So, how many RPs have you read, then?
A few that I catch early enough. They can be fun if you're participating, or are close on the waiting list, after all. But they tend to be burdened by roleplayers not really having a focus, and after a few pages, my head hurts from the varying writing abilities of those involved. It's easier to find one inspired GM than six inspired players and an inspired GM together. That's a simple statistical truth, isn't it? Rolling a six once is much more common than rolling seven sixes in a row. Simple and undeniable probabilities in action.
As a result, I haven't found a long-established RP thread that was consistent enough to read as a story, rather than participating as a game. Meanwhile, I caught on to Lordship when it had 90 pages already, read them all happily without noticing any changes in quality or style in the main story, although the suggestors have come and gone.
To counter-argue, a suggestion game has the capability to be more railroaded than something such as a freeform RP can. With a suggestion game, the author can simply pick suggestions that fit with what he wants to do or simply wait until someone makes that suggestion. With a roleplaying game, the GM HAS to acknowledge the choices of the players otherwise all of the players will complain. So essentially, with a suggestion game you're getting a railroaded story that was going to end with what the author had in mind no matter what the readers wanted.
See? It's easy to argue this kind of stuff.
And to rebutt, you are speaking like a participant, which I have already said is good fun. I am talking about whether RP threads exist enough as a coherent storyline to have merit to
outside readers. You use words like railroaded, which has no meaning to the outside reader. Everyone other than the involved participants is "railroaded" by the very nature of their passive reading. "Freeform" to participants is still "railroaded" to all uninvolved readers. So are we now talking about the handful of participants, or the general readership, as I thought we were doing?
And to expand on what freeform implies, it isn't always better quality than a story dictated from one voice. Often those freeform things don't actually go well together and make a good story. When you read a great book of English literature, you are getting "railroaded" and I wouldn't have it any other way, and you are getting it all in one consistent voice with a clear theme and style. I don't want to read a page of Shakespeare, flip and find a page of Hemmingway, then a page of Stephen King, then of Stephanie Meyer, etc.
Plus, players can backstab the living hell out of each other.
Anyway, it's not a case of "inferior substitute, superior exemplar", RPs and suggestion games are two different genres who do some things really, really well, and other things not so good.
RP threads are good fun. To participants. To outside readers, they are just extremely disjointed books without any interactivity. Backstabbing is actually a good example of why the RP thread is a horrible read to outsiders. Just a bunch of newbs team-killing at the spawn point!
You can say that this isn't about inferior and superior forms of forum game, and I'll agree with that. because RP threads are really fun and have a lot of merit as games, just not as stories. But what we're saying is,
which type depends on having a large readership, and which is actually more readable to outsiders? That's what was asked. The unified structure of the suggestion game makes it more suited to both those questions.
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Topic: Time To Segregate Suggestion games? (Read 9910 times)