually care about my approval, lol.

I have a few points I wanted to raise:

1. While the open-world/free-roam idea is attractive, I've yet to see it work on WTF. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea, but WTF may not be the audience. A lot of players here seem to prefer a story (it doesn't have to be anything big or grand. It just has to be a motivating point) and stories are excellent GM tools to nudge players into activity. Like Strude said, having a loose cast may be useful because a set cast means definite diversity of characters, etc.

2. Strude touched up on this, but I figured it's worth elaborating on: Games like these are often "high-skill cap." What I'm trying to say is: You'll need a group of writers who aren't a herd of sheep (aka people who can't be active in their posts and constantly rely on other people, namely the GM, to guide them). If you don't want a story, it's imperative that you gather active writers, who can bounce ideas off of each other. But I could be wrong about this. I'm not sure how you ran Eternal Sands and you may have found the balance for setting up such a game.

So, basically, I rehashed what Strude said, but I just wanted to share my thoughts as well. I know this sounds really negative, two people saying the idea may not float, but it's not. It's just an observation of what has worked and what hasn't over the past few months. If you could link to your previous game, Eternal Sands, it might help people to better understand how you had run things originally. (:

So I finally made it. Caravan Riders, ho! Yeah, I sort of tried that cast idea on Eternal Sands. Probably handled it very poorly, but I guess it worked to a degree, people were joining. I suppose my biggest mistakes were trying to tackle several different storylines at once, strictly keeping them 1 x 1 and being very impatient... yeah, I just basically handled the overall RP very poorly. Anyways, I'll just see how Caravan Riders goes for now. Gonna be adding more info to it soon and maybe create a bit of depth so interested players can get an idea of what they can do (assuming people can be bothered reading info dump). The cast idea is a good idea, but I just wanna see how things go for now. Oh yeah, and I made a few changes from the original idea. So how's it lookin?