A RPGWW History

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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 such as, for instance, Final Fantasy. Like many webcomics, RPG World had an online forum. Here fans of the webcomic 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 on one page, 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 had mixed serious and persona responses, depending upon the poster, which led to some misunderstandings.

Early personas established during this period include Ash Fanrico, Daniel, Folx, Jinx, KingOfDoma, Neko, Nekogami, Rydia-chan/Empress Rydia, Stephan, and Vulture. It was during this time that the country of Doma was established. Boozeland was, as well, but was wisely not carried over into RP cannon 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. RPGWW was becoming a neat idea to people, and there was suddenly a lot more to the community to attract posters who weren't interested in RPG World.

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.

Discontent

There was some discontent. There were many more posters than before and, now, several very distinct in- and out-groups on the RPG World forum. There were those forumers who had general forum-wide recognition--they appeared in the comic, they received fanart, people knew 'who they were,' what their persona was supposed to be; these included heavy posters. There were also the fanartists, who received attention based on their abilities to create. There were the RPers, who--well, RPed. There were the spammers. There were the people who talked about the comic, and those who didn't. And, of course, there were myriad combinations of these.

As different forumers gained and lost popularity, suggestions were made as to the motivations for why forumers made themselves likable to certain other forumers. A very few people made themselves petty, but overall, it was just a group of people trying to figure out how to deal with a fairly abrupt change.

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 they were keen on a solution. This solution appeared to be moving away from the UBB-based forums and over to phpbb.

Keen phpbb are...GO!

One day, the RPG World comic board 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 the forumers on dial-up "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 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.

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!

Keenspot

UBB, phpbb

ezB, phpbb

Comics

comics

birth of RPing

The RP bootcamp