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A lot of this is absolutely my experience with PbP as well, especially having distinct modules/milestones, clear progress towards an end, and some kind of audience participation. I'd also add aesthetic unification (like the art you make for your games) and game-created artifacts (like maps, histories, languages). The former helps tie players together as a single group, while the latter gives them an ongoing sense of achievement, as in "this is what we've built so far". There are a few games specifically designed for periodic online play, such as A Doomed Pilgrim in the Sundered Land, but I suspect there's a larger pool of games designed mainly for tabletop that work well (possibly even better) in PbP because they tap into some of these features you describe, as well as other aspects that your games don't really use. Your games give everyone almost freeform-like control over exactly one character, but I've also had or seen a fair amount of success with games down the other end of the continuum, like The Quiet Year and Microscope. These turn-based games give players complete, but brief narrative authority on their turn, and have them share characters and settings. Meanwhile, there's always a lot to build on, with large casts of characters and multiple narrative threads happening on any given turn. This helps keep both the story and the game flowing - people can pick and briefly expand on something that interests them and advance the overall story at the same time. This common control seems to increase people's buy-in, though you can definitely get a similar effect without sharing so much (like PbtA games typically do with simultaneous character creation and world-building). A completely different route is turning conventional RPGs into CYOAs, offloading all the mechanical and narrative bottlenecks onto one motivated writer and letting a collaborative audience take care of (some degree of) the decision-making. I guess that gives us at least 4 general modes of play:
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Jan 24, 2019 20:38
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Theantero posted:I sure do love playing them forums games oh boy
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Jan 24, 2019 20:45
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Dog Kisser posted:I can vouch for The Quiet Year being a hell of a fun game to play PBP, but even there the need to use an external service to create the map and draw the cards (which would be a lot easier if people were all sitting together around a table) raises the barrier to entry - if you only have a few minutes a day to post and/or need to phone post and can't get access to Roll20 it can make it difficult to want to post. I wonder if there are tweaks to TQY that would make it function better online? A Doomed Pilgrim is a textbook perfect example, though. Audience participation makes it well suited to online play, and it's easy enough and not reliant on any particular player to keep going. As long as the GM is writing, the story can keep going - until you either die or survive! Re: Doomed Pilgrim, it works well, but it's also focused on just one character. I tried setting up a multiplayer adaptation after the first Doomed Pilgrim game I ran, but it died pretty quickly despite having a decent audience before. What ended up happening was that the most engaged audience members from the Doomed Pilgrim game signed up to play it, leaving us with a much less involved audience. I don't know if that would happen with a standalone multiplayer game, but you'd definitely need to pull in more people than for single-player. - Building on what you said about modular storytelling, I think there are other ways to use that idea in designing or running a game besides having modular chapters: firstly, anthologies of short stories played out using the same set of mechanics; and secondly, stories played out with a rotating, overlapping cast of characters who weave in and out of the audience's view. Either case might have an overarching story, but could also express a common theme or take place in a shared narrative world. That allows people to leave or end the game (or set a time in the future for it to end) without compromising it as a satisfyingly complete and coherent piece of fiction. I'm thinking something like Stories from the Grave (a pulp/weird horror anthology game) or Sojourner (an RPG inspired by the videogame Journey, with the option for characters to drift in and out along their journey). - And then building on what you said about discord, I think a hybrid of PbP and discord opens up a lot of design space for online play where you can get the advantages of both for different modes of play in the same game - the time to think, edit, and distill ideas that you get with PbP, plus the instant feedback of discord (or any chat service). For example, there's a game of Microscope currently running that's using a discord for the IC parts where you play out history on a personal level, and posting directly in the thread for the OOC parts where you write history from a top-down view. I'm running a game of Fall of Magic here in a similar way - the game is built of individually-narrated scenes, so either a player can write up and post a short scene themselves, or they can take it to discord and play out a scene in conversation with someone else. In both of these games the discord scenes get collated and posted when they're wrapped up, so really, the discord is just there to speed things up rather than being integral to the game. This isn't really a new thing - people have been doing this for a while with IRC - but discord is in my experience more user-friendly and more commonly used in general.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:03
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