Mary Sue or not Mary Sue

Mary Sue; the name is immortalized in a song and in literature, but they aren’t the same person. So, my friend, you want to write a book, short story, or merely participate in a play by E-mail online roleplaying game and need a character. This article is going to tell you how to avoid a trap even the best authors can fall into called Mary Sue.

It can be seen by some as a wish fulfilment of the author to live vicariously through the character while having no noticeable flaws or having flaws that don’t make sense, either physically or mentally.

Roleplaying Focus – What would you do?

Hello there!

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

I hope everyone has had a grand Christmas  Personally have been introduced and discovered the wonders of Sodastreams. Equally, I hope New Year was great – my latest ambition is to move into a new four bedroom house come March, which will be nice and a MASSIVE improvement over where I am now, although the train journey may or may not be a welcome change. Sorry I’ve not been able to post recently, my excuse is that I may of had a digit severed and reattached recently – kinda makes typing a little on the difficult side! I certainly didn’t do what most of the heroes I’ve written about would have done, namely shrug it off and continue on like nothing had happened. No, it was a case of wincing in pain and feeling a bit ill at the sight of my bone. Which brings me to my topic for this time.

What would you do?

This time, I’d like to discuss roleplaying in character.It is an important aspect to roleplaying, be it play-by-post, tabletop, or humble literature.

OtherSpace – Crowd funding a roleplaying game

In the last article about OtherSpace‘s upcoming story arc, I mentioned that the new story was funded by the members. This goes to funding the website’s hosting costs (not to be underestimated! I bet there’s many GMs out there who selfishly foot the bill of their hobby, whilst users get a free service!), marketing costs, player rewards, artwork. I thought it was pretty unusual for a roleplaying community to ask for money for the volunteers, so I asked OtherSpace’s Wes Platt about it:

Are the contributions mandatory or voluntary?

It’s worth noting that we don’t just have contributions coming from participants, although many of our sponsors do play the game. Several are just friends of the game or fans of the idea of collaborative real-time storytelling. Honestly, I’d prefer to see more patrons supporting our creative efforts from outside the playerbase. It just feels so unfair sometimes, going back to the same well and asking for help from the same people, time and again. I’ve been very lucky, though. We have some extremely supportive players. All that said: It is absolutely voluntary. There’s no price of admission and no membership dues. You can join the saga and never contribute a dime – you’ll still be welcome.

Introducing the 2012 Simulation Cup Winners…

The Simulation Cup

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the winners of the 2012 Simulation Cup!  But before I get into that, I’d like to briefly explain what the Simulation Cup is and how it works.  Filling in this year for the annual Tournament of Simulations, the Sim Cup is a one-time competition allowing role play games of various clubs and genres to compete against each other in a friendly manner for several awards.  Each participating sim first submits one mission/episode/thread/chat session that was completed during 2012.  Next, each sim’s submission is evaluated by two judges on a specific criteria set.  The games receiving the highest marks are then recognized.

Evaluating sims will always be subjective and this is especially true for the Simulation Cup.  We’re not here to identify the best sim or sims as this is impossible.  Instead, we recognize what we think are the best sims in our opinions.  A different set of judges may very well chose a completely different set of winners.  And that’s fine.  As said earlier, each participating game was graded by two different judges.

The missing WBWW story

Weeks after the end of WBWW, and the winner has been announced, I found this exciting gem in my email spam folder. My heart sank as I realised what had happened, this had been submitted by email but for some unknown reason was treated like spam. Usually I trust Gmail, as it usually does a decent job of distinguishing actual spam, but for some reason it hide this away from me. The story was submitted by Wes from OtherSpace. We’ve featured several articles by Wes about his MUSH.

I can’t apologise enough to Wes, this is a great story but unfortunately it was never passed to the judges. So the best thing I can do is post it here so you can read, and wonder how well it would have done in the WBWW competition. 

Life Lessons From the Center Chair

This article is written by Marissa Jeffrey, an active member of the Starbase 118 Star Trek RPG, where she plays Captain Kalianna Nicholotti, commanding officer of the massive Trojan Class Starbase 118 Operations.

Marissa Jeffrey from Starbase 118

Whether you are a Starfleet Captain like I am, are a leader of a fighter squadron, a GM of a game you created yourself, or a member of a sim, there are life lessons we inherently learn as we play. Much like a time we may barely remember, as children, when our most important lessons were learned through the simple act of play, as adults, we can continue to learn and grow through our roleplaying games. Though our sims are ‘just games’, there are hidden nuggets of wisdom around every corner, and if you’re open enough to catch them, you can often find yourself applying them to the real world in much the same way you do in your game. As for myself, it took three years for me and my character to traverse the path to command in the game I play, but it was only when I looked back from the center chair of my starship, that I realized just all I had learned from the process.

Field of dreams got it wrong. If you build it they won’t come, unless you tell them to

I haven’t seen the Kevin Costner film “Field of Dreams” because it sounds terrible. Fortunately I have seen Waynes World which spoofed the film’s main catchphrase “If you build it, they will come”, leading Wayne and Garth to create a rock concert, which goes surprisingly well despite barely any advertising.

The mentality of “If you build it, they will come” is a dangerous one in my opinion.