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From Play By Wiki
Welcome to Play-By-Wiki!
This is a somewhat experimental site at the moment, but we have big dreams and goals!
I (Earl; aka theGleep - site master...Hi) have big plans and dreams for what Play-By-Wiki can become.
I have been enjoying play-by-email RPG for more than a decade now. I'm proud to be a founding participant in Elderon.
I'm a computer programmer. Always have been. And whenever I've played RPG, I've looked for ways to improve the experience. With play-by-email, I had a few game experiences that "petered out". I went to the trouble of creating an interesting character, invested good time and thought into him...and then the game died. I would have loved to be able to carry him on to a different game.
Hence - goal #1 (not in any particular order): A system of sharable characters. Some way for game managers to trust characters created outside of their game, and players to keep beloved imaginings alive longer.
About a year ago, Ben (the Game Manager for Elderon) decided that the game had been going on long enough that it might warrant a web site. (Previously, we'd been playing via Yahoo, and I'd been keeping the web site off my home server.) After a conference call, Ben bought the site...and it sat dormant for a few months. (Much to Ben's frustration!) I had been thinking we might use Drupal to host the site, but the learning curve was just too steep (for a little while, we did have a Drupal front-end, but it didn't go very far). Ben convinced me to install a Wiki so we could track game lore...and it was SO easy to maintain that I quickly moved the front-end to Wiki.
Goal #2 is closely tied to goal #1 - host multiple games in a single environment. It will be a lot easier for GMs to trust characters/players if they came from at least the same community.
Things gathered steam from there! I learned a lot about Wiki - and quickly. I was able to implement security so that only registered players can post. I installed Semantic MediaWiki and learned how to "tag" details for easy re-use. I built a "HeroSheet" template that makes it easy for non-techies to update details about their characters. I built a chapter template that makes it easy for players to submit their latest move. And I built story summary templates to make reading the "books" (yes, books - Elderon is big enough that we have broken it into books!) simpler.
While all of this was going on, I kept thinking back to my larger "plans" of having a site where many games can play together. And I embraced the potential for playing via Wiki - so I created this site.
It's still in it's infancy, so browse around a bit. Go ahead and register - it's free. (At some point, I will probably start hosting a little group of Google Adds to pay the cost of Web Hosting...but the site will always be free.)
Want to host a game? Sign in and contact me User:TheGleep and we'll get you started!
