|
Ominous Jazz posted:Is there a discord for trad games goons? Also, is there a superhero rpg thread? There's like three discords? I believe they are mortal enemies of one another? None are "official" and I always caution folks not to think otherwise, because of course there is inevitably drama and they are petty kingdoms in and of themselves etc. etc. I'm sure someone from each of them can send you an invite via PMs. Plutonis posted:Man it's really depressing how the recruitment thread went from one page in 12 days to one page in nine months. I guess people are too burned out on PBP but there aren't that many recruits for roll20 or foundry stuff either on it...? Yeah. Obviously the total population of TG has declined a lot; people seem more interested in playing on VTTs/discord than here, and I'm not sure if folks feel like recruiting for games here works or what. Maybe there is burnout too. I wish there was a lot more activity. I'm not helping much, I don't run or play any RPGs right now, so it's hard for me to blame anyone.
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2022 20:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 23:51 |
|
|
I could stand to make more enemies
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2022 21:25
|
|
|
The fact that any game group started here seems to end in record time may also be a factor.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2022 23:03
|
|
|
PBP dead, so what
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2022 23:34
|
|
|
I think PBP has a notoriously high failure rate just in general.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2022 23:37
|
|
|
Colonel Cool posted:I think PBP has a notoriously high failure rate just in general. Yeah, most PbP I've been involved in has eventually petered out without any resolution because of the enforced slow pacing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 00:28
|
|
|
Yup! I played a lot of PbP back in the day and really only one game went all the way to a proper "conclusion" out of dozens that didn't. I blame the use of systems that weren't good matches, a tendency to stop paying attention if a thread slowed to less than one post a day, people who never thought "will I be around or busy in three months when this game is on its second encounter", and various other factors. I'm still not totally burnt on the idea, though. I think good system, players who have done PbP before and know what's expected, and honesty can combo into an enjoyable time even if the game isn't likely to run for years.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 00:32
|
|
|
What would folks pitch as the "ideal" system to use for PbP, out of the ones they've encountered? Assuming no or minimal house ruling.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 00:36
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:There's like three discords? I believe they are mortal enemies of one another? None are "official" and I always caution folks not to think otherwise, because of course there is inevitably drama and they are petty kingdoms in and of themselves etc. etc. Goon on goon violence
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 00:37
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:What would folks pitch as the "ideal" system to use for PbP, out of the ones they've encountered? Assuming no or minimal house ruling. Moldvay Basic style D&D. I did a full three year campaign with it and the exploration turn is a perfect daily chunk of RPGing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 03:01
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:What would folks pitch as the "ideal" system to use for PbP, out of the ones they've encountered? Assuming no or minimal house ruling. It's certainly not ideal for every game, but Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine is specifically designed to work well for PbP. The main reasons for that are firstly that it's diceless, and secondly, you're only allowed a certain amount of 'meaningful' actions per scene. So it's real easy to do your two actions as two posts and then you fade into the background or do smaller reaction posts, and then the scene's up and you move on once everyone's done their meaningful actions.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 03:44
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:What would folks pitch as the "ideal" system to use for PbP, out of the ones they've encountered? Assuming no or minimal house ruling. Torchbearer. Most of Burning Wheel, but you'd pretty obviously want to keep a hand hovering over the granularity dial. A bunch of the more mechanically rigid Japanese-style games. Really, I think what you want is a game that has a pretty rigid structure so people know exactly what they're doing, mechanically, at all times. It's not that people can't write out role-playing, players actually have way more time than normal and can have multiple drafts, it's that every interaction between participants takes much longer due to the delay. If you have a dedicated turn structure, then it plays a lot like boardgames through the mail but with a significantly strengthened fictional component. Hence why I thought of Torchbearer and its overt turn structure where things are discreet chunks for much of the times instead of back and forth.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 04:28
|
|
|
I think PDQ has worked pretty well here in the past. A lot of "god games" ran for a long time. It has significant weaknesses as a game mechanism, but you can resolve a conflict in not too many turns, character sheets are pretty simple, and there's a lot of wiggle room for exactly how narrow or broad you allow characteristics to be. I think it's kinda old now and has been supplanted in the hobby by newer systems?
