My Online Campaigns, Part 1
Recently, I had a couple of players mention things that have happened in some of my previous online games. That got me to reminiscing about some of my earlier attempt at running RPGs online and I decided it would make a good blog entry.
I started running a GURPS Space campaign many years ago. This was sometime around 1993 or so (before I even got an online account). It was a tabletop game set in a universe of my own creation and it was fairly popular with the group I was running at the time. After a few years of running the game and getting some experience with the online environment, I decided to start an online version of the game. This was sometime in 1997 or 1998.
I realized from the start that the best way to run the campaign was by e-mail. I had read enough message boards and chatted with enough people to realize that trying to get folks together for a chat session would be almost as difficult as it is in real life. In addition, I was working non-traditional hours, so my free time wasn't the same as the rest of the world.
The campaign was designed to be a little different than the tabletop game -- that one had the players working together as the crew of a starship. The online game would put the players in high-level positions of authority -- fleet admirals, governors, and similar careers. I worked out a lengthy e-book with the background of the campaign (which was fairly extensive) as well as my own rules for creating characters.
The game struggled on for a few months before it eventually died. I had made a few serious errors with the campaign that most likely caused its death.
First of all, I had about six players in the game and I was trying to run each of them with a separate plotline. It was ambitious, but way to complicated for the campaign. Trying to keep sight of what everyone was doing and what their goals were was just a little too tough. Add in the fact that I lost a few players due to real life stuff and the whole thing just ground to a halt.
The second problem was that my overall story arc was too distant. I had the same story arc in the tabletop game, but it was in the background with the players working away at the edges of the story, slowly uncovering the truth. Those players were already vaguely aware of the overall theme. The only players were new to this universe and had no idea what was going on. Clues that would have been obvious to the tabletop group were lost on the online gamers.
So ended my first attempt at running an online campaign. I learned a lot from the experience and applied it to my future campaigns.
