Pros and cons on on-line gaming fora?

[Simon Smith]

What is it like trying to run a pencil-and-paper RPG in the various online
RPG fora?

Googling for 'online role playing' produces a selection of sites, but the
pencil-and-paper online sites all seem to be being flooded out by the
computer RPG-related stuff. I know there's supposed to be some good online
penciil-and-paper game sites out there somewhere.

As one example, http://www.giantitp.com (The Order of the Stick) has an
active D20 RPG area, and it's quite a fun comic too.

Would anyone who has played in them (or, like me, considered and rejected
playing in them) care to share their views on what they're like? What do
they do well, and what do they do badly? I believe someone (Mary?) may even
have posted links to a couple of them, but I can't even remember enough
details for a search to find that post again.

I believe most of these fora are based on PHPbb type setups - i.e. web
forums of one form or another, with some custom code for things like
die-rolling tools, a whiteboard facility and other useful stuff. Plus a load
of (to me) unwanted dreck, such as avatars, lack of threading and the other
common weaknesses of web-based chat fora.



Reason I ask is because I'm looking at trying an on-line RPG using a Wiki
format instead, because I think this might work better. As I'm mooting a
Wiki, it should be plain that I consider 'cheating' by trying to sneakily
edit old posts to be a non-issue. This is likely to involve me doing a
certain amount of customising to whatever Wiki I decide to use, however.

But there are some features of the existing fora - such as a whiteboard
facility - that look like they might be useful. Or are they in practice
just gimmicks?

One Wiki approach which looked promising is at http://kevan.org/rpgwiki

See also the related the Lexicon RPG of Neel Krishnaswami, which I
always thought looked fascinating, and would love to play . . .
sometime.

Google cache of Lexicon here - this link should be all on one line:
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:t346ZYXVzy4J:www.20by20room.com/2003/11/lexicon_an_rpg.html+http://www.20by20room.com/2003/11/lexicon_an_rpg.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk&ie=UTF-8



Thanks for any comments.

[Nicole Massey]

Post by Simon Smith
What is it like trying to run a pencil-and-paper RPG in the various online
RPG fora?
Googling for 'online role playing' produces a selection of sites, but the
pencil-and-paper online sites all seem to be being flooded out by the
computer RPG-related stuff. I know there's supposed to be some good online
penciil-and-paper game sites out there somewhere.
As one example, http://www.giantitp.com (The Order of the Stick) has an
active D20 RPG area, and it's quite a fun comic too.
Would anyone who has played in them (or, like me, considered and rejected
playing in them) care to share their views on what they're like? What do
they do well, and what do they do badly? I believe someone (Mary?) may even
have posted links to a couple of them, but I can't even remember enough
details for a search to find that post again.
I believe most of these fora are based on PHPbb type setups - i.e. web
forums of one form or another, with some custom code for things like
die-rolling tools, a whiteboard facility and other useful stuff. Plus a load
of (to me) unwanted dreck, such as avatars, lack of threading and the other
common weaknesses of web-based chat fora.
Reason I ask is because I'm looking at trying an on-line RPG using a Wiki
format instead, because I think this might work better. As I'm mooting a
Wiki, it should be plain that I consider 'cheating' by trying to sneakily
edit old posts to be a non-issue. This is likely to involve me doing a
certain amount of customising to whatever Wiki I decide to use, however.
But there are some features of the existing fora - such as a whiteboard
facility - that look like they might be useful. Or are they in practice
just gimmicks?
One Wiki approach which looked promising is at http://kevan.org/rpgwiki
See also the related the Lexicon RPG of Neel Krishnaswami, which I
always thought looked fascinating, and would love to play . . .
sometime.
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:t346ZYXVzy4J:www.20by20room.com/2003/11/lexicon_an_rpg.html+http://www.20by20room.com/2003/11/lexicon_an_rpg.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk&ie=UTF-8
Thanks for any comments.
--
Simon Smith
When emailing me, please use my preferred email address, which is on my web
site at http://www.simon-smith.org

I've never played a truly pencil and paper system online, but I've both
played and written systems for online play that were fairly close to pencil
and paper systems -- no computer assisted stuff besides rolling dice.

The benefits of playing online are interesting. They break down into two
basic categories, social and mechanical.

