Greetings! I'm Zwangzug, a longtime member of the sports roleplaying community. (You may also have seen me around as an issues editor.) I'm here to hopefully elucidate some of the ways the subforum works, and how it's similar to (and different from) the many other types of roleplaying you can find on NationStates.
At a very high level, sports RP consists of someone or someones (the "host(s)") using a computer program to randomly generate the results of a sports event between competing teams. Then, the participating countries roleplay the event, by writing posts telling stories based on what happened.
I'll be using examples based on a tournament I recently competed in World Baseball Classic 40. Here, the host, Cassadaigua, posts the results of a game. (This is from the championship series, so there are only two teams remaining; usually, there are many more teams participating.) Afterwards, Super-Llamaland, one of the participants, posts a roleplay in response. As you can see, this is a news article that looks like rather traditional sports journalism. But the final series also included character-based RP, via a private conversation between characters, and even poetry that had little to do with the tournament itself. This, in a nutshell, is the way that tournaments run. So while we call it "sports roleplaying," I'll be covering the "roleplaying" part first, and then move on to deal with the "sports" nuances!
Sports roleplaying is open-ended. Almost any style of writing can be effectively transferred into a sports roleplay. Many traditional styles include news reports that follow a team (or individual)'s progress, whether that be newspaper articles, blog posts, transcripts of radio or television broadcasts, social media postings, or the like. Other ways to report on a team include third-person narratives writing about the daily lives of the players on the team, the managers, or loyal fans. This story by Tenburg, a relatively new roleplayer, is a great example of roleplaying the game itself without relying on a "media" output.
Sports roleplaying also doesn't have to be about sports. Many users choose to write about day-to-day life in their country or national drama on a grand scale, interweaving various plotlines or just mixing things up to keep themselves fresh. Here, Cassadaigua updates us on the protest situation in the host nation, while calling back to some roleplays from other sports.
Sports roleplaying is a great way to be interactive, if you so choose. You can choose to roleplay only the game at hand, but you can also respond to other players' posts, whether or not you're playing against them. Like in other subforums, it's important not to do anything drastic to other countries without their permission (more on this below), but as a good rule of thumb, you have control over your own characters within your own nation, and reacting to other people's posts can lead to some good back-and-forth dynamics. If you want to plot out long-term events, again, just like in other subforums, it helps to have a good OOC relationship with other users and to plan ahead via telegram or IRC. Here, Newmanistan writes an article responding to Cassadaigua's protest situation above, while still not godmodding by controlling the narrative about what's going on in Cassadaigua beyond what's previously been roleplayed.
Sports roleplaying has a strong internal canon. The World Cup of association football/soccer dates back to 2003 (before the Jolt forums!) and records are still kept of who won! If you love writing factbooks or wikis, making callbacks to your or others' old RP characters, and tallying up statistics of heroes gone by, you might enjoy the many continuity nods to be found on display. Here, Schiltzberg analyzes the history of a previous baseball tournament. (On the other hand, if this doesn't appeal to you, theres's nothing forcing you to RP in a specific style; just don't be alarmed when others do.)
So that's a little bit about the roleplaying side; what can we say about the sporting touches?
Sports roleplaying is ultimately based on random numbers. No matter how simple or complex, every scorinator (results generating program) should have some measure of arbitrariness, thus providing some chance, no matter how small, for the world's greatest underdogs to topple the number-one seed. Ultimately, everything is a function of luck, so as much as teams may crow about their success IC, OOC success is no true badge of honor, nor should OOC lack of success be a cause for disappointment.
Sports roleplaying very often includes a rank component. Usually in tournaments that are held over and over again (like the World Baseball Classic or the World Cup), the results of the last few tournaments are used to give teams that did well in those high ranks the next time, and thus make them more likely to win in the future. This lends a degree of realism to the results, since real sports competitions have stronger and weaker teams in the rankings. It also means that new entrants will generally have a harder time doing well right away. (Again, teams old and new alike are usually advised to look for the fun in roleplaying as a goal, rather than immediate success!)
