Play by Post: what should it look like?

[Glorelendil]

This is a little bit off-topic and probably belongs more in a general RPG forum, but this community is so much...nicer...than many RPG forums. (More intelligent, attractive, etc. etc. etc.)

For those of you with familiarity playing in or running PbP games, what are the biggest annoyances (or opportunities) with the format?

Here are some of mine:

1) It's hard to know when it's your "turn", meaning that somebody/everybody is waiting for your input. You just have to keep checking. You may be waiting for somebody else to post, and vice versa, and you'll never know it.

2) Sometimes I want to go back and find the game mechanics (what was rolled, when I spent Hope, etc.) and in the sites I've found you have to manually search through the posts. (This is also a problem with roll20: the dice rolls are embedded in the chat.) rpol.net has a separate dice roller, but there's no correlation to the dialog.

3) In general I'd like more integration with game mechanics. So that, for example, I can just type "roll Athletics" and not have to go look up my Athletics score on one screen, then go to another screen and make sure I type it in correctly.

4) Similarly, synchronizing events in the dialog with the character sheets is a pain, and requires manual correlation. "Wait...did that Hope point already get deducted?" If I lose endurance or spend hope or gain fatigue I'd like the event in the dialog to be connected to my character sheet. For example, the LM might embed a message in the dialog that says "...and you lose 10 endurance". That text should cause my character to lose 10 endurance, so that if the text is deleted the 10 endurance is restored.

Anybody else? Whatcha got?

[Falenthal]

In the games I've played and LMed, we do have different threads for the same game.
It's not mechanic, like you wish, but in one thread we have one entry for every character stats; in another one we have the dice-rolls (every time someone rolls dice, he has to write what the roll is for); sometimes in another one we have the most usual stats (Endurance, Hope points, ...) for every character and only the LM can edit them; finally there's a thread for the adventure itself and a separate one with the discussions, metagame questions, and general off-topic.

About turns, well, we post when we can, and sometimes not everybody posts before the story moves on. We are not very rules-heavy when playing by post.

[Pangea]

To go over your points with my two cents:

4) as Falenthal said, use multiple threads. Have a thread in which the person running the game edits the top post to tell the players where their characters are at stat-wise (for TOR that can mean tracking Endurance, Fatigue, Hope, Shadow). So you have a place to go check where everyone is at.
Depending on where you play, you can have each player post things too (on rpol you have the little bio lines that appear under your name & avatar, so you can decide to have people put END 14/28 HOPE 4/12 - and thus you always see where you are at ; Myth-Weavers has coding where you can click on the character image and go to a page with stats etc. ; and some games have signatures, where players can keep track of things that you see beneath each post).
I doubt you can find a way to automatically detect a roll and deduct lost Hope to a sheet in anything other than a site you code yourself.

1) for turns, that is mainly the task of the person running the game to keep you up to date. A Loremaster can easily put a little OOC note at the end of his post (or have a thread dedicated to this) stating who has to post before moving on (or if he or she simply will move on after a certain point in time).

2) Either you have a site that handles this (like rpol as you said) or else just put up a thread where people must post their rolls.

3) I do not know of any gaming site that does this (since they have to cater to so many game systems). And I only have such a system in a WhiteWolf tabletop game in which we play, where a software engineer player coded a sheet for us where everything is linked and things change automatically.

Anyhow, my main feeling is that you have to adapt the structure of your game pages to what the players want.

[zedturtle]

There's currently a topic in Tabletop Open at rpg.net that is this topic; it might be worth looking at.

Integration with the character sheet and persistent rolls (that I can check a month or two later) are two of my big things. Support for player notification is important too; I get more useful messages from rpg.net than rpol.net for some reason (it may just be learning curve).

[Glorelendil]

I doubt you can find a way to automatically detect a roll and deduct lost Hope to a sheet in anything other than a site you code yourself.

Oh, yeah, this is less about how to force the existing sites to accomplish these things than features people would like to see.

(I may very well be coding it myself some day...)

[Glorelendil]

I don't know if anybody else cares about this topic, but some more thoughts of mine:

In-game voting would be great. Right now we're filling up an OOC forum with everybody agreeing on how to use the Fellowship Pool. Many, many posts getting used.

