Eric Martindale

RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they've been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.

You'll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn't an issue. In today's roleplaying world, RPGChat's index fits right in.

They've got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn't very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the "Home" and "Rules" link work.

I'm going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn't horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let's have a glance:

<a href="http://forums.rpgchat.com/index.php"> <img src="header/but_home.jpg" border="0"> </a>

Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn't have an alt attribute! Search engines won't be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won't be very beneficial.

I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).

When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character's history to fit it into the post.

After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for "advertising on multiple occasions", much to my surprise.

However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn't very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.

After speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.

I sent a request via the site's contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven't yet received a response. It'd be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!

In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That's scary!

Let's take a look at their search results:

As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we've seen - most of RPGChat's traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.

RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 "active" members. While that's only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don't see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.

It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called "C/G" for short. It looks like most other forums' version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.

Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you're careful to follow their 500 word list of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they're going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

Running a role playing game online presents a large of amount of flexibility in the way you run the game. You no longer need individual sessions where all players are present, and there are a plethora of options as to where you are going to run it - if you want to run it in any one place.

One of the number one questions I receive relates to the medium for online RPGs. There are tons of different ways of communicating online, mainly grouped into a few categories. We have instant messenger, chats, message boards, and emails. There are a few custom services out there, but I'm going to touch on the four that I've mentioned.

On RolePlayGateway, we have a set of roleplaying forums as well as a roleplaying chat. When you're running an RPG, there are a few items you should consider when deciding where you're going to keep everything.

Forums have the benefit of being static and always available - users can post to forums at any time during the day and be sure that other users (and roleplayers) can see their message. Forums are also very flexible, they allow you to embed images and other multimedia within your posts, allowing you to share any experience with your players. However, it is post based - forums are often not the quickest way to communicate, as it is not a live feed of information like a chat.

Chats, on the other hand, have the benefit of being real time. Games can be run in chat (and instant messenger) on a moment's notice, and work best when all of the players can be available at the same time. Because it is real time, short blip-based sessions such as character conversations and interactions work extraordinarily well with chats. Players can get the chance to interject into other player's actions and statements without the worry of too much time going by. It is for this reason that the longer posts, such as those that exceed a paragraph, are often too large and unwieldy for chats - players end up waiting too long for each post, and will get bored.

Longer posts do very well on forums, where writing an individual post can take half an hour or longer to refine and perfect - just enough time for the players to go look at other games and other topics before they come back and begin formulating their response.

If you're running a game with a detailed and/or complicated storyline or characters, it is always good to post something on a forum for player reference. This lets the players have a place to communicate out of character (OOC) - such as when they won't be able to make a chat session, or when they want to discuss plans for character interaction, growth, or development. Even if your game is already on a forum - it is a good idea to create a place for OOC discussion. For chat-based games - this gives a perfect opportunity for players to jump in at the middle of a game with little trouble, as they simply need to read over the history of the game on the forum, which they can do at any point in time, and less time is needed explaining the game to the player.

Instant messenger works well when dealing with one on one sessions, such as when two characters are the only ones in an interaction or a meeting needs to be private. These interactions can be summarized or written into a cinematic format and then posted to the forum, for other players to enjoy as well. Instant messenger (as well as Private Messages) does very well at asking questions of the other players, which is convenient when you have a question about how they're playing a role or a reference they made in character.

There are also emails - many games aren't run by email anymore, but email is still a very valuable tool. RolePlayGateway like many forums offers you the ability to subscribe to topics. Subscriptions will let you receive an immediate email update whenever someone replies to the thread. This is extraordinarily helpful when there's an RPG with only a few players that can only reply every once in a while, but it requires that people, y'know, actually check their email. RolePlayGateway also has the special ability to instant message you when there's an update to a subscribed thread. All you need is a Jabber account (GMail accounts work, too) and to set up the notifications. We'll send you a message as soon as there's an update.

What methods have you used to manage your online roleplaying games? Are you a fan of forum or chat? Both? What helps you determine where you're going to hold your game? Discuss!

Following suit with the likes of Tim Bray and Eric Meyer, I figured I'd throw together my browser's letter sweep tonight.

• [A]dmin Site. Yeah, I guess I would be visiting the admin panel for this. Quite frequently.
• Mirascape's [B]log. An infrequent haunt of mine, but fairly obvious.
• [C]MON. Cluster Monitor for MySQL Cluster, something I almost always have open.
• Google [D]ocs. This one is painfully obvious, I use Google Docs extensively.
• [E]ricMartindale.com. Okay, that's a gimme. Does this make me egocentric?
• [F]acebook. I'm actually fairly ashamed of this one. Why can't I have a cool F site? sadface
• [G]mail. Three accounts linked using Google's Multiple Sign-in. Open [almost] all day.
• [H]ighcharts JS. A pretty kick-ass Javascript library for generating charts on the clientside.
• [I]nternal Discussion. A site for communication with my team. :)
• [J]Query Mobile Demo, 1.0 alpha 3. I've been spending a lot of time toying with jQuery Mobile, seeing where it's going compared to Sencha Touch.
• [K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
• [L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
• [M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
• [N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
• [O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
• [P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
• [Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
• Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
• [S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
• [T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
• [U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
• Google [V]oice. Allows me to use SMS from my computer, read (as opposed to listen to) voicemail. Great tool. If only it supported MMS.
• [W]achovia. One of the places I do banking.
• [X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
• [Y]ouTube. Another big namer. No surprise.
• [Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)

Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.