A RPGWW History

RPG World

The history of the RPGWW community starts before the creation of RPGWW, with the comic RPG World by Ian Jones-Quartey. RPG World is a webcomic which spoofs the cliches of RPGs--games such as Final Fantasy, for instance.

Now, back in the day, RPG World had an online forum, like many webcomics! Here fans of RPG World congregated to talk about the comic in specific, and also nothing in particular. Occasionally, a poster would come to the forum who would not be a fan of the comic--someone who came for the social aspect, perhaps alerted to the community by another poster--but these were few. By and large, posters were also fans and once-fans of console RPGs.

UBB: the early board

The early board was a single-forum UBB (Universal Bulletin Board). All threads were displayed together (like a single subforum of our RPGWW, or today's RPG World forum), and in each thread, 75 posts were displayed per page. The UBB was hosted on Keenspot, as was RPG World at the time.

No doubt influenced by these limitations, there was a certain uniformity to forum threads. Very few threads were 'serious' or uniformly serious. The larger portion of posters had a persona under which they posted--a sort of roleplaying in and of itself. Some threads would have mixed serious and persona responses, which led to some misunderstandings.

Early personas established during this period include Ash Fanrico, Daniel, Folx/EmpressFolx, Jinx, KingOfDoma, Neko, Nekogami, Phil/EmpressPhil, Rydia-chan/Empress Rydia, Stephan, Vulture, and Zero the Barkeep (not to be confused with Capntastic). It was during this time that the country of Doma was established. Boozeland was, as well, but was wisely not carried over into RP canon later.

RPGWW? RPGWW!

It became popular to create or modify game sprites to represent one's forum persona, to the point that a handful or more posters had done so. This, perhaps, helped lend the idea to poster Chrono_Catfish to make a sprite comic based on the forum shenanigans.

A thread posed the question: what should this comic be called? The answer came back: RPG World World.

C_C's comics were originally emailed to interested parties, but poster pdrydia began to find hosting for them and minister what would be the RPGWW website. As more forumers read the comic, more wanted to be in it, and thus made their own sprites or found someone to do so for them.

RPing

Most RPGW/W forumers were, by the time C_C's comic was getting into the swing of things, already posting under a created persona. Epic spam threads were occurrences many looked forward to; over the course of a very short amount of time, forumers posted rapid-fire responses in a single thread, often with amusing results. Some of these threads took the course of plot, spawning new characters--Staniel, for instance, or TDTLTTOBNL.

Early attempts at RPs were similar to this, but purposefully instigated instead of happy accidents. They largely did not take off. A notable exception would be School Daze (illustration by AbbaTerra), which would later be reincarnated.

The first "serious RP" and perhaps first RP to finish would be The Hit, started by Ash Fanrico. While bearing several typical features of a GM's and RPers' first venture into RPing, by and large those who participated in it enjoyed it greatly. The events from the RP are pseudo-canon. The Hit started and ended on the UBB forum.

The second RP to finish was Rise of the Guild (sequel: In Pursuit of the Darkness). This RP was started and GMed by Archmage, using the Philsys which had been somewhat recently developed by forumer Phil-dog. Rise of the Guild started and ended on the UBB forum.

After the successful completion of Archmage's RPs, and his loud encouragement, more posters began to GM and RP.

Discontent

With the RPGWW comic and RPing beginning to take off, there was suddenly a lot more to the community to attract posters who weren't interested in RPG World. More people began to come to the forum, which wasn't completely to the liking of everyone there at the time.

Larger than before, the RPG World forum now had very distinct social groups. There were those who spammed and did not, those who RPed and those who didn't, those who talked about the comic and those who did not even so much as read it. There were artists, who tended to be popular and well-known, if also sometimes disliked and envied for their popularity based on their "innate" skill. There were also the other well-known forumers--those who posted frequently, those who had "loud" personas, or those who contributed in some significant way to the community such as Chrono_Catfish.

Plenty of suggestions were made as to who should leave and who should stay. It was pointed out several times that this was the RPG World forum, especially as talk of the comic became less and less common.

The forum itself was experiencing technical problems more and more frequently. It had always--at least from 2001 onward--suffered the problem of having the occasional thread eaten, but now it was happening more and more frequently. The board went down for several days, taking several threads and user accounts with it.

This was a keenspace-wide problem, however, and the keen powers that be were keen on a solution. This solution the good folks appeared to settle upon seemed to be moving away from the UBB-based forums and over to phpbb.

Keen phpbb are...GO!

