Reinventing the Phoenyx.

I've been running my Kalyr PBeM on The Phoenyx for something like five years now. This site, run by Carl and Karen Cravens has been providing mailing lists and gamesmaster tools for PBeMs for a long time before that.

Now they've decided to make a major change in the focus of the site, as detailed in this announcement.

Massively Multiplayer Play By E-Mail

Okay, that header is kind of a joke. But we realized that what we often have in our application file is a gamemaster who has had a good, unique idea that he wants to try out. And that's neat, except: when he has the next good, unique idea, is he going to want to continue with this one? If something unexpected happens to him, will we ever get another gamemaster who's interested in picking up that game?

In the Phoenyx brainstorming discussions, we've adopted a policy of voicing any idea, no matter how weird, because we really felt we needed something different. So my idea was MMPBEM. A shared, standardized world, where gamemasters can run individual games, but benefit from a shared environment. Now gamemasters can exchange ideas (plots, NPCs, monsters), have crossover plots, even run opposing groups of players. New gamemasters can come from the ranks of players, because the world is all laid out in a shared format (probably the Wiki). The problem of non-standard offsite game homepages is solved, because nobody's going to come to us with a pre-built game and already-existing pages.

To do all that, we need to build worlds. Worlds will have to be Phoenyx property (or the Phoenyx will have to have an unlimited license), to avoid the "I'm taking my marbles and going home" syndrome, so they have to be built from scratch. That's usually a huge project, but in this case they really just need to be "generic" worlds with all the usual tropes for their genre... we're specifically not striving for uniqueness, we're just looking for a shared framework gamemasters can hang their own stories on.

I have very mixed feelings on this. It's a bit like my attitude towards modular layouts. I like the idea of shared worlds, in that it enables something much bigger than anything a single GM can come up with. On the other hand, I'm less keen on the sort of compromises I'd have to make. Bit like the unrealistic 3-track format of Ntrak.

I also have to admit that Dwarves 'n Elves generic fantasy isn't to my taste either. As Karen said in the ensuing discussion:

We're going for a sense-of-comfortable-like-old-shoes rather than sense-of-wonder, with the basic tenets of the world.

That's really not to my taste at all. I loathe the hack fantasy of the likes of David Eddings and Robert Jordan. But I have to admit they're enormously popular, an awful lot of people love the familiar tropes.

However, Kalyr will continue more or less unchanged, because:

Existing games get grandfathered in, and nothing about them will really change. So long as someone's willing to gamemaster them, they'll continue. Those that can fit into the Phoenyx standard worlds are welcome to do so, of course.

If a current (or even prospective) gamemaster wants to turn his game into a shared one, and is comfortable with all the requirements, that's doable.

Kalyr as a multi-GM game in it's own right? I don't want to make any pronouncements at this stage. Let's see how things go..