Can we make Roll20 Massive?

I found this forum after a lengthy Google search for "online text-based mmorpgs" and variations thereof and found nothing that was precisely what I was looking for. I had the idea that we who identify as "tabletop role-players" should have nothing less than a free web-based community dedicated to merging Game Masters and Players in real-time. I found this website and its resources all but perfectly suited to the cultivation of a truly Massively Multiplayer Online Text-Based Adventure. What we need are Massive Campaigns with many Game Masters and many Players. Maybe they should be called a "Universe" instead of a "Massive Campaign." We can do it by starting groups of Game Masters called Directors. The Directors work together to set the rules of the Universe as well as design and approve Adventures. The Directors will then recruit Game Masters to run Adventures for their Campaign. The users of a Universe can join as either Players or Game Masters, but both must follow the rules the Directors set for their Universe. Game Masters can log on at any time and broadcast to Players of the chosen Universe that they are ready for an Adventure. The Game Master will choose an Adventure that complies with the Rules of the Universe. The Game Master will then wait for Players to queue up for their Adventure and after verifying the Player's compliance to the Rules of the Universe, the Game Master will then start the Adventure. Adventures should be made available to Players using the Campaign Creator feature on this site. The Adventure's Name and Level along with the #UniverseName should be in the name of the Campaign. Since most Universes will likely start with no more than a few users each, Game Masters will have to allow time to schedule their first adventures, but as Universes grow and gain more Game Masters and more Players, the wait time for a game should drop to nothing and this site will get clicks like crazy. To sum it up, I am suggesting the creation of a new forum dedicated to the creation and management of Universes. There should be a forum for the recruit of Game Masters separate from the forum that should contain the Charter for a Universe as well as the names of its Board of Directors. Directors and Game Masters can handle scheduling their own adventures. For Game Masters it might be as simple as adding a #InsertCampaignNameHere to the name of the Campaign adventure, but what is desperately needed is a way for a Game Master to broadcast to Players that there is a Game Master waiting. This can be handled with simple email alerts, but the Universe's Directors need a forum dedicated to making Campaign Rules as well as Game Master availability accessible to new players. Imagine the LFG page on this website with Campaigns that say "Join An Adventure Now!" If you play Dungeons and Dragons, you're already doing what I'm talking about. You play in a Universe created by Directors and managed by Game Masters. If you're one adventurer short on your 4 player 8th level adventure, would you take that sit-in who brought his own character? What if the sit-in was your Game Master? Thanks for reading.

Nothing stops you from starting a game with multiple GMs and 100s of players. I for myself, am not interested in that. And Roll20 is not meant for that either, so I'll doubt you'll get too much support for that.

My point, originally, is that there is no place for something like this yet. I'm thinking that this would be the best place, as it has the most complete campaign recruitment tools I've yet found.

There are a number of RP chats online which do approximately what you're talking about, although "massive" is in the eye of the beholder, as the various chats are broken up and the playerbase is scattered (naturally, since you couldn't make this work across multiple systems, each would have to be dedicated to a single game). The chats rise and fall over time; I myself have seen three different chats for Exalted run their course, hitting several hundred players engaged and several dozen concurrent users at their peak. Sometimes the publisher hosts such chats (I know White Wolf used to have a few World of Darkness chats running), and there are IRC channels dedicated to this sort of purpose.

Thanks, Brian. I have run into some of the things you were talking about. My whole problem is how scattered the community is. I know there are so many of us out here that play tabletop games and still prefer them to any video game. I was simply hoping for a way to organize our campaigns into something that we can all use - a place to find a quick game. There are so many great Game Masters out there and so many who would like to be, but they just don't have the experience. I'm not suggesting we throw away traditional Game Master/Party relationships, simply that Game Masters work together to make a whole world of Adventures and Adventurers.

Triston M. said: ...simply that Game Masters work together to make a whole world of Adventures and Adventurers. Why? And while that may sound unduly dismissive, I'm legitimately curious. I just don't see layering on bureaucracy and extra hoops to jump through as conducive to encouraging more people to GM or fostering a continuous stream of pick up games. Also, you might consider checking out the old concepts of MUD/MUCK/MUSH type networks which used to (but still might) be a thing. That was the first thing that popped into my head while reading your initial post.