First, the mechanical. Die rolling becomes easier when you can have a
computer roll your dice for you. And you can get some rather odd dice rolled
too. Also, you can actually have an IM window open with the referee so that
you can "pass notes" to the referee without anyone knowing it. This
eliminates the suspicion inherent in passing a note across the table. This
also means that the host can have a messy house, obnoxious roomates or
children, and live in the middle of Arkansas without too much problem.

The social aspects are far more profound. If you have several referees, you
can easily set up a tavern environment, a web based forum, and private chat
rooms for the game groups, and actually set some type of meta-game in the
environment. This takes the interaction levels to great heights, and you can
have faction, allies, and neutral resource groups involved that create a
much more dynamic environment where you have far more resources. It also
means that a tourney or adventure always has a large contingent of
possible players.

These interactions are not to be minimized, as the multiplayer environment
really adds a new dimension to games. Want two parties to go for the same
goal? All you need is two referees and a common adventure, and some
communication, via IM, between the referees, and you can actually have this
kind of adventure quite easily. (I've got an incomplete tournament dungeon
that can have up to six different teams going for the same prize at once
with the steps they take affecting the other teams and how they progress.
This kind of scale is hard to do outside of convention environments, and
even then, communication between referees is problematic.

[Keran]

Post by Simon Smith
What is it like trying to run a pencil-and-paper RPG in the various online
RPG fora?

I've never played anywhere but online.

I got my start playing on a message board, but we weren't playing an
actual pen-and-paper RPG. We were doing freeform
story-writing/roleplaying. Sometimes we went into chat to play a
scene that had a lot of dialogue in it, in order to speed up the pace.

I've seen people write very long and very elaborate cooperative
stories successfully. The pace tends to be fairly slow and one has to
be prepared to write around someone who just drops out, but it can be
done.

Way back in the Tertiary, before the new Internet, Compuserve's RPG
forum had numerous message-based games. I didn't follow them closely,
but I supposed some of them must have worked. However, I've never
been acquainted up close with a message-based RPG (as opposed to
cooperative story-writing) where the campaign ran to completion.
Typical RPG assumptions putting all resolution authority in the hands
of the GM slow the pace down even further than it is in collaborative
story-writing. In a collaborative story the writer of a character
often has a lot of say about what happens to that character, and about
some parts of the setting, and can sometimes pose an action and
resolve in one post; in an RPG the resolution is typically referred to
the GM, and this means that practically everything, no matter how
small, involves turnaround time.

I might take up collaborative story-writing again, but playing an RPG
on a message-board or by email is out. They drag to the point where
they don't work.

I've done the bulk of my roleplaying in chat. I started out playing
in conference on one of the old, now-vanished online services
(Delphi).

I've played on IRC. IRC cramps my style, though I don't regard it as
intolerable. IRC dice code tends to be functional but inelegant, and
if it isn't built into the server you often need to run a bot. The
big annoyance is that IRC truncates messages at somewhere around 200+
characters (I don't remember if it's 256; I have the odd memory that
it might be fewer than that), and the coding that's possible with IRC
doesn't seem to include any mechanism for cleaning up the results
neatly (that I noticed in the time I gave the problem, anyway): I
tried to write something better than the garden-variety cut script,
and improved on it, but never achieved the results I wanted.

I much prefer to play on a MUSH, which is where I'm running my current
campaign. I have three players, a room to play in that's always
there, and I wrote fast and easy dice code for my homebrew. The MUSH
buffer limit is 1024 characters, which is too long for me to need to
worry about truncated messages, and MUSH gives me more flexibility in
formatting.

It's a lot slower typing at each other than talking, obviously, and it
took me a great while to figure out how to run combat satisfactorily
in the medium, because the bandwidth crunch makes certain tabletop
practices cumbersome. However, I have more time to think, can write
more descriptively than I can talk, and we don't have any sensory
input interfering with the portrayal of characters unlike ourselves.
Also, I have logs of everything that happened. We've probably played
a bit more than three dozen sessions in the current campaign. Unlike
message-based RPGs, my chat-based campaigns usually do run to
completion.

There are some non-tabletop styles that are common online. There are
freeform RP groups, most often based around a fantasy tavern, that run
on IRC and Web chat. Since they don't have GMs, they have a somewhat
different culture.

Then there's the roleplaying that goes on in MUSHes, MUCKs, MOOs, and
the like. I run tabletop-style on a MUSH, but the commoner form of
MU* RP involves using the MU*'s text-based
virtual-reality-constructing ability to make a setting, in which
people will create characters who interact whenever the players happen
to be connected rather than, say, on a weekly schedule. Sometimes
they code in a system to resolve conflicts -- homegrown, World of
Darkness, and I've even seen GURPS; sometimes the RP is consent-based
(meaning, basically, 'defender resolves').

