What do I need to know when making my first story role play? I never done an RPG forum before so I’m looking for some tips
Oh that is... a huge question. Like, absolutely massive.
Before I get into anything about how to do this, the best piece of advice I can give you is that
you need to actually participate as a member on an RP forum FIRST. You absolutely cannot be a
good RP admin if you don't understand the community, or the problems and processes that RP forums have. It's like trying to open a restaurant without ever working in one; if you don't have experience and you don't understand how a successful forum is run, you will not be successful yourself.
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Now, for actual setup advice.
In my experience (18 years of running an RP forum), the most important thing you need to know is the story. The mechanics of how you run the story will really be influenced by what the story IS, so that's something you need to established before you even consider anything else. You cannot rely 100% on members to decide how the plot goes, so you need to — at MINIMUM — have "milestone" plot events that you can use to move the story forward. By the same token though, you can't be 100% prescriptive with the story otherwise there's no point playing. You need to find a good balance.
Beyond that, a few other things:
- Familiarise yourself with terminology. As an example: no one calls it an "RPG" because the G implies a physical, tangible game (a video game, a tabletop game). They're just called "RP Forums". There are of course other words that are important, but this is where that "be a member first" comes in handy.
- Don't info dump. You need to give members room to understand the forum and the setting and the story, but you can't just write so much they have to memorise before even creating a character. RP forums are collaborative stories: allow your members the space to collaborate with you.
- You need to have rules, but keep them simple. Members, by and large, are intelligent. Getting too granular with the rules is going to be too overwhelming and won't convince people to join / stay. So, cover behaviour with a simple rule to be kind to everyone, and then outline some *specific* things that apply to your forum and how you want it to operate. (Optional: in my opinion, having a rule against not stealing other people's characters and writing or not controlling other people's characters without their consent is unnecessary because people should know that. But this isn't a super popular opinion haha).
- Lead the forum with kindness and compassion, but be firm. Hold everyone to the same standards, member and staff alike. It's YOUR forum. Don't be a jerk about it, but at the end of the day it's your place so you get the final say in what happens. And, if you ever need to discipline someone for misbehaving, be consistent, and be firm.
- Aesthetics are nice, but ultimately not as important as content. Your forum's theme should never overshadow or make it difficult to absorb the content / participate.
Beyond that, there's not a whole lot different from a regular forum! That member experience is going to be so valuable to you because you'll learn how these forums tend to work, what you like and don't like about it, and you can make educated decisions about what you wanna do for yours.
One last word of advice: you really need to be passionate about RP in order to run an RP forum. Specialty forums are always harder to run than general forums, and creative endeavours can often lead to sensitive feelings and people feeling hurt if someone doesn't like their content. It will be an uphill battle, even if you do become wildly successful, to maintain a consistent quality of community and story when people's activities wax and wane as the seasons change and as they age. And, you may not ever EVER become wildly successful: you'll need to ask yourself if you'd be happy with just having 2-6 members for an indefinite period of time. I don't mean to say this to discourage you, but I want to be realistic — don't start an RP forum if the only thing you're thinking of is that it's an easy path to having a successful community.
Let me know if you have any questions!