In the last WBC, the numbers after the teams' names indicate their starting rank (1 is best). Super-Llamaland, who wound up winning, were fourth seeds. Tenburg, who were unranked, made it to the quarterfinals.
Some events don't work on this scheme. The Olympics, for instance, usually have a system where you can give each athletes a ranking between 0 and 100, with an average of 50 per delegation. So a country like Zwangzug's with great bikers but bad shooters can choose what they want to be ranked highly in, and so can every other nation. It doesn't matter if you've never participated before!
Sports roleplaying frequently includes bonuses for roleplayers. It's certainly not a determinant of success, and random numbers will always have the last word, but posting roleplays will often give you a small boost to your rank, be you a new or established user. So all things being equal, being an active participant may sometimes indirectly contribute to in-character victories.
Sports roleplaying encourages you to give other users material to build on. Many of the most-roleplayed sports (like football and baseball) are team sports. To participate in the tournaments, all you need to do is post in a signup thread saying something like "we sign up!" (Again, more on this later.) However, it's easier to roleplay with a country that gives a list of the players on its team, rather than saying "We beat Zwangzug 3-1, they scored one run and their pitcher pitch badly." Therefore, it's highly encouraged to post a roster, or list of your players. For larger tournaments like the World Cup, there will be a separate thread for this; for smaller tournaments like the World Baseball Classic, this will take place in the main roleplaying thread. Here's a roster from Mount Pleasant.
Along with the roster, you're also encouraged to post a list of what your opponent can and can't do if they roleplay first. Can they pick which of your players scored? Can they roleplay that one of your players got injured, or thrown out of the game for bad behavior? Can they stretch the laws of physics or narrative credulity? Setting these guidelines allows for better cooperative roleplay.
You don't need to be an expert on the sport to put down a list of names; usually, other users will have styles that you can emulate (though completely copy-pasting styles is frowned upon). Similarly, you don't need to be very knowledgeable about the sport to roleplay it itself! Character-based roleplays are always a good jumping-off point.
When bonuses for roleplaying are in effect, rosters usually count towards this; hosts appreciate giving other teams something to work with.
Sports roleplaying operates on the principle of first-come, first-serve. If one player posts a roleplay about the game, then the second player shouldn't contradict it in their RP. They can, however, suggest that maybe the referee's call was questionable, or that one of the goals was cheap, or so on. Of course, the first player shouldn't do anything that was against the second player's roster instructions. Here Newmanistan mentions that Hannah Lee will pitch against Zwangzug, and here I take that into account in my roleplay.
Sports roleplaying is of all techs and none. No matter whether you're an intergalactic empire or an island microstate, once you take the field, you have the same chance of winning. You should be ready to handle losing to or winning against countries whose teams look very different from your own. (Note that this doesn't mean your country has to ICly recognize other techs, nor do you have to roleplay about them; you can RP a game just politely ignoring the other team's IC nuances if it's something that doesn't exist in your canon, or make a very funny RP out of selectively trying to cover it up.) Cassadaigua RPs with an all-female national team, but has no sentient ponies (unlike certain other successful baseball teams)!
Sports roleplaying has no "house style". For a variety of reasons, we're not part of the roleplay mentorship program, so there are no official people to go to who have "seniority." In particular, this means there's no "right" or "wrong" way to RP. Other than "if it looks like bad (ungrammatical/incoherent, etc.) writing in any context, it's probably not good writing here unless you've made it very obvious you're doing it deliberately." But nobody is going to demand you use overly purple prose; nobody has the right to declare "just because I've been around longer I'm a better writer than you." Many longtime and talented writers don't have English as their first language. RPer A might be respected and admired by RPer B, while RPer C might think A is pretentious to a fault. All are allowed to participate. I'd suggest that if you find a writer you admire, adapt whatever traits you like from their storytelling (humor/continuity denseness/emotion) while leaving behind what you don't (cynicism/inaccessibility/cheap melodrama), the same way for an amateur RPer as you would for a professional author! But hey, if you don't like my advice, the great thing is...you can ignore it.