One day, the RPG World comic board link led to a VERY different forum. Instead of the familiar whites and pale greys of the UBB, the board was dark. Lord only knows why Keenspace decided to change the color scheme so drastically, but for a time, the board worked a little better.

Then someone changed the phpbb color scheme. And everything went to hell.

The pages loaded slowly at the best of times, on a fast connection, leaving dial-up-dependent forumers "SoL." Roughly half the time, however, the pages refused to answer for even the best of connections.

Thus...

Suicidal Sprite, to the rescue

Poster Suicidal Sprite went to ezboard.com to open a new board--one we could actually post at. The ezB RPGWW was established on 22 April 2002.

The original idea was that we would, at the least, have a temporary place to post until keenspace got it's rear in gear. If we decided we liked it, we'd keep it.

We decided we liked it. The ability to create subforums was perhaps one of the most indispensable features of the forum: RPs could be separated from spam, spam from discussions, discussions from art, art from RPGWW and RPGW comic discussion.

Having our own admins and moderators was also incredibly useful--or, rather, the abilities they have to delete spam, block spammers, and move posts. The ability to customize images and colors was also quickly utilized, as were custom postranks.

The original administrators of the ezB RPGWW were Suicidal Sprite (also the ezOp), Archmage, DMSCV, and pdRydia. Later admins would be Squintz Altec, Kai, and Idran1701 while pdRydia would step down to moderator.

Miscellany

AIM

RPGW/W's first venture into AIM started during the era of the UBB board. There was a thread--several threads, actually, as each successive thread got bogged in spam and then fell to the bottom of the thread heap--requesting AIM screennames. As screennames appeared, they were added to buddylists and invited into chats when RPGW/Wers were online.

Originally, RPGWW chats had spontaneous names and all chatters had to be invited. A gathering of 6 chatters was a momentous occasion and necessitated the involvement of all chatters present, for it might not happen again for quite some time.

During this time, RPs tended to occur spontaneously from normal chats. A normal discussion would turn to spam, the spam to spammy RPing, and the spammy RPing to serious RPing. Older characters often have backgrounds which have links to spammy origins and events because of this.

Sometimes the RP would move to a different chat at some point, but only if there were enough people in the chat who wanted to just talk. Starting RPs intentionally, mind, was difficult for most chatters. One would say, "I want to RP," get the entire chat to agree, and wait as everyone did and said nothing, not knowing what to do to initiate an RP.

The tradition of naming RPGWW chats "RPGWW Chat" and of keeping RP chats distinct from the main chat was cemented with the RPGWW website. At one point in time, FlamingDeth told pdrydia of an HTML code--it made a link which, when clicked, would take an AIM user directly to a chat of the coder's choosing. The ability for RPGWWers to invite themselves to chat sounded pretty neat--it just necessitated a static chat room name. As RPGWW Chat had been used for a bit of time already, RPGWW Chat (aim:GoChat?RoomName=RPGWW+Chat) was decided upon.

RPGWW Chat had grown stagnant, RPGWWers having been accustomed to being invited to chat; inviting oneself to chat took some getting used to. The link made things easier, certainly. Still, today, some RPGWWers generally will not enter chat unless invited--how else to know the chat is active? It's not terribly uncommon for RPGWW Chat to host up to 20+ chatters at once, all of whom are doing things other than chatting.

The website

Originally, C_C's RPGWW comic was emailed to interested parties. It so happened that pdrydia--at the time posting under Rydia, Rydia-chan, or EmpressRydia, depending--learned about this comic and asked our C_C to email her the backlog. He kindly did, although he had to ask around find a couple of ones he had misplaced. Dia offered, then, to place these comics on a website--somewhere the whole forum could easily access, and coincidentally a place to store backups. C_C sounded agreeable to this idea.

The first RPGWW website was opened several subfolders down at [zeke.tzo.com]. The length of the URL was intimidating, which encouraged Dia to later move the site to [rpgww.topcities.com]--which at some point in time was automagically shifted to [rpgww.50megs.com].

Dia met a guy of the SN GreatDave through (of all things!) a Rydia fansite, and the kindly Dave offered webhosting at davidr.com. Thus, RPGWW moved once again, this time to www.davidr.com/rpgww. At some point in time, Dave's rent of the domain name davidr.com ended, and the domain changed to greatdave.org--thus, www.greatdave.org/rpgww.

Later, Dave decided to take leave of the internet for some time. RPGWW was moved back to zeke, this time at the shorter URL zeke.tzo.com/rpgww.

The website now resides at rpgww.org thanks to the fantastic Mr. Idran!