I've done a fair amount of freeforming and MUSH RP, but I prefer
tabletop for various reasons. The most important of these is that,
lacking a GM, the world is usually much blurrier in these styles than
it is in tabletop RP -- you have multiple people resolving, deciding
what's happening, deciding what's in the setting -- sometimes without
their being able to communicate with each other, or sometimes without
having visions of the setting that are in accord. Also, it's
necessary to spend more time thinking about OOC elements because
there's no one dedicated to arranging play for you -- you have to see
to your own spotlight time and your own plots.

Then there is the roleplaying that's based around fan-fiction writing,
and the participants in which are much more likely to be female than
male. Not being all that interested in fan fiction, I haven't done
any of this; the culture, again, differs significantly from tabletop,
and also from the other styles I've mentioned.

GMless RP cultures ... well. There's no one who has the authority to
say, "No, you did /not/ jump 18 feet in the air to land on the roof!"
or to rule that someone is simply too inept to join the group. So the
sanctions for being a munchkin/twink/zippy/whatever tend to be social;
there tend to be strong, markers for who's in and who's out.
Sometimes these make sense, and sometimes they're arbitrary or even
counterproductive.

<snip>

Post by Simon Smith
Reason I ask is because I'm looking at trying an on-line RPG using a Wiki
format instead, because I think this might work better. As I'm mooting a
Wiki, it should be plain that I consider 'cheating' by trying to sneakily
edit old posts to be a non-issue. This is likely to involve me doing a
certain amount of customising to whatever Wiki I decide to use, however.

We don't actually play on a wiki, but I use ProjectForum
http://www.projectforum.com to keep my campaign notes in order, and to
show players the maps, timeline, logs, etc. I've told them that the
notes may have spoilers, but the maps, timeline, and logs are safe.
ProjectForum setup is painless.

I considered using Fantasy Ground for combat if I needed it, but we
don't run combat often, and the last combat session I ran worked
perfectly well just with the map of the area up in ProjectForum, with
my custom dice code, and with my practice of handling the entire
mechanical interaction myself, so we don't have to waste any precious
keystrokes talking about the modifiers or the dice syntax. (Since
typing is much slower than talking, OOC chatter about mechanics
interrupts IC thinking for much longer than it would face to face, and
I dealt with this by eliminating it entirely. Also, my homebrew is
simple, intentionally designed to have a low handling time even
without custom dice code.)

There's still the possibility that I may want something like Fantasy
Ground for more complicated combat, but I think that before I tried
that I'd make a grid to overlay my Illustrator maps, and see if that
sufficed.

[Beowulf Bolt]

Simon Smith wrote:
[re: online gaming fora]

Post by Simon Smith
Would anyone who has played in them (or, like me, considered and
rejected playing in them) care to share their views on what they're
like? What do they do well, and what do they do badly? I believe
someone (Mary?) may even have posted links to a couple of them, but I
can't even remember enough details for a search to find that post
again.

I've been playing in a Cthulhu-based forum
(http://www.callofcthulhu.org.uk/) for about a year or so now. The
biggest lessons I've learned from this are;

- the pace of advancement is very slow. Most participants make only
about 3-4 posts per week, and the need to wait to hear how other
people or the GM are responding to your actions means that it takes
considerably longer to get anywhere. In the one campaign I'm still
active in, we've spent more than 1000 posts and about one full
year real-time playing out the events of a *single* day (a hectic
one, granted). And that day isn't done yet, and probably will not
be for several more months real-time.

In a face-to-face campaign, these events would have filled two,
*maybe* three 4-hour sessions. Thus you are looking at taking
about a month (real-time) to accomplish what you could in a single
hour or so of a face-to-face campaign. (Thus I feel that people
running the equivalent of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign
online, frex, are nuts.)

(It is possible that this can be sped up if all participants are
willing to give up some authorial privileges to allow the GM or
other players to extrapolate ones responses or the responses of
NPCs to ones actions, but I haven't really seen any successful
implementation of this in any of the hosted campaigns.)

- you've got to be *very* careful about who you allow into a campaign
(or from a player's perspective, which campaigns you join). The
fora equivalent of a newsgroup troll or immature player can really
ruin things for everyone. (And to give an example of the
opposite point of view, the first campaign I joined crashed-and-
burned after it became clear that the GM was trying to recreate
a Gamera movie, and couldn't deal with variations from what the
characters in the film attempted.)