Sports roleplaying has somewhat of a technical learning curve. There's no experience necessary to participate or roleplay! Just dive right into a signup thread by posting "I sign up" into something that looks like "Blah blah blah tournament--signup thread." However, hosting a tournament is significantly more demanding; if you begin a thread by saying "plz join my tournament
" without posting any information on what program you will use to scorinate, this is considered a sign of inexperience, sort of like posting a thread in International Incidents by saying "plz join my war and I n00kz u ." It is highly recommended that you participate in some tournaments first and get a feel for how sports work before you dive into scorinating and hosting! (On the other hand, you never need to host if you don't want; there are longtime, respected roleplayers who've never felt the need to try their hand at it.)
A common and powerful scorinator is xkoranate, which can generate results for over sixty sports, such as Olympic events. Go here to download it. This forum thread is an unofficial guide.
An older scorinator is NSFS3, which provides somewhat more flexibility in domestic league scheduling (for instance, if you want to run a baseball league with teams playing more games against opponents within their division than those from outside). It's no longer actively supported, but you can download it here. There's lots of discussion about scorinators in general here.
Sports roleplaying is mostly region-independent. For most of my NS career, I was a regional hermit. Now I've joined a region with one venerable past sports RPer (Errinundera) but few active ones. None of that has any impact on my ability to tell stories alongside other posters; I might get drawn in a group along countries from all over the place. However, there are a few regions that are particularly dedicated to sports RP; Atlantian Oceania, rushmore, and esportiva have long-running football tournaments. (Unfortunately, the "sports" tag is not very useful for finding sports-dedicated regions, in part because of the issue above; many people will slap it on their regions along with every other tag, without having an understanding of the forum's RPing culture.) While I'm not part of these regions, many creative and clever RPers are there, ready to welcome newcomers.
Sports roleplaying has specific rules for puppets. Just as you might want to switch things up and have one country for capitalist roleplaying and another for communist shenanigans, you might want to have one account for an attack-minded team and another to explore defensive tactics. In some circumstances, you can enter multiple countries into the same tournament, but you must obey the rules stated in the original post of the signup thread. Those might be something like "two nations per user, and please declare which nations are yours," or "two nations per user if you've entered before, one nation if it's your first time," or "only one nation per user, no exceptions." Moderators do have authority to enforce clearly-defined rules against signing up undeclared puppets in the sports forum, and breaking these rules can get you in trouble with the hosts. When in doubt, read the signup thread carefully, and ask questions if need be!
Sports roleplaying can also be done independently. Not everything is an international competition! A lot of users enjoy scorinating your own national domestic leagues (like the English Premier League), roleplaying the results, and then posting them for all to share. You can also enter your football teams into competitions such as the UICA Champions' Cup (our version of the UEFA Champions' League). This is also a great way to get practice scorinating. Here is Zwangzug's most recent football season.
Sports roleplaying has many injokes and an offsite culture. Join us on IRC at #nssport on EsperNet (there's also a Discord, discord.gg/3BmvkAb, but I'm hardly ever there) to ask questions and learn more! You can go to this Mibbit webclient, choose "EsperNet" from the dropdown list on top, choose a nickname (usually your NS account name or a variant), and then choose #nssport for the channel to join.
Sports roleplaying has a rich history whose surface I've just scratched. One of my proudest hours on NS was archiving data from the Jolt outage to now and pestering others to do the same, and while I'm glad to say that most of that was ultimately not necessary thanks to broader efforts, there's still a lot more to explore. If you'd like to see some highlights I've gathered for previous expos, check out (The First) Ten Years Of Football History and Jolt Flashbacks. (Note: this NSWiki archive may be a replacement for some of the broken links, but not all. Sorry!)
