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Star ArmyⓇ is a landmark of forum roleplaying. Opened in 2002, Star Army is like an internet clubhouse for people who love roleplaying, art, and worldbuilding. Anyone 18 or older may join for free. New members are welcome! Use the "Register" button below.

Note: This is a play-by-post RPG site. If you're looking for the tabletop miniatures wargame "5150: Star Army" instead, see Two Hour Wargames.

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Is Star Army a LitRPG?

Soban

Soban

Convention Veteran
LitRPG is a storytelling style that is growing popularity. In LitRPG are stories that that exists in a game world or world with obviously stated game mechanics (Ie: damage notifications, status screens, stats, health/mana bars, etc.) and the character must progress in some obviously stated way. (Ie: levels, skills, abilities, notifications, ranks, etc.)
 
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No, Star Army is not a LitRPG. While we may have gamification elements, they are optional and don't exist within the universe of Star Army. There are no in character obviously stated game mechanics. Characters do not typically progress in an obviously stated gamified sort of way.
 
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Nah. I read a lot of LitRPG and sarp is pretty far from it. LitRPG all have some sort of system that dictates the laws of the universe not in math or sciences but in a quantifiable and easily tracked method that almost always seems revolved around killing as a motivator.

While it once had magic and was close to high-space fantasy, Sarp is a space opera fantasy. And while mega-macro AI exist within the setting they are woefully bland and underutilized in their capabilities.

Tho, tbh it would prob be enforced as soft canon or not at all but there's nothing stopping you from making a world with a Macro-AI in it that has filled the air with nanites and in your body and creates micro-evolutions every time you kill or do enough stuff and replicates the effect of magic using nanites but only works on that world (like a twisted amusement park experience but for killing or as some great game you cant escape) and created a quantifiable system to track and manage it seamlessly for its players.
 
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Honestly, I feel like RPG-lit would be a better term for those types of books (in that they're literature with RPG elements and not an RPG with literature elements) but it's become a standardized term we would cause confusion by calling ourselves that. The accepted terms for Star Army seems to be "play-by-post roleplaying game" or "forum RPG." That said I wouldn't mind some sort of leveling system provided it is in keeping with the existing universe and theme. I'm reminded there's a situation in that not all online RPs agree on what an Open RP is (my stance is that it means one that's joined freely, e.g. without restrictions other than following the rules).

Though it might be better for OOC use instead of IC use? What I mean is it would be cool to reward points or levels or something to the people contributing actively to Star Army and allow them to get extra perks from that. Like after an RP concludes what if there was a survey about if players were fun, helpful, nice to work with, etc and points were doled out based on the survey results so that people who made this RP better would get the most rewards.

Anyway, I digress--Star Army is very much a group storywriting-based form of RP, but not a LitRPG in the accepted sense of the term.
 
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Yeah, LitRPG is the strangest misnomer. When I first heard about it as a sub-genre of SF/F, apparently labelled such around 2013, it just struck me as a weird descriptor that Westerners put on throwaway paperbacks/ebooks that take place in an RPG world, which Japanese fiction has been doing for decades longer across literature, manga, and animation.

As to RPG mechanics for SARP like leveling up, we've kind of been moving away from that. A character's military rank is the closest we really get (especially since players can only create PCs ranked equal to the highest ranked earned through RP with anything higher being an NPC, which is just a re-use of the common practice of a new character getting the level of your previous dead character). Skills and abilities used to scale up roughly with rank. But we've kind of moved past that with our characters' skills being more amorphous and even not required to list at all anymore.

It'd be easy to reintroduce more leveling mechanics, though. My favorite tabletop RPG series is Legend of the Five Rings, a samurai game, and the older editions that I played had great ways to level up or track various aspects of one's character beyond their physical/mental/skill attributes. Like you'd have honor (personal morals that get solidified or degraded based on actions), glory (how well known you are), and status (how powerful you are), and sometimes points in a wealth advantage depending on the edition. So honor was akin to alignment but on a sliding scale, then glory and status while similar reflected different things—the rarely seen Emperor would have status 10 but a low glory score because he's sequestered away from the masses recognizing him, but a heroic clan Daimyo might have status 7 but glory 10 because everyone knows who they are. A wealth stat essentially tracks your SAoY prestige system rank. I think there was once a thread about that last one.

I think something like the above could work and be easily implemented via wiki struct, but it's also very gamified and could lead to people caring about the wrong things when it comes to RP. Not really a fan of surveys or voting for player perks on a site-wide scale because they ultimately wouldn't be indicative of who actually makes the RP better, but within plots it could work well.
 
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