Slobbovia - Slobbovia As A Role-Playing Game and As A Shared World

Slobbovia As A Role-Playing Game and As A Shared World

As a complex and involved take on the concept of "King of the Hill," the original Venturer Scout version of Slobbovia anticipated by a fair number of years many live action role-playing games. After adaptation to the Diplomacy framework, but with the continued emphasis on the players' characters as opposed to the countries they represented, Slobbovia can easily be viewed as a role-playing game, and as such preceded Dungeons & Dragons by several years, though it had little impact in the general gaming world by comparison to D&D.

It also was an example of the "shared world" format before it became popular amongst writers in science fiction and fantasy. The unwritten but usually respected rule was that a player could borrow other players' characters, but never kill them. Previously published stories were to be accepted as "fact," although reinterpretation of events was allowed. (e.g. When one player "sank" another's capitol beneath the sea, the owning player wrote a story about a mass-hallucination.) Putting another player's character in a situation that was inconsistent with the nature of that character was considered suspect, but the clever writer would not only go with the flow, but turn it to his advantage. This was at the very core of being "strakhful", and always earned the player great respect if he could pull it off.