Wise Turtle Publishing

(Edit: Oops. Completely glanced over the "Ask wise Turtle" section. Should this be moved?)

Hello everyone. Yes, I'm new here. I found this system when I was looking into BESM as an RP medium to carry on a forum role-play on Gaiaonline in a more focused chat based format facilitated by a system like fantasy grounds. And it got me thinking about just how I should run it. Granted, I'm not new to tabletop roleplaying. I've DMed a few games and I've played in countless World of Darkness, D&D, and Pathfinder games. But for the sake of this discussion, since I've only just brushed through the rules, lets just treat me as though I were an online forum RPer trying to put together a OVA game set in the same world with the same characters as the original format.

Now I've always been sort of the GM, doing about 90% of the world building and lore, answering all the questions players might have to fit their characters into the world, ext, but I always kinda granted sort of a template style of world building that not only lets the players leave their own print on the world, but can sort of assume the mantle of the story teller for purpose of side stories, story arcs, or... Erm, "Episodes" if you will. In which case I get the luxury of just sitting back and playing my own characters in their stories without having to worry about running the game as anything more than a mediator or moderator who steps in to solve disputes.

So if I were to take that same approach, basically setting up kinda a sand box world, controlling the main story and the stories pertaining to the core cast, ext, what sorts of things would need to be considered if I allowed players to step in and run their own adventures, perhaps submitting simple quest or episode ideas onto a quest board, and voting which quest to run next and which characters the players decide to take with them for that episode? Sure, I would still be acting as a global moderator for purpose of enforcing rules and balance, but not telling the story, and maybe playing the role of one of my NPCs. Would this sort of game style fit well in a tabletop game? Has it ever worked before? What sorts of things would one need to consider in order to make it work fluently?

This is something that happens a lot with freeform RPs online, but has had less of a foothold in tabletop games. Still, there’s quite a few games that treat Game Mastering in unique ways, or even drop the Game Master altogether. If you google “story games” you’ll find a lot of novel approaches to RPGs. OVA touches on a few of these approaches to GMing in “Sharing the Work” in the Game Master’s Section.

In any case, you may want to approach the game with a very liquid GM role, where everyone can introduce NPCs, plotlines, role-play extra characters, and so on. This would be closer to what you’re used to on Gaia Online, probably, and gets everyone into the mindset of directing the world. The element of surprise is a bit less (since, without a true GM, there are no secrets), but I think you’ll find OVA is well-suited for it. NPCs are so easy to create on the fly, after all.

I’d be interested to hear about your experiences trying it out! Good luck!