I hope this has helped dispel some of the confusion some of you might face, or open up a new frontier to those who were not familiar with this domain. Thanks for reading, I'll take questions, and I hope to see you on the playing field!
At a very high level, sports RP consists of someone or someones (the "host(s)") using a computer program to randomly generate the results of a sports event between competing teams. Then, the participating countries roleplay the event, by writing posts telling stories based on what happened.
I'll be using examples based on a tournament I recently competed in World Baseball Classic 40. Here, the host, Cassadaigua, posts the results of a game. (This is from the championship series, so there are only two teams remaining; usually, there are many more teams participating.) Afterwards, Super-Llamaland, one of the participants, posts a roleplay in response. As you can see, this is a news article that looks like rather traditional sports journalism. But the final series also included character-based RP, via a private conversation between characters, and even poetry that had little to do with the tournament itself. This, in a nutshell, is the way that tournaments run. So while we call it "sports roleplaying," I'll be covering the "roleplaying" part first, and then move on to deal with the "sports" nuances!
Sports roleplaying is open-ended. Almost any style of writing can be effectively transferred into a sports roleplay. Many traditional styles include news reports that follow a team (or individual)'s progress, whether that be newspaper articles, blog posts, transcripts of radio or television broadcasts, social media postings, or the like. Other ways to report on a team include third-person narratives writing about the daily lives of the players on the team, the managers, or loyal fans. This story by Tenburg, a relatively new roleplayer, is a great example of roleplaying the game itself without relying on a "media" output.
Sports roleplaying also doesn't have to be about sports. Many users choose to write about day-to-day life in their country or national drama on a grand scale, interweaving various plotlines or just mixing things up to keep themselves fresh. Here, Cassadaigua updates us on the protest situation in the host nation, while calling back to some roleplays from other sports.
Sports roleplaying is a great way to be interactive, if you so choose. You can choose to roleplay only the game at hand, but you can also respond to other players' posts, whether or not you're playing against them. Like in other subforums, it's important not to do anything drastic to other countries without their permission (more on this below), but as a good rule of thumb, you have control over your own characters within your own nation, and reacting to other people's posts can lead to some good back-and-forth dynamics. If you want to plot out long-term events, again, just like in other subforums, it helps to have a good OOC relationship with other users and to plan ahead via telegram or IRC. Here, Newmanistan writes an article responding to Cassadaigua's protest situation above, while still not godmodding by controlling the narrative about what's going on in Cassadaigua beyond what's previously been roleplayed.
Sports roleplaying has a strong internal canon. The World Cup of association football/soccer dates back to 2003 (before the Jolt forums!) and records are still kept of who won! If you love writing factbooks or wikis, making callbacks to your or others' old RP characters, and tallying up statistics of heroes gone by, you might enjoy the many continuity nods to be found on display. Here, Schiltzberg analyzes the history of a previous baseball tournament. (On the other hand, if this doesn't appeal to you, theres's nothing forcing you to RP in a specific style; just don't be alarmed when others do.)
So that's a little bit about the roleplaying side; what can we say about the sporting touches?
Sports roleplaying is ultimately based on random numbers. No matter how simple or complex, every scorinator (results generating program) should have some measure of arbitrariness, thus providing some chance, no matter how small, for the world's greatest underdogs to topple the number-one seed. Ultimately, everything is a function of luck, so as much as teams may crow about their success IC, OOC success is no true badge of honor, nor should OOC lack of success be a cause for disappointment.
Sports roleplaying very often includes a rank component. Usually in tournaments that are held over and over again (like the World Baseball Classic or the World Cup), the results of the last few tournaments are used to give teams that did well in those high ranks the next time, and thus make them more likely to win in the future. This lends a degree of realism to the results, since real sports competitions have stronger and weaker teams in the rankings. It also means that new entrants will generally have a harder time doing well right away. (Again, teams old and new alike are usually advised to look for the fun in roleplaying as a goal, rather than immediate success!)
