As I said in my introduction post, I have started to work on setting up the forum based play-by-post roleplaying game. The earlier one was a failure - or kind of, because I did learn a lot from it. I would like to put my planning in writing before I execute it for two reasons. One, it makes things clear, and two, I hope to get advice from veterans here.

So, here goes.

About the forum:
The forum would be for roleplaying in a play-by-post manner, in a high fantasy universe of Chaos And Order.
The forum would allow people to choose among one of the four races as start up characters and they would experience the lands of Pipurim, by roleplaying in the continent of Gajadwipa.

Target audience: I have two kinds of people in my mind. One, the veterans of RPing. They would not find it hard to do a roleplay in Chaos And Order. Two, new comers to Roleplaying - I would like to introduce the world of roleplaying to new comers also so that they too can experince it.

Hosting and Branding:
I think the last time, I made a big mistake of putting up the forum in a free forum host, and I found it hard to get people to the obscure URL. This time around, I am intending on branding it under my already launched article library site, WiseTome. WiseTome is a growing article library, that presently has articles on World Building, Photography and other miscellaneous topics. (There would be more topics as the number of articles would increase).

Anyway, I would like to brand under WiseTome itself. I already it running on a hosting account (using Drupal as CMS). I would be installing a phpBB board either as a subdomain or otherwise and launch the Chaos And Order forums.

I have not yet explored the options I have on skinning the phpBB forum, to make it unique. I would prefer something that is unique by only the means of appropriate colours - no fancy graphic images and plugins.

Content:
From my past experiece, I belive there is a requirement of extensive background information on the universe and the world for proper roleplaying. I have currently placed it as a website under WiseTome itself and have not made it public at WiseTome or anywhere else. I hope I can put the URL here: http://www.wisetome.com/cao/ As you can see, I have the basic framework ready, but I am halfway through creation of content.

Advertising Options:
I am a bit stuck here. My newly lauched website WiseTome too does not have audience yet, and I am not sure where else I can advertise about Chaos And Order. I would like some advice here.

Forum Management:
I am yet to write up anything on the hierarchy structure in the forums, or the forum rules. I would like some advice on this quarter too.

That's very interesting. I like how the Kala was formed with only 10 masa. I also particularly like how the Dinas of the Kapta are named.

Do you have GM experience? I don't know how to run a R.P.G. in a forum with a turn system. Good Luck with that.

Advertising... that's a toughy too. It's been my experience that teens like to RPG, so perhaps a myspace campaign is in order. (no pun intended).

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Right now, just keep it simple: No spamming, no negativity, watch your language etc.

This was the last thing to go into my forum before releasing it. I had to sit back and look at the content and think: Would that rule work? Will it match the tone of the forum etc.

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RedMatrix, To create the unique naming, I have worked on creating a constructed language. I have given a glimpse of it at my blog post: http://www.blogcharm.com/splat/42821...and+Words.html

The word list given there was pretty basic, and I have built quite a bit over that now. Basically, I just am using the constructed language Pasen for naming purposes, but later I might use them for basic verses that could be used in the write ups.

Now for GM experience. I have had GM experience at the previous forum. I do not have the dice based RPG GM experience other than a home brew campaing I ran it with a group of friends and cousins.

Hmmm. Myspace? I never thought about that as a source of members.

Anon, yes, I think that should work. I will keep it simple, and may be add to it later. That is the way, I think I will be working on the Player Handbook too.

As I proceed with creation of content at http://www.wisetome.com/cao/, I think now I should also concentrate on how to customize the forum that I would be launching.

As stated earlier, I would be using a phpBB for creating the forum. The first thing that comes to my mind, with respect to customization, is skinning it. I have been alway not a contender of complex skins - I like the skins of my forum to be simple flat colours.

Now, that I think about it - I have no idea on how do I skin phpBB. I would like a skin, that would go along the blog. As you can see, all it would contain are primarily three colours - a dark gray filler, a maroonish background for text, and the text color as yelloish orange.

Could some one please advice me as to how I should proceed?

If you are familiar with html and CSS, then you should be able to figure out phpBB skinning by doing a little digging through the tpl and css files. If you do not know html and CSS very well, then you are probably out of luck with your own skin...Your options would be to learn html and CSS yourself (can take a while depending on how far you want to go), hire somebody to create a skin for you (pricey), or find an already existing, free skin to use (quality may be a concern). You can also buy a paid, but shared skin for $30 or so. These skins can be bought an used by an infinite number of people, so they are not unique, but they are still of good quality. The first such site that comes to mind for me is www.extremepixels.com

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I think then I should be able to manage by not spending a buck on the skin. I have pretty decent knowledge of CSS and I am quite competant in HTML. So, I think all I need to do now is grab a stable release of phpBB, install it on my local server, and start twiddling around with the template files and style sheets.

I have heard that phpBB 3 is under beta release. The previous stable was a phpBB 2 point something.
So, have any of you got any ideas when the phpBB 3 would have a stable release? Because, I do not want to duplicate my efforts on both the versions, if phpBB is going for a relase soon.

So, any estimate of the release date of phpBB 3?

I'd focus on phpBB2 myself. There are (at least promised) going to be converters from 2 to 3 by the phpBB3 crew, but with their track record, phpBB3's first release may or may not be any good. Early versions of phpBB2 were prone to being hacked. Also, their release cycles are anybody's guess. Could be 'stable' tomorrow, or it could be another 6 months. No way of knowing.

Indeed, there is no way of knowing...but I would definitely not work on phpBB, hoping that it becomes stable soon...if it helps you understand more clearly, it took ohh...3 or 4 years to go from phpBB2 to phpBB3? The phpBB development team could very well be picking up their game, but they have a bad track record.

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Amen.