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aoisakana - blog owner
Sunday, February 23, 2003
--- General Information - Rulebooks vs Free Form ---
Onto business... lets start with general information.

   roleplay online has two main branches: free form and rule books (ranges from white wolf to dungeons and dragons). Both are great systems, both have their ups and downs. Personally, I have tried WW briefly but I found it not to my liking but you may find that it suits your style better.

   Prewritten rules are good in that it's a set standard that many people follow, so it makes it a bit simpler in the flow of rp because you don't need to explain what this or that ability allows you to do.

   On the other hand...

   Free form is exactly that - you make up your own abilities, your own strengths and weaknesses and such. You can be as creative as you want to be. Invent your own creatures/beings, make up new abilities and whatnot.

   But there's always a downside...

   Prewritten rules and character concepts can be -really- hard to learn and understand. I've taken a peek at a few of the books and they might as well have been written in Russian for all I understood in it. Granted not -all- are hard to understand, there's still the learning your character and 'playing it by the book' deal.

   Free form has no rules, no guidelines in creating your character and while that is a good thing, there's always the not so good side. Without any boundaries, it is tempting to give your characters all these super god-like abilities as well as changing or adding abilities when it suits your situation.

   There isn't a good side or a bad side to this. Both free form and prewritten guidelines are good to use. Like I stated previously, it just depends on your preference. But there are always a few things to consider when you make your character.

   If you're going to follow the guidelines then try to follow it as much as possible. There's no point in creating a ww/d&d character if you're just going to write up your own abilities and such. Might as well go free form. Adding/changing a thing or two slightly, as long as it makes sense is alright; so long as you don't rewrite everything so that you are at the uppermost level, etc.

   If you're going to go free form then keep in mind that you should make your abilities as realistic as possible. By realistic I mean that every ability has a weakness, every character has at -least- one weakness the enemy could exploit. These weaknesses don't have to be so blatantly obvious that a half-wit could figure them out (but then again, you might want to play that way) but they shouldn't be so obscure that it's nearly impossible to harm your character. Now, I'm not asking that you write out -every single- weakness your character might have or how to defeat your character and his/her's abilities; simply, I am suggesting that you keep in mind what weaknesses your character will have in its personality or its abilities. If that's a lot to think about it might be helpful to write it down on a personal page or a pad of paper.

   In either case, whichever you choose to use, it would work to improve your rp if you had "a good grip on how the character acts, thinks, speaks. They have a "life" all their own, they're convincingly another person if it's done right," ('Ric).
 aoisakana 18:13