In the last WBC, the numbers after the teams' names indicate their starting rank (1 is best). Super-Llamaland, who wound up winning, were fourth seeds. Tenburg, who were unranked, made it to the quarterfinals.
Some events don't work on this scheme. The Olympics, for instance, usually have a system where you can give each athletes a ranking between 0 and 100, with an average of 50 per delegation. So a country like Zwangzug's with great bikers but bad shooters can choose what they want to be ranked highly in, and so can every other nation. It doesn't matter if you've never participated before!
Sports roleplaying frequently includes bonuses for roleplayers. It's certainly not a determinant of success, and random numbers will always have the last word, but posting roleplays will often give you a small boost to your rank, be you a new or established user. So all things being equal, being an active participant may sometimes indirectly contribute to in-character victories.
Sports roleplaying encourages you to give other users material to build on. Many of the most-roleplayed sports (like football and baseball) are team sports. To participate in the tournaments, all you need to do is post in a signup thread saying something like "we sign up!" (Again, more on this later.) However, it's easier to roleplay with a country that gives a list of the players on its team, rather than saying "We beat Zwangzug 3-1, they scored one run and their pitcher pitch badly." Therefore, it's highly encouraged to post a roster, or list of your players. For larger tournaments like the World Cup, there will be a separate thread for this; for smaller tournaments like the World Baseball Classic, this will take place in the main roleplaying thread. Here's a roster from Mount Pleasant.
Along with the roster, you're also encouraged to post a list of what your opponent can and can't do if they roleplay first. Can they pick which of your players scored? Can they roleplay that one of your players got injured, or thrown out of the game for bad behavior? Can they stretch the laws of physics or narrative credulity? Setting these guidelines allows for better cooperative roleplay.
You don't need to be an expert on the sport to put down a list of names; usually, other users will have styles that you can emulate (though completely copy-pasting styles is frowned upon). Similarly, you don't need to be very knowledgeable about the sport to roleplay it itself! Character-based roleplays are always a good jumping-off point.
When bonuses for roleplaying are in effect, rosters usually count towards this; hosts appreciate giving other teams something to work with.
Sports roleplaying operates on the principle of first-come, first-serve. If one player posts a roleplay about the game, then the second player shouldn't contradict it in their RP. They can, however, suggest that maybe the referee's call was questionable, or that one of the goals was cheap, or so on. Of course, the first player shouldn't do anything that was against the second player's roster instructions. Here Newmanistan mentions that Hannah Lee will pitch against Zwangzug, and here I take that into account in my roleplay.
Sports roleplaying is of all techs and none. No matter whether you're an intergalactic empire or an island microstate, once you take the field, you have the same chance of winning. You should be ready to handle losing to or winning against countries whose teams look very different from your own. (Note that this doesn't mean your country has to ICly recognize other techs, nor do you have to roleplay about them; you can RP a game just politely ignoring the other team's IC nuances if it's something that doesn't exist in your canon, or make a very funny RP out of selectively trying to cover it up.) Cassadaigua RPs with an all-female national team, but has no sentient ponies (unlike certain other successful baseball teams)!
Sports roleplaying has no "house style". For a variety of reasons, we're not part of the roleplay mentorship program, so there are no official people to go to who have "seniority." In particular, this means there's no "right" or "wrong" way to RP. Other than "if it looks like bad (ungrammatical/incoherent, etc.) writing in any context, it's probably not good writing here unless you've made it very obvious you're doing it deliberately." But nobody is going to demand you use overly purple prose; nobody has the right to declare "just because I've been around longer I'm a better writer than you." Many longtime and talented writers don't have English as their first language. RPer A might be respected and admired by RPer B, while RPer C might think A is pretentious to a fault. All are allowed to participate. I'd suggest that if you find a writer you admire, adapt whatever traits you like from their storytelling (humor/continuity denseness/emotion) while leaving behind what you don't (cynicism/inaccessibility/cheap melodrama), the same way for an amateur RPer as you would for a professional author! But hey, if you don't like my advice, the great thing is...you can ignore it.