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 05:25
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Yeah, most PbP I've been involved in has eventually petered out without any resolution because of the enforced slow pacing. Eventually somebody just ghosts the game, often the GM it seems like.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 05:44
|
|
|
No system or gimmick is going to fix PBP. You build a group through relationships, shared commitment, and trust. Play the numbers and pray you beat the odds, or buckle up and do the work.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 11:14
|
|
|
tokenbrownguy posted:No system or gimmick is going to fix PBP. You build a group through relationships, shared commitment, and trust. This is also a big part of why PBPs have been hit as hard as they have been by Discord. When you'd open your average Fate PBP, you were for the most part just opening it for your dozen friends in the Fate PBP community. If any other random goons applied, well, it was time to either incorporate them into that friend group or deal with how awkward it is to have a random stranger around. If you're running a PBP on Discord, you can just link directly to that friend group and you don't have to deal with fully public recruitment.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 15:04
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:This is also a big part of why PBPs have been hit as hard as they have been by Discord. When you'd open your average Fate PBP, you were for the most part just opening it for your dozen friends in the Fate PBP community. If any other random goons applied, well, it was time to either incorporate them into that friend group or deal with how awkward it is to have a random stranger around. If you're running a PBP on Discord, you can just link directly to that friend group and you don't have to deal with fully public recruitment. I'm confused, if it was before discord and they didn't want to deal with strangers joining in wouldn't they have just made a private group for their friends in any of the other numerous chat clients and social media options predating discord?
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 18:38
|
|
|
FirstAidKite posted:I'm confused, if it was before discord and they didn't want to deal with strangers joining in wouldn't they have just made a private group for their friends in any of the other numerous chat clients and social media options predating discord? If you wanted to do something vaguely real-time, sure. But if you want to set up a proper play-by-post, what are you going to do? Make a whole forum that people will forget about because that pbp is the only thing there? No, you make a few high-effort threads on an RPG site and deal with having a bunch of randos in that community also looking at it. Having that kind of private social space was still important in those days (shout out to my fellow #persona nerds), but it isn't suited to some game types.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 18:54
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:If you wanted to do something vaguely real-time, sure. But if you want to set up a proper play-by-post, what are you going to do? Skype chat
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 19:24
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:What would folks pitch as the "ideal" system to use for PbP, out of the ones they've encountered? Assuming no or minimal house ruling.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2022 19:26
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:If you wanted to do something vaguely real-time, sure. But if you want to set up a proper play-by-post, what are you going to do?
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 16:33
|
|
|
Splicer posted:Private IRC channel? IRC channels don't let you see the backlog of posts that happened while you were offline. Skype chat would, I guess, but Skype tended to be used for when you wanted to do voice games instead and its chat was pretty bad. Discord does have the edge of offering free voice channels, text logs that are easy-to-parse, can be separated out into ooc and ic chat, general chat, and filed under various categories, custom emojis, fairly easy-to-use special formatting like italics and bolding and such.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 16:44
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:IRC channels don't let you see the backlog of posts that happened while you were offline. Skype chat would, I guess, but Skype tended to be used for when you wanted to do voice games instead and its chat was pretty bad. Yeah but the conversation isn't about whether discord is better, it's about what would have been used before discord was a thing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 16:58
|
|
|
There's a huge disconnect between what people want/wish RP could deliver and what it actually does. I think that's the only explanation for the number of abandoned games and general RP ads everywhere online where it's a thing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 17:38
|
|
|
hyphz posted:There's a huge disconnect between what people want/wish RP could deliver and what it actually does. I think that's the only explanation for the number of abandoned games and general RP ads everywhere online where it's a thing. God drat IMAX projector.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 17:39
|
|
|
FirstAidKite posted:Yeah but the conversation isn't about whether discord is better, it's about what would have been used before discord was a thing. In theory you could use Skype chat. Did anyone do that in practice?
