Play by Post is not a new concept. It’s older than much of the internet and I would argue that people devised ways of playing via snail mail as well as E-mail back in the day.

I administer a form dedicated to role playing, specifically geared for anime role playing, where a person can sign in, and join a world within an anime setting and play a personality dedicated to an anime or manga character. But this forum offers more than just imagination play. It also serves as a hub to discuss anime in general as well as the role playing games that many of the role playing games use mechanically. Lately, I’ve begun branching out and added a Wiki to my forum so that I can write up detailed biographies for anime characters and have quick access to little details that are often forgotten about that would help to enhance either a role play or fan fiction.

The above is what I’m used to when talking about a role playing forum. However, I recently discovered Role Playing Directories. I initially thought that these were just hub for people to advertise their forums dedicated to role playing, and that’s sort of true. Instead of a general purpose forum that has a section dedicated to role playing (as most forums may have), these Role Playing Forums are dedicated to an entire role playing environment. Meaning that the forum itself is used as the imagination playground.

This is a concept that boggles my mind, although, as a creative writer, it really shouldn’t? But I’m having troubles wrapping my mind around such an immense landscape. Where is the order within this chaos? People can just post character interactions anywhere within the forum? This appears to be the case, from the few boards that I glanced at for research into this article.

I’m used to a single board being a large enough place for imagination play. Members take turns posting one after another to build a story. But how does a story get built in a non-linear fashion? More importantly, does anybody actually read the content on these specialty role playing boards? Or is it more like most other places, where you post it and forget it—a troubling trend within the modern day social media era of mega platforms like FaceBook Groups, Reddit, and dare I say, even here on SubStack.

But the idea of using an entire forum as a role playing playground does have some interesting possibilities. You can design the entire forum skin/theme to reflect your vision of the world. A dystopian post-apocalyptic setting for a game might be rendered using a darkly colored theme. A school-type of environment, could be modeled to look like a digital schoolyard, complete with designated areas for disciplined studies. Even the typeface can be customized for an academic feel. People can create multiple accounts, each account would represent a different character— although I would be very tempted to install a blog to use as a character diary for the purpose of growth and advancement, not to mention giving the player the ultimate space to really get into their character’s head and get to know their character(s) with intimate detail. Even the naming conventions for the board titles could follow a theme, such as a military setting could use terms such as Barracks (character profiles), HQ (site announcements), Mission Briefings (plot discussions), Mess Hall (general chit chat), Battle Field: [name] (actual role playing missions), etc.

One other benefit of hosting an entire forum for a role playing game is that there are so many options for software available! There are free packages like Simple Machines Forum (SMF), the software I use, to shiny applications like XenForo (another software I really like), but can’t afford, each with loads of customizable options and extensions, so that you can customize the interactivity feel of your playground.

But probably the biggest benefit of running a dedicated forum for your role playing game is that it’s completely yours. You’re not renting space on somebody else’s platform. If you want to make your game sexually explicit completely unhinged with violent behaviors, you can (a common limitation on most shared platforms)! You have the ultimate control to ban troublesome players, you can set the rules to how you want to play. You can even set up payment/subscription modules (although I don’t think I’ve ever seen a role playing board do this).

Now for the not-so-bright-news. These places are in decline. Services such as Discord have taken over the market share because it’s easier to set up a Discord Server than it is to set up an entire forum. However, this convenience comes at the cost of losing archivability. But then again, as I mentioned above, do people really read the past actions of these fictitious characters anyway? Keeping this in mind, you have to ask yourself and your friends (assuming you’re not like me, and actually have friends) is it worth the time and possible monetary investment to set up a forum? Most of the forums I looked at seem to be running on vapor right now, with minimal participation from people. Perhaps people don’t have the time to commit anymore, or maybe role playing forums have just gone out of style as a fad, kind of like platform shoes, plaid pants, and dare I say, bell bottoms? Sorry to anybody who likes the 70s, but it’s just so easy to pick on the Disco era!

What are your thoughts on this novel use of forum software. Is it too much, like total overkill, or do you like it, and maybe want to explore it? As for me, I’ll just keep my general purpose anime role playing forum, and maybe start up my own game within that space sometime soon.