Another thing I'm envisioning is separate by synchronized threads for in-character, ooc, rolls, game effects, etc. So imagine all those threads in independent columns, but laid out such that (for example) when you narrate an action and make a dice roll for it, those two things are next to each other vertically but in separate columns. Real estate would be constrained, but you could collapse unneeded columns and use color-coded dots to indicate the presence of entries.

General observation on screen real estate: the layout of most forums wastes an extraordinary amount of space, causing very little actual typing to fill up a ton of vertical space. This could be optimized much better for PbP RPGs.

LM (DM/GM/Narrator) tools are the main things that's needed, because they have the hardest job, and my perception is that the limited supply of willing & competent narrators is the gating factor to this community (and to tabletop and VTT gaming, for that matter.) If we can make their job easier, and help novices do a better job, we will have MANY more games. Rocmistro spends an inordinate amount of time creating and updating hand-typed tables of everybody's stamina, hope, shadow, etc.

I started up a game at myth-weavers (which is starting very slowly as I stumble my way through the learning curve) and I'm constantly clicking through different screens reminding myself which character has which backstory, what's been said previously, etc. There has got to be a better way to do that.

EDIT:

The big dilemma is that the technology really should be customized to the game...must be customized to the game for this to be anything but a niche market...but most RPGs don't have a big enough market to justify the development costs, probably even if it's built as a general platform with game-specific addons. For example, a TOR game would really benefit from a utility that tracks the Fellowship Pool, allows members to request a point, allows everybody else to vote on whether to grant the point, and validates with relevant rules (e.g. there's one Hobbit, the Beorning has Twice-Baked Honey Cakes, and the Ranger can't get points.) Yes, you can make that work with general tools, like we are currently doing with an OOC thread, but each mechanic you integrate improves the user experience but another little bit.

To make an analogy, there are currently dozens of MP3 players on the market. It's time for iPod/iTunes.

And just like everybody on Slashdot panned the iPod and declared it would fail..."It doesn't support Ogg Vorbis!"...I'm sure a core group of PbP'ers would pour hate on such a thing if it actually came out, probably because of the specific game the first version uses.

The scary/hopeful fact is this: if such a technology were produced and it only supported one game, that game would dominate the market because it would appeal to a vast new market that currently doesn't play RPGs because of the logistical barriers. Most people would rather play a mediocre game system on an easy-to-use platform than jump through hoops to play a great game.

[zedturtle]

I certainly am interested. A lot of my thoughts will have to wait until I get in front of a real keyboard but one of my back burner projects has been a game system designed from the ground up for PbP. More on that and things like Chuubo's later.

[Glorelendil]

I certainly am interested. A lot of my thoughts will have to wait until I get in front of a real keyboard but one of my back burner projects has been a game system designed from the ground up for PbP. More on that and things like Chuubo's later.

And wouldn't C7 be the perfect organization to create said game?

As I've mentioned elsewhere, my idea PbP game would be useful for teaching writing in a formal (e.g. school) setting, for old fogies like me to have fun gaming, and everything in between.

[zedturtle]

And wouldn't C7 be the perfect organization to create said game?

As I've mentioned elsewhere, my ideal PbP game would be useful for teaching writing in a formal (e.g. school) setting, for old fogies like me to have fun gaming, and everything in between.

I think that the more likely venue for something as specific as a game meant to be played in only one limited format is as an independent publication, but if anyone at C7 disagrees, they're welcome to get ahold of me.

- - - - -

As for your app, I do think that TOR presents a strong test case. But I'd be personally more interested in something akin to Armybuilder (or roll20)... a framework wherein interested expert users could create packages for their favorite games. Then you just tag certain phrases or create appropriate insertion buttons to correlate game data with story data.

It would be interesting to do some market research; I'm not sure how much would be publicly available as to the systems popular for use in PbP versus F2F. But another consideration is that success rate of a game is not very dependent on the game system (though that helps) or the format (though GM tools and player tools certainly help); the primary factor is the people involved and if they make the connections necessary to plough through all the challenges inherent in the medium to get to the good stuff.

[Glorelendil]

My ideal game could transition smoothly from pbp to tabletop, so that f2f groups could use it in between sessions, but of course that constraint means you would be forgoing taking advantage of the computers ability to trivialize complexity. Unless you were willing to require the presence of technology at tabletop sessions.

I'm undecided where I come out on all that. The old fashioned side of me likes the idea of a game that CAN be played perfectly well with dice and paper, but that is also seamlessly integrated with tech.