Make a concept work

What is a RP concept you think sounds really interesting, but too complicated or strange to actually work?

I also encourage you to snatch up a concept/idea somebody else posted in this thread and try to think of and present a way to actually make it work!


My hardest classical RP problem is to make a SBURB RP work. SBURB is a game within the Homestuck story which has players communicate via digital chatting (or voice, can be done I guess) and interact with each other's worlds as if they were The Sims or a builder game like that. It's proven to be quite tricky to orchestrate and make fair. Plus all the weird terms and resources and the crafting system... I tried to scale it down to the bare minimum and didn't even call it SBURB anymore (I called it Chess iirc, and the RPs were called Checkmate and Checkmate: Redux) but what killed the first one was probably largely that players also operate on their own planets, kind of, so interaction is a bit hard aside from said chats/calls. Blarghr. I should maybe try to find successful Homestuck RPs online to study...

An RP based on the TV show Once Upon a Time.

Basically it's a show where Fairy Tale characters get sent to modern world due to a curse, and they don't remember their fairy tale characters. It's a rather complicated show, and I don't know how it would work as an RP. Every character is connected to each other in some way, we would need a savior, a Dark One, a villain character to cast the curse, a couple to fill the role of Snow White and Prince Charming. Then there's the question of how would flashbacks be handled, among other questions that I can't think of right now...

Monster Guy said:

An RP based on the TV show Once Upon a Time.

Basically it's a show where Fairy Tale characters get sent to modern world due to a curse, and they don't remember their fairy tale characters. It's a rather complicated show, and I don't know how it would work as an RP. Every character is connected to each other in some way, we would need a savior, a Dark One, a villain character to cast the curse, a couple to fill the role of Snow White and Prince Charming. Then there's the question of how would flashbacks be handled, among other questions that I can't think of right now...

Click to expand...

It would be relatively easy to have each player sign up as a classic character from a fairytale, and then give them a modern alter ego as well. They'd outline both lives, the original history as well as the new "fake" one in our world, but their personality would be the same in both.

Then, I think the GM shouldn't reveal exactly how it came to be that they got stuck in the real world at the start. Likely, the GM would need to play the role of the one person who knows something is wrong. Either by a Henry type of character, or by somebody who comes from that world but has their memories intact. Perhaps there could be a magic or mechanics that will let this person convince the others one by one that they are actually from another world. This will likely only work if the GM sets up some events and has a plotline in mind that they somewhat linearly will follow... perhaps the GM can actually play several characters in the real world and not reveal to the players who they are in the fantasy world? So the players will know that one of them cast the curse and is the villain, but not exactly whom yet. And they have to figure it out :)

You could throw in flashback events just for fun, for a few characters at a time. Like how we saw characters meeting in unlikely situations in the flashbacks in the show, so that practically everyone knew everyone through someone in the end. And it could all build up towards the curse being cast and explained, and then jump forward to today and real world again and confront the villain.

Could be super fun if a GM (or several co-GMs) had loads of time and energy on their hands and hte players were motivated and devoted and didn't drop off ahah

I'd love to go back and revisit Connections but I've tried it like 3-4 times now and it's just so hard to get RPers invested in an intricate, character-focused story without any action.

An RP I'd love to work and revisit is Darker Than It Seems. It was one of the most viewed RPs only behind the original PTA. It was about Team Rocket genetically modifying kids at a younger age with Pokemon DNA, where they kind became Pokemon Types, although the remained 100% human minus the super powers.

The people in them were so passionate about there characters, but once the first Darker than it seems fell apart, we couldn't recover. We tried two additional times remake it. I honestly don't even know what caused the first one to fail. There was a lot of shipping, which honestly could have been far less of, but the RPers enjoyed it.

I think it could be remade from the ground up, but other than the original cast, new people didn't really stick around long enough. A few times, they just disappeared even when they seemed to enjoy it. This might be because we were posting too fast and people got lost in all the posts.

I would really love to bring it back some how, but I don't know if it was the concept people didn't like, the speed, or what it was. I wasn't a GM of it, so I couldn't really do much. I know one big downfall was the time difference. Especially when there was only about a 3 to 5 hour window where we could work together on JPs and stuf.

gimmepie said:

I'd love to go back and revisit Connections but I've tried it like 3-4 times now and it's just so hard to get RPers invested in an intricate, character-focused story without any action.

Click to expand...

I feel like that shouldn't be too hard, as long as you have a plot that steers the players along all the way and don't let it get sandboxy? It's also probably important to foster a nice atmosphere between your RPers, like having a channel or server on Discord dedicated to them or encourage banter in the OOC thread! That's usually what keeps people in RPs more than anything. Fun and friends and making weird plans for their character relationships.