Sports roleplaying has somewhat of a technical learning curve. There's no experience necessary to participate or roleplay! Just dive right into a signup thread by posting "I sign up" into something that looks like "Blah blah blah tournament--signup thread." However, hosting a tournament is significantly more demanding; if you begin a thread by saying "plz join my tournament
" without posting any information on what program you will use to scorinate, this is considered a sign of inexperience, sort of like posting a thread in International Incidents by saying "plz join my war and I n00kz u ." It is highly recommended that you participate in some tournaments first and get a feel for how sports work before you dive into scorinating and hosting! (On the other hand, you never need to host if you don't want; there are longtime, respected roleplayers who've never felt the need to try their hand at it.)A common and powerful scorinator is xkoranate, which can generate results for over sixty sports, such as Olympic events. Go here to download it. This forum thread is an unofficial guide.
An older scorinator is NSFS3, which provides somewhat more flexibility in domestic league scheduling (for instance, if you want to run a baseball league with teams playing more games against opponents within their division than those from outside). It's no longer actively supported, but you can download it here. There's lots of discussion about scorinators in general here.
Sports roleplaying is mostly region-independent. For most of my NS career, I was a regional hermit. Now I've joined a region with one venerable past sports RPer (Errinundera) but few active ones. None of that has any impact on my ability to tell stories alongside other posters; I might get drawn in a group along countries from all over the place. However, there are a few regions that are particularly dedicated to sports RP; Atlantian Oceania, rushmore, and esportiva have long-running football tournaments. (Unfortunately, the "sports" tag is not very useful for finding sports-dedicated regions, in part because of the issue above; many people will slap it on their regions along with every other tag, without having an understanding of the forum's RPing culture.) While I'm not part of these regions, many creative and clever RPers are there, ready to welcome newcomers.
Sports roleplaying has specific rules for puppets. Just as you might want to switch things up and have one country for capitalist roleplaying and another for communist shenanigans, you might want to have one account for an attack-minded team and another to explore defensive tactics. In some circumstances, you can enter multiple countries into the same tournament, but you must obey the rules stated in the original post of the signup thread. Those might be something like "two nations per user, and please declare which nations are yours," or "two nations per user if you've entered before, one nation if it's your first time," or "only one nation per user, no exceptions." Moderators do have authority to enforce clearly-defined rules against signing up undeclared puppets in the sports forum, and breaking these rules can get you in trouble with the hosts. When in doubt, read the signup thread carefully, and ask questions if need be!
Sports roleplaying can also be done independently. Not everything is an international competition! A lot of users enjoy scorinating your own national domestic leagues (like the English Premier League), roleplaying the results, and then posting them for all to share. You can also enter your football teams into competitions such as the UICA Champions' Cup (our version of the UEFA Champions' League). This is also a great way to get practice scorinating. Here is Zwangzug's most recent football season.
Sports roleplaying has many injokes and an offsite culture. Join us on IRC at #nssport on EsperNet (there's also a Discord, discord.gg/3BmvkAb, but I'm hardly ever there) to ask questions and learn more! You can go to this Mibbit webclient, choose "EsperNet" from the dropdown list on top, choose a nickname (usually your NS account name or a variant), and then choose #nssport for the channel to join.
Sports roleplaying has a rich history whose surface I've just scratched. One of my proudest hours on NS was archiving data from the Jolt outage to now and pestering others to do the same, and while I'm glad to say that most of that was ultimately not necessary thanks to broader efforts, there's still a lot more to explore. If you'd like to see some highlights I've gathered for previous expos, check out (The First) Ten Years Of Football History and Jolt Flashbacks. (Note: this NSWiki archive may be a replacement for some of the broken links, but not all. Sorry!)
I hope this has helped dispel some of the confusion some of you might face, or open up a new frontier to those who were not familiar with this domain. Thanks for reading, I'll take questions, and I hope to see you on the playing field!