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 17:41
|
|
|
FirstAidKite posted:Yeah but the conversation isn't about whether discord is better, it's about what would have been used before discord was a thing. As someone who was there... I mean, I would have given it a try if a friend wanted to, but it's Skype. It'd be like trying to run a full game in Steam's group chat, it'd feel wrong.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 17:45
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:In theory you could use Skype chat. Did anyone do that in practice? Yes Anecdotal but at least 4 or 5 separate groups I knew of (run by different unrelated GMs) were doing stuff through skype, and at least 1 person who was using a facebook group. It wasn't ideal but they did it. I imagine anyone looking to do a private game between friends who didn't want any possible public strangers getting involved would either have just used stuff like skype or just made it clear in the public group that it's for a specific set of people. Discord has made all of this easier but I can't imagine a situation where a stranger joining in on what was meant to be a private or closed game couldn't have been easily fixed through the gm just being clear that it's a game for certain people only or just moving to a small private group to avoid the situation altogether.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 18:03
|
|
|
FirstAidKite posted:Yes Okay well, I took Lurks to be referring both to how it's easier to recruit from friend groups in Discord channels than it is to go through the involved application process SA's PbP recruitment threads often demanded, and Discord is more convenient in every other way for both voice and text RPing than anything that came before that. I don't see how any of this is contradicting that. I used a combination of IRC and archiving RP sessions on a private Steam Group forum once, and it was alright because it was before roll20 existed and made reading text logs more accessible. Still, Discord combines all the benefits of every prior option at the cost of everything being more dispersed and private.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 18:32
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:God drat IMAX projector. I mean, yes, a lot of my drama was caused by expecting something from either RP or participation in RP groups that it couldn't deliver, but that doesn't mean I can't see it in others. The most obvious is that almost any RP that starts with "an RP/game in which we are..." will be dead in a week or less.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 19:06
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:Okay well, I took Lurks to be referring both to how it's easier to recruit from friend groups in Discord channels than it is to go through the involved application process SA's PbP recruitment threads often demanded, and Discord is more convenient in every other way for both voice and text RPing than anything that came before that. I don't see how any of this is contradicting that. I used a combination of IRC and archiving RP sessions on a private Steam Group forum once, and it was alright because it was before roll20 existed and made reading text logs more accessible. Still, Discord combines all the benefits of every prior option at the cost of everything being more dispersed and private. Ok
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2022 22:23
|
|
|
hello thread, this is the poster once known as UberJew i hung out with lots of tg folks on synirc back in the day like six+ years ago and if any of them are still around and happen to check this thread and wanted to pm me or w/e i would love to hear where people landed and what they've gotten up to
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 08:19
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:If you wanted to do something vaguely real-time, sure. But if you want to set up a proper play-by-post, what are you going to do? Make a whole forum that people will forget about because that pbp is the only thing there? No, you make a few high-effort threads on an RPG site and deal with having a bunch of randos in that community also looking at it. Having that kind of private social space was still important in those days (shout out to my fellow #persona nerds), but it isn't suited to some game types. I can't remember the name of the site now but there used to be a forum dedicated to letting people host their PBP games on it. That was the whole of the site from what I remember. My interaction with it would have been around 2007-2008 as that's when my high school gaming group all went to college and we were going to attempt to keep a game going despite being at different schools. Didn't work out because our old GM was a flake.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 17:59
|
|
|
