Tag: nanowrimo

Awards & Prizes

Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others participated in our NaNoWriMo contest; for which I am very grateful. Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon. A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

For a while now I’ve been doing participation awards, those people who contribute the most, I believe, deserve to be recognized.  However, recently those participating have all been staff members, and I believe that we should focus on non-staff members for such awards.  It isn’t that I don’t appreciate our staff, I truly do, however the idea is to draw people to participate and contribute which staff members usually do anyway.

Whether it is due to multiple languishing storylines or due to everyone being busy with school, work, and/or life the server has seen a drastic dive in the amount of activity.  I am not very concerned with this, activity comes and goes and while I hope things don’t die off, if they do they do.  I wouldn’t be the first time I had to rework things and start again.

That all being said, my contribution / participation recognition has not gone as well as I’d hoped and I am actively looking for other options to accomplish that goal!  Please feel free to contact me with any ideas on how to increase participation, and such awards are on hold until I figure out a different way to do things.

NaNoWriMo Contest Results

This year I did something I’ve thought about doing for a while and opened up a new thread and a challenge.  That is, I wanted the server to write a novel!  There have been other crowd-sourced projects like this, my favorite (and perhaps the most funny) was put on by a guy named Brian Brushwood and was to troll the novel 50 Shades of Gray.  It’s a hilarious idea, while I didn’t want to troll anyone, I’ve seen first hand how creative everyone is.  To give some incentive, I said I would pay money to the top two contributors to the thread (excluding myself of course).  The thread can be read here.  While I do plan on continuing the thread with anyone who wants to participate, I was disappointed in the number of people who took me up on the offer.

Of course, Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others did participate; for which I am very grateful.  Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon.  A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

Moving Forward

I talk a lot about moving forward, I want to find out what everyone thinks we should do to increase our activity.  We’ve had some new players join, which I hope that they submit characters, and I know it is pretty standard on Discord to join a server and forget about it.  I’d like to try and refocus our strategy, we’ve got a lot of members, and it’s clear that our core people (staff mostly) play really well together.  I ask that everyone try to do a story with someone they don’t play with often, time permitting of course.  The more people we have playing the richer and more developed the setting and its history will become.

Thank you to everyone; happy gaming.

NaNoWriMo 2018

I know that a lot of the players here have made some real efforts that have paid off and the quality of the writing on the server has greatly increased over time and I am honestly proud of how far everyone has come in the quality and caliber of not only their writing but the quality of thought that goes into their ideas. So, lets write a novel together.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have really wanted to expand on our collective efforts of creative writing.  One of the most key parts of any role playing server is doing just that!  I know that a lot of the players here have made some real efforts that have paid off and the quality of the writing on the server has greatly increased over time and I am honestly proud of how far everyone has come in the quality and caliber of not only their writing but the quality of thought that goes into their ideas.  So, lets write a novel together.

The Plan

So, this year I’m going to put into motion something I really thought about doing before and we’re going to hand out prizes for contributions to this project over the next month.  The time frame goes from today, November 4th, until the end of the  month (November 30th).  First place will get $25 in the form of an Amazon Gift Card (since it does not need to be mailed) and 2nd place will get a $10 Amazon Gift Card.  Equivalent monetary value can be put on alternatives for those who cannot access Amazon or are unable to claim said prizes (for our International players).

The money will come out of the server’s Patreon fund, which I encourage people to donate to so that we can make a contest like this a more regular occurrence!

The Rules

So any contest must have rules, posts which do not add value to the story (such as posts made up of the same word repeated over and over again or some such) will be removed.  Predatory or malicious posts will also be removed — these are defined as posts which discourage others from posting or posts that are designed to upset or otherwise maliciously poke and prod another author.  Also, do not edit another users posts and while one may edit their own posts, pleas refrain from making edits to your own posts after they have been the basis for someone else’s posts.

The contest will be judged on the # of words contributed to the story which have a letter length of greater than 3 characters.  This is to avoid words like a, an, the, I, if…  We are going for actual content here and need a way to measure that.  Word length (beyond being at last 4 characters long) does not matter, so there is no need to use the longest words possible.

All server members are eligible to participate and win (other than myself, I will be participating but I am not eligible to win).  Characters and ideas need not be approved before posting them, this is not role play and doesn’t even necessarily take place in one of our settings (though it might).

Where?

The actual writing will be taking place on the forum on this thread.  Discord simply isn’t suited to this kind of writing, I would prefer to use Microsoft Word but since it is very expensive one cannot promise that people have access to it, that is out and Google Docs does not have sufficient tracking to keep track of everyone’s contributions.

Each post will be an addition to the story as if it is one long document.

What about after?

After the story is complete, we will be judging whether or not it should be further put into a document and edited / polished into a final draft.  I would personally like this and then for it to go onto here or be stored elsewhere so that we can go back to it.  I think this server has a lot of great talent in it and I look forward to seeing it moving forward.