The World of RPing

[Goron40]

I know this has been suggested before, and I wanna thank whoever came up with the idea, but I don't remember your name.

The compilation of a time line of the RPing world as we know it. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to help all the way back, as I'm relatively new. I would leave it up to the likes of Fort and DP to fill in the Forum Wars sector.

We should base everything on a year zero. I'm thinking BB and AB. I hope you can guess what the acronym is. Just put the thread and forum (if necesary), event, and time span (Role Play Time, not real life time). I've noticed that a lot of RPs don't last for more than a week of plot line, so just give the year. Major RPs only for now.

---

The EC
Thread: N/A
Forum: Everywhere
Time: 15 BB

The Forum Wars
Thread: Forum Wars
Forum: Gameware
Time: 11 BB - 8 BB

The Great Gameware/EC War
Thread: EC vs Gameware
Forum: Gameware
Time: 1BB - 1 AB

The First Corporate War
Thread: Corporate Development
Forum: Blackstar
Time: 0 AB

The Guardians
Thread: Birth of the Guardians
Forum: Blackstar
Time: 0 AB

The Second Corporate War
Thread: Corporate Development 2
Forum: Blackstar
Run Time: 2 AB - Ongoing

The Concordat War
Thread: The Concordat
Forum: Blackstar
Run Time: 21 AB - Ongoing

---

BTW for all teh n00bz, AB stands for After Blackstar and BB for before balckstar.

[Jent]

It was Father Mac, Goron. I think the Ec vs Gameware included bb and AB (or at least the begging of blackstar), I wasn't in the war, but that's my guess.

[Fort]

I believe all the Forum wars were BB. The main one was for sure anyway. It was on Gameware BTW.


The EC's forum can be defined as

Creature Labs Forums --> TreeSprites Creatures Grove Forums --> Treespirte Creatures Grove Forums + Gameware Forums --> Backup Forums + Treepsrites Creatures Grove Forums + Gameware Forums --> Gameware Forums + Backup Forums --> Gameware + Private Forums --> Private Forums + Blackstar Forums


And the Time is...probably 3-4 BB (We are talking about real years here? If the years are supefical and are a fictonal timescale, put us down as...150 BB? Or alternatively: "The Beginning BB", I'll need other's input on this.)

[Goron40]

Fictional years people. And I know the Forum wars were BB. How much BB?

[Danikat]

How are we supposed to know how long BB it was if its being measured in fictional time?

How many real years go into a fictional year?

[Goron40]

Lol, it varies. (( )) I'm talking actual in RP time. No effect from the real world. The time that characters experience.

[Fort]

Oh Gods. This will be difficult to pinpoint exactly. 0_o

Let's see, it finished long before Blackstar was contemplated, and I joined when it was halfway through, which was two years ago.

Errm...I'd say it lasted for, pffft, in fictonal time, a month at most?


I'm hesitant about setting years on this thing because it can start giving our characters shockingly long ages, if we take into account every single detail and time gap.

[Goron40]

Well cmon it's just Role Playing. Who said this stuff has to make sense?

[Fort]

Well it could be seen as a sort of Powerplaying, because characters will end up having certain age traits pinned onto them the OOC person might not want.

[Goron40]

Well doesn't this exist anyways? All I'm doing is showing it. You put Fort under a rock, and just because you can't see Fort doesn't mean he isn't there... or not breathing.

[Kat_05]

For all intents and purposes it doesn't exist actually. That's how you can be in two RP's at once. You can't be in two places at once after all!

When people reference an earlier RP, it's usually because they developed a trait there, and it's gone into their personal backstory (in their minds at least). The great thing about picking and choosing is you don't have to worry about that pesky time and you can grab only what you think's important.


I'd be all for a real chronological timeline though!

[addman]

A timeline would be great, especially for those who want to further their RP characters and have them grow with age. Obviously, this will need a lot of balancing to achieve the correct effect for everyone.

Fort makes a good point. I'd say my character would age at a human rate, but going by the original time scales set out here, Addman must have aged at least 50 years by these standards, making him 70.

But on the other hand, if we gauge this on human years, it would seem that we have some sort of apocalyptic war every few days. Even the advanced technology of Psychotopia could not repair the damage done to the Dojo in a couple of days, ready to levelled over during the next EC scheme

So, perhaps we need a little fine tuning. I suggest trying out 3 RP years for 1 Human year, meaning that the EC would be somewhere between 12-15 years old, the forum wars 9-12 (?) years ago, the EC vs Gameware war happened somewhere around 2 years ago, and Corporate Development 1 + 2 within the last year or two. This'll help to spread the events out a bit, but without aging our characters too much.

What do you think? Feel free to say whether this is a rubbish idea or to suggest a better RP years - Human years ratio.

[Danikat]

Theres also the issue of deciding how long exactly an individual RP actually lasted.

Although time is taken into account when we're talking about travel times and what your character would be able to do before their opponent completes an attack etc. we tend to ignore it in the larger scale. I don't think we've ever had an RP where we had to stop because it got dark, or the characters had been up for 32 hours straight and needed sleep. I'm not even sure how many of our characters actually need to sleep.

And to be honest I don't know that it'd be practical, or even possible, to include time as a factor in RP's.

I also agree with Kat's point that the way things work now gives people the flexability to pick and choose 'cannon' events for their character as it suits them.
If everything that happened was included it'd get incredibly complicated. And most of our characters would probably be coated head to toe in scars.

I do like the idea of a time-line for refrence purposes, but trying to apply everything that would have happened within it would probably be impossible.

On another note can anyone remember any of the really early CC RP's, the ones back on the old DS forum?
Back in what I've mentally started calling the 'Dark Ages' when everyone was a self-proclaimed evil overlord (even Sparky) and there were a lot of pre-Forum Wars forum wars with incredible amounts of power-playing and weapons of mass destruction like Kablooie.
But there were also some more structured RP's run by people with experience from other communities. Although I wasn't really involved in them because I didn't understand them at the time.

There was also the original "What If We All Lived In The Same House?" which again I can only recall vauge snatches off.

Maybe if everyone who was around and RP'ing at the time got together we could put together some sort of vauge history of that period at least.

((And on yet another note between that and thinking about the fact that I've been playing Creatures for 10 years now I feel old.))

[Swix]

*Tries to take into account all the A2K/Gameware/EC/Blackstar RP's characters she's had have taken part in, how old they would be now, and gets a headache*

I'm going to side with Fort and Kat here, since I like being able to pick and choose what traits my characters get. Though with me, every RP any characters been in effects them somehow (eg. the way DM reacted in Corp Dev2 was because of a single RP I did once with an RPing friend who's retired now, over MSN).

And because most of my characters bar Syllak, Sallah, Endorphine, Kheesth, Lykaios and a-certain-EC-character-who-hasn't-shown-up-here-yet, all age just like humans do. So, I'd have such a limited time period to use these in I wouldn't bother with them. They'd be far too old for me to show any sort of development before I had to 'retire' them.

And because of this kind of thing, you'd be pretty much asking for a powerplay/immortal-fest just so people could stick to their favourite character.

[Goron40]

See? This is good. Because we know that all of Goron's ideas need a little fine tuning.

Realistically? This is unrealistic. But that's not the point. If we held ourselves to a realistic standard, this place would be boring as hell. *Pictures addman with gray fur*

This concordat war will make a nice addition to our timeline, I think I'll add it, even though its not a major RP.

(Does anyone else have some emotes in the wrong place? The shocked on is giving me sad, the puzzled one is giving me surprised, and a whole buncha other ones are out of place. DP! More things for the admin list of DOOOM)