Roleplay Online

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The white RPoL logo. Other colour variations are user selectable.

Roleplay Online (RPoL), is a play-by-post role-playing game site.

1 Format
2 History
- 2.1 jase (RPoL coder, creator, owner)
3 External links

[edit] Format

There are 24 different genres of games at RPoL, such as Anime, Comedy, Historical Fantasy, Horror, Werewolf, etc. Games at RPoL vary by type as well, from freeform systemless games to system-heavy games such as Dungeons & Dragons and GURPS. The "RPoL Forums" genre is dedicated to "official" purposes; advertising games, asking questions about how to use the site, seeking advice and feedback on game ideas, etc.

Each game has a built-in dice roller (capable of generating scores for dice ranging in size from 2 sides to 10,000 sides), which also includes pre-set roll formats for several popular game systems. Game Masters and players may send each other private messages within a game. Game Master may also create a character sheet for each character in a game, which can only be viewed by the player of that character and a Game Master for that game. Each player in a game has a private "scratchpad" for keeping notes and storing information pertinent to the game.

[edit] History

RPoL went live at 11:58, Friday 25th Aug 2000 when its creator and a small group of fellow role-players were unable to access the Bulletin board system they had been using to that point. The first of June 2002 saw a huge rise in the number of players joining RPoL due to a conflict between the administration of Play by Web and several of their members.

Since inception, features have been added as requested by site members:

8 June 2001: Character groups were added.
7 October 2002: RPolls, automated, voluntary polls of users.
16 October 2002: "Portraits" or "avatars" added. (The portrait servers, currently supplied and managed by volunteer users, host 5844 portraits as of 6 January 2006).
16 July 2004: RPoL moved to a new server which is paid for by donations from FoRPoL, the Friends of Roleplay Online.

There have been three major outages since RPoL first went live:

In 2002, a number of problems occurred between RPoL and its shared webserver host, including a disk failure and conflicts pertaining to the host's ToU about RPoL's CPU usage. RPoL was eventually moved to a RAID5 at jase's place of employment.
On 15 July 2004, the day before RPoL was to be moved to a new dedicated server, its RAID5 crashed. Approximately 12 hours' worth of posts were lost, but the outage itself was short due to the planned move already in progress.
The "Great Outage" lasted 11 days, occurring from Sun 07 May 2006 to Thu 18 May 2006. RPoL became one of thousands of victims of a disastrous webhost migration. The new webhost misplaced the disk in another customer's server. The other customer discovered this error and returned the contents of the disk to the RPoL admin. No data was lost.

[edit] jase (RPoL coder, creator, owner)

Jason Roper (known on RPoL as "jase" with a lower-case j and otherwise known as woof) is the creator, owner, and coder of the Roleplay Unlimited Bulletin Board system on which RPoL runs. He currently resides in Perth, Western Australia.