- there's nothing like watching the campaign grind to a halt for a
week or so because of the unexpected vacation plans of a particular
player, or because someone got too busy to post for a few days.
Maintaining plot momentum is very difficult.

- perhaps for all of the above reasons, participation is *extremely*
flaky. I've seen two campaigns die because the GM disappeared
without a word, and the turnover rate is atrocious. Players
disappear constantly without notice. GMs are thus forced to deal
with either continually slotting in-and-out new characters, or
trying to find replacement players for existing characters and then
worrying about radical changes in tone. It must be very tempting
to have key NPCs remain under GM control, but that in itself is
prone to abuse (railroading) in my experience.

(Aside from online fora, I've also dabbled with chat-based online
games and PBeM ones, but never had a successful experience in either
because of similar issues. As none of my trials really ever got off the
ground, however, it is quite possible my experiences with these media
are idiosyncratic.)

On the other hand, it *is* possible to have a reasonably-decent time,
provided (as with a face-to-face game) you've got the right combination
of players and GM. Even so, the slow pace means that I cannot imagine
even the best of online campaigns rivalling a decent face-to-face one.
Would a wiki-based one be any different? I don't know.

If you do go ahead, I wish you all the best and can provide only one
other bit of advice. If you are looking for an online random number
generator, I'd recommend the Invisible Castle
(http://www.invisiblecastle.com/). It is a robust generator that keeps
track of rolls made for a particular character, so you can watch for
signs of cheating if such concerns you.

Cheers,
Biff

[Mary K. Kuhner]

I have never played on an interactive forum, but I've played by
email.

Biff is dead right about response time. The successful games
I've seen have had *very* few players, and those players have
to be very committed, or it slows down to the point of expiration
quickly. I concluded after a while that the optimal number of
players was one, though of course that's a prejudice of mine
anyway. Certainly not more than about four.

The participants should love to write, and write well. You can
be a fun tabletop participant with no flair for dialog or
description, but it doesn't work as well in PBeM. The GM
in particular had better be up for writing a *lot*.

It's a better medium for political games than for combat games,
Conversations can work well, especially if you accept that the
dialog should not be too realistic: instead of having each
character speak a line or two and wait for the next, you can
have little speeches and get a lot further.

I've been in PBeM games with excellent moments, the equal of
tabletop. But they are frightfully fragile.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Chuk Goodin]

Post by Simon Smith
What is it like trying to run a pencil-and-paper RPG in the various online
RPG fora?
Googling for 'online role playing' produces a selection of sites, but the
pencil-and-paper online sites all seem to be being flooded out by the
computer RPG-related stuff. I know there's supposed to be some good online
penciil-and-paper game sites out there somewhere.
As one example, http://www.giantitp.com (The Order of the Stick) has an
active D20 RPG area, and it's quite a fun comic too.

RPG.net has a forum devoted to all types of PbP (play-by-post) games. I've
played a few on there, several through email, and a few through a site
called Rondak's Portal -- it is a messageboard type system with features
for maps, character sheets, dice rolling, chat, etc. Haven't used that
last one for a few years now.

Post by Simon Smith
Would anyone who has played in them (or, like me, considered and rejected
playing in them) care to share their views on what they're like? What do
they do well, and what do they do badly? I believe someone (Mary?) may even
have posted links to a couple of them, but I can't even remember enough
details for a search to find that post again.

I will add more on this later.

[Chuk Goodin]

Post by Chuk Goodin

Post by Simon Smith
Would anyone who has played in them (or, like me, considered and rejected
playing in them) care to share their views on what they're like? What do
they do well, and what do they do badly? I believe someone (Mary?) may even
have posted links to a couple of them, but I can't even remember enough
details for a search to find that post again.

I will add more on this later.

It's later now. I find others have made many of the comments I would make
(slow pace of games, frequent drop outs and not finishing, good
characterization and writing possible). I have also played in a wiki based
game (a cross between 70's cop TV shows and Star Wars called JediCops,
it's here http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dev/jedicops/wiki.cgi?JediCopsHQ if
anyone wants to see how it looks now), which was interesting and led to a
much nicer "finished" form. Looking at the page now doesn't really give a
feel for what it was like "in play", I'd definitely try it again if a good
game came up.