I think I know what you're saying, Dave. What I'm proposing is a little extra compared to what we're used to, sure. But it's no different than when Game Master chooses what game to play. He looks at the Rules of the Universe (be it D&D, Pathfinder, whatever) and interprets them for his adventures. What I'm saying is a little like that, only instead of only looking at the rules of the Game, we allow more room for interpretation in the Universe. If you want to play Core Rulebooks, there's room for that. But maybe you want to put Dragons in Manhattan. Who says not to? These are just campaigns on a massive scale. Your chosen Universe might have rules that only allow for adventures in that campaign's list of approved adventures, or it might let a game master completely improvise the rules based on his own adventures. The rules aren't there to be a new thing, only to serve as flags for idle Game Masters to nest under. As for the concepts of MUD/MUCK/MUSH networks, those are great examples of what can happen when Game Masters work together. Sure, we all want to have our trademark campaigns, and there's nothing wrong with that. But who would have a problem with running a random group through each adventure in their favorite campaign? It's an extra challenge for the GM and a lot of potential fun for Players and Game Masters alike.

I think people are hesitant because it seems a little premature to create a forum for something that nobody is doing yet... but why not create a thread for it (LFG is probably the best place) and start one up? If it's successful, maybe someone else will do another in a different universe. You probably don't need a whole forum for it until then. (Note that there are Campaign-specific forums that can be used once the game gets going, so that you don't have to keep everything in one huge thread in the LFG forum.)

The question is what specific benefits would you be going for above the sort of experience that can be had with a fixed set of ~6 players + 1 GM? I can think of a few differences, but I think its important to be clear on the goals. What you've described sounds sort of like the Living Greyhawk/etc metacampaigns administered by WotC. Each group of players+DM plays the adventure and submits the results back to WotC, and things are vetted/standardized/etc so you can take a character from one DM's table to another's... but in practice, the results of an individual session won't reflect back on the world (WotC won't take the results of how it went at your table and make it canon for everyone). But I've also been part of 'club campaigns' where you have, say, 20 players and 4 DMs, and each DM will say something like 'I'll run a thing on Tuesday for 4-6 players', and then they'll talk with eachother and what happens in each of the games is canon for the entire campaign. So e.g. if the players in Tuesday's game blew up the PC's guild headquarters, the headquarters is blown up for all the other groups too. That has a very different kind of dynamic than the Living Greyhawk style of thing. There's also the 'lets put 100 players into a single session' type thing, which I've heard of, but in general I don't think that works well with a turnbased medium - you need some sort of asynchrony or most of the time is spent waiting for your chance to do something. Where I have heard of this working is LARP-style events with maybe 10-20 players at most, where gameplay breaks up into separate rooms, each of which has a GM administering the room, and players enter/leave rooms as their characters change locations. That way each individual room is hosting only a standard party size of players at a given time, and because of the convention that different rooms are different places in the game world, its okay if you don't know what happened up to the minute in the room next-door. So each of these has a different set of goals and advantages/disadvantages. What exactly would you be going for?

Triston M. said: I was simply hoping for a way to organize our campaigns into something that we can all use - a place to find a quick game. In practice, that's not how a "massive" type tabletop campaign works. Generally, characters must go through an approval process to ensure that none of the campaign's rules have been broken, and that take time. Then, character advancement generally requires time investment. Some chats also have been running for an extended period of time and therefore grant additional exp/bonus points/etc. at character creation to let new players be remotely competitive with the older ones -- this necessarily means a longer time spent creating characters, and a proportionally longer time for GMs to approve new characters. The logistics of RP chats (those which are using actual tabletop systems, not freeform roleplay) are simply not conducive to "a quick game." That said, once you're established in a chat, you can usually play for a relatively short amount of time in a day if you please. Nicholas G. said: There's also the 'lets put 100 players into a single session' type thing, which I've heard of, but in general I don't think that works well with a turnbased medium - you need some sort of asynchrony or most of the time is spent waiting for your chance to do something. Where I have heard of this working is LARP-style events with maybe 10-20 players at most, where gameplay breaks up into separate rooms, each of which has a GM administering the room, and players enter/leave rooms as their characters change locations. That way each individual room is hosting only a standard party size of players at a given time, and because of the convention that different rooms are different places in the game world, its okay if you don't know what happened up to the minute in the room next-door. What you've seen in LARPs, where the large number of players is broken down into smaller rooms, is the standard for massive play. Turn-based games lose their appeal when you have dozens of people playing at once, so the number of participants is cut down to a manageable handful. GMs are only necessary in scenes of conflict or plot, which do not occur 24/7, and separate rooms can run asynchronously.

Love "To sum it up, I am suggesting the creation of a new forum dedicated to the creation and management of Universes." I want to be exalted chairman of universe creation.