Hey all I was figuring, some of us like writing but don't know much what to write about, well I think it would be a cool idea to have a "boardwar" once and a while to let folks get their creative juices out in an original and fun way
For those of you wondering what a Boardwar is it is an interactive story/text driven game there are many kinds as well which all have different ways to play and different ways to drive the story/game forward they are as follows:
The Simple Board Wars:
Fleet: This is a rather simple style wherein players create a race out of their imagination, each race is allowed to have totally different culutural and technological aspects (this may vary depending on who started the bw) players form alliances and battle it out with others to create a storyline, unfortunately many times these board wars are hard to bring to a close depending on the people participating and their willingness to drive a plot foward.
Army: Similar to a fleet board war but generally they take place on a single planet.
The More Complex Board Wars:
Conquest Style Space BW: The "Conquest style" is one wherein players have a designated empire (or at least it takes place in a specific galaxy) where there are planets to conquer, Fleet and army aspects are used in this style as players must conquer other players worlds in order to make headway, this leads to epic scale wars that can take up whole pages of story.
Fleet battles in such a board war are also more important then in the Fleet bw as if your starships are engaged in battle while one of your world's desperately needs more troops because it is being overrun then they obviously can't get reinforcements there and you may very well lose that world.
Medieval/Fantasy Boardwars: This style of boardwar is one of the most complex (beleive it or not) as you are playing the role of a King over a Kingdom, there are generally rather few rules in such a board war as it mainly relies on the player's desire to create an entertaining arena of battle and can be very epic in scale (I played one where my main army during a huge war was 150,000, my allies was 75,000 and our enemies numbered about 400,000 all told) but such large battles are rare as that would represent a huge investment of men.
Fantasy Versions can get complex but fun as there are many races/magics that can take place in the environment.
Character Board Wars: This is where the creator of the board war generally has a good idea of how he/she wants the story to go and drives each player down that storyline through force of script writing, each player is more like an "actor" taking part in a movie, they have independence but rely on the creator to drive the story forward.
How non-character Space Board Wars work:
Some players who have participated in board wars before and carry their races forward will start right off the bat "knowing" of their friend's race and be allies, others usually take the "new to the area" road and explore until they find another player's fleet/world/whatever.
Generally they can do whatever they want, introduce characters with which they can talk to each other's empires with or just shoot first and never ask questions it all depends on how the participants want to play it.
Medieval/Fantasy:
Players generally start out with designated kingdoms, they know about each other for the most part (though some are "hidden" and require others to explore for them) and can act however the participants see fit, whether sending messengers or armies it's up to you.
How ALL battles work:
Whether it is space, Army, or fantasy battles geenrally work the same, no player can dictate the extent of losses he inflicted on his apponent until that person gets Online and replies, this is to prevent player A from saying "I Fired my uberbeam of thundercrap and destroyed your entire fleet" not giving the other player a chance to reply.
NOW THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS!
For example if I have a dreadnought run into a fighter of your race or something otherwise insignificant compared to my force involved I can pretty much safely say I destroyed it, of course the other player can retort saying there were survivors but sometimes this is just not worth it and you can acknowledge defeat with grace
The same works for if I am in a Medieval Fantasy boardwar and my force of 300 archers and swordsman ambush 200 or so of your men, I can pretty safely say most of your men if not all died, of course this depends on how I declared my ambush:
For example say you sent a patrol of 200 men into a territory well known to be mine for example:
"The 2 companies of swordsman entered the borders of (kingdomnamehere), traveling along heavily forrested road in their goal to scout the region"
Then that player could turn around in another post and say something like
"The scouts watched as the 2 enemy companies marched down the road unawares of the fact they were walking streight into an ambush."
NOW the player that is about to be ambushed is obviously nto a "god" in the game and thus as far as the boardwar is concerned he has no clue he's being watched, even if he's kicking himself in the pants for making such a dumb mistake.
Player A (the guy about to be ambushed) can make his other post however he sees fit as long as it's not cheese or powergamy)
Player B:
"The archers let loose a devestating volley of arrows, slaying many of the enemy men, as the enemy reeled from the confusion of the ambush more archers loosed another volley and then another, killing many."
The general thing here is be vague about just how many your killing because the other player will probobly want to make some sort of reply.
Anyway generally I'd expect better posting with much more depth then that but those are just examples.
Is anyone else interested in this idea, I could start a medieval fantasy or fleet bw up really quickly depending on which you guys would prefer 
OT: Boardwars Anyone interested?
Perhaps a few basic guidelines on size of forces and empires and such?
Linear Mode