I played on Skype. It worked fine when Skype was working fine, which was rarely, because Skype was always a piece of poo poo. I've also done self-hosted stuff, as in, my buddy got a static IP address and installed some forums software so we could all direct-connect and post on it. Which worked OK but was fiddly and annoying too. The advent of persistent chat clients like Slack and Discord have made a huge difference, as have good (well, "better") VTTs. I still prefer PbP because I'm a decent writer and bad at improv. I like to have time - even just 20m or so - to think about and compose an RP post in text, playing to my strengths. But it has been frustrating how many games I've been in that had a lot of potential, talent, fun, and then petered out. Definitely one big factor is the anonymity, people just don't feel as much of a commitment to a group where they don't know the individuals personally. We've discussed the issue with game structures that require ordered posting, so the game gets hung up on whoever is slowest, that's always been a big factor too. I think another one is that with encounters taking so long in real-time, a single bad decision by a GM can destroy the whole game. As a PbP GM I've definitely had a couple or three cases where I set up an encounter that turned out to not be very fun, and then didn't make a critical decision halfway through the encounter to just handwave the end away in the interest of moving on. Players usually do not complain, ironically out of politeness, even as they start to disengage and posting gets slower and slower. A key skill for a PbP GM then is to be willing to aggressively ignore the games rules and dump any scene that shows signs of stagnating. And a key thing for players to do is to realize that being polite and not saying that the current situation in the game isn't really grabbing you really sucks if your response to that is to forget to post for a week. I've also had players feel intimidated if one player is "really good" at RP posts. That's really weird but I get it, if it starts to feel to each player like they need to put a lot of effort into each post but they typically just quickly jam out posts all over the forums, they start leaving the effort-post till "later" and "later" becomes "tomorrow" and then that spirals badly. So I guess another factor might be to either exclusively play with people who always type giant screeds like me, or only players who type curt one-liner posts, or at the worst, find players who are willing to just be the one-liner person even while another player is describing vivid pastiches and typing out gripping soliloquies. It's a lot of asks but I feel like in-person RP also has plenty of pitfalls too. Maybe just the lack of face-to-face makes it harder for people to talk out and resolve issues efficiently. I can look across the table and see that Mike is bored and playing with his phone ten minutes into this encounter, but I won't notice that Michaelangelo420 has briefly lost interest until like three days have gone by without a post, and I still have to guess that possibly he's just been really busy so I don't want to nag him, and here we go. I wonder if there isn't some kind of technical solution to some of these issues.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 18:26
|
|
|
Epi Lepi posted:I can't remember the name of the site now but there used to be a forum dedicated to letting people host their PBP games on it. That was the whole of the site from what I remember. My interaction with it would have been around 2007-2008 as that's when my high school gaming group all went to college and we were going to attempt to keep a game going despite being at different schools. Didn't work out because our old GM was a flake. Was it rpol.net? I played on that a lot back around that time. I think last time I checked it had been consumed by ERP but that was many years ago.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 18:29
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:I played on Skype. It worked fine when Skype was working fine, which was rarely, because Skype was always a piece of poo poo. I've also done self-hosted stuff, as in, my buddy got a static IP address and installed some forums software so we could all direct-connect and post on it. Which worked OK but was fiddly and annoying too. The advent of persistent chat clients like Slack and Discord have made a huge difference, as have good (well, "better") VTTs. Leper I would PBP with you and not flake(probably). We are homies through fantasy football and I respect that. The most fun I've had doing PBP on the forums was ibntumart's The One Ring games but neither actually made it that far which says something.. potatocubed posted:Was it rpol.net? I played on that a lot back around that time. I think last time I checked it had been consumed by ERP but that was many years ago. Doesn't ring a bell but it's been a long time and the game fizzled almost immediately.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 19:06
|
|
|
potatocubed posted:Was it rpol.net? I played on that a lot back around that time. I think last time I checked it had been consumed by ERP but that was many years ago. I thought people used F-List for that. Hell, I do.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 19:51
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:I thought people used F-List for that. Hell, I do. Did exactly once. GM/partner for that managed all of one session before trying (and failing, miserably, but also telling me he failed) to cyberstalk me and to track down my real info. And yet that was still a better outcome than I've ever had with play-by-post. (Considering "text-based games in IRC or Roll20" as a separate entity, since those are real-time games just using text as a platform to compensate for my hearing issues & others' various needs.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 19:58
|
|
|
I used rpol a lot back in the day. Then it did get consumed by ERP, and I ran screaming
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 19:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 23:51 |
|
|
Honestly, i've found that people flake really often in online things, particularly if they don't know you, and it's a fact of life. If you recruit six people, you'll probably get 3 at most, and you have to keep churning and churning.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2022 20:06
|
|
