Playing tabletop games online

[greedo1379]

ANOTHER QUESTION: How many players is best? What works and doesn't in terms of number of people for: Play-by-post, chat/messenger based, etc.?

In play by forum or Yahoo group I don't really seen much of an upper limit at all.  I mean beyond what would get in the way of the story anyway.  I think it all depends on how active everyone is.  If you have an active core of people you can do it with less.  IF you have a group thats really busy with other stuff you might need more people.

Re: Deck of Cards

Duh.  Of course a D52 wouldn't work if you were going to draw more than one card.  What was I thinking?

[Rob Carriere]

And (pie in the sky) if it were visual -- like a Flash application -- "reading" the cards would come much more naturally. Hmm.

Your pie might not be as high in the sky as you think. Flash's ActionScript is just JavaScript with a different name. It would be possible to develop this as a bare-bones JavaScript that runs in a webpage and then hand it to a Flash person to embed it in pretty animations. That'd be the route I would advise if you want over-the-top graphics.

Alternatively, if all you want in the way of visual is showing the cards, that's easily within reach of HTML+JavaScript. Simpler and easier to do incrementally.

SR
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[Ginger Stampley]

ANOTHER QUESTION: How many players is best? What works and doesn't in terms of number of people for: Play-by-post, chat/messenger based, etc.?

The one rule I find that has really held for me is the bigger the group, the slower the play will be. The group is the actual group in a scene; 20 1-on-1 scenarios with the GM is time-consuming for the GM, but the individual scenes can be run at high speed.

I have found that on chat, above 3 players starts to slow down/overrun; 4-6 in a scene is upper limit on email; PBP can handle more, but you have to keep it in chunks. You can't post a long narrative passage or a long piece of dialogue in a large group on a board without getting headachy levels of quoting and complexity. Email is bad enough that way.

My operating assumption is that the GM wants to encourage even slower players to have an equal stake/share in the game by not overrunning their posts/contributions. If you're more interested in speed than in equalizing participation, you may be able to get more in a scene, but you will start losing the slower players, either in the flood, or when they drop because they don't feel like they can get a word in edgewise.

I would tend to pose this question the other way around: "I want to run a game that has X players. Which online gaming style works best for a group that size?"

Ginger, another thought -- I was just thinking about those Bridge reports in the newspaper (Omar Sharif, right?!?). They do a competent job of displaying the cards surrounding the table. So, I could either 1) draw for everyone as GM, or 2) let everyone send me their card draws.

Either way, I then create a simple graphic showing everyone's card for each phase, post it somewhere, and go from there. (Best as a play by post technique, I guess).

Much better for PBP/wikis, yes. Also very time-consuming. I must admit to not being familiar enough with the details of Nine Worlds to suggest a better/quicker alternative, though.

[David Laurence]

ANOTHER QUESTION: How many players is best? What works and doesn't in terms of number of people for: Play-by-post, chat/messenger based, etc.?

In my experience with play-by-e-mail, the work for the GM goes something like the square of the number of people involved, depending on how much people act separately (*) and how much those actions will influence the other players' situations.

Now we're playing one-on-one, and it's very comfortable and smooth and (relatively) quick. When I had a 2-player campaign (this was about a 2-year-long Mage campaign) it was generally pretty smooth but sometimes an enormous pain in the ass and got bogged down rather easily, and when I tried to add a third player to that campaign it really didn't work very well at all.

(*) Tangentially, as someone whose tabletop roleplaying experience is all firmly "old school," one of the nice things I've found about PbP is that people can and do work separately quite a lot. People can get out from under the usual tabletop roleplayer's feeling that "we have to do everything together together, even if it really doesn't make much sense." It also makes working at cross-purposes more viable, for similar reasons.

Edit: clarity

[alexandria2000]

Wow. Something I can take a gander at answering.

I've played in PBP and PBEMs before, and am presently playing in several play by posts over on RPOL. I like these types of games because they're slow - I can take my time considering what to say or do. Yes, it's slow, but if you have dedicated players and state up front just what you're expecting in terms of post times and whatnot, the games can go really well.

But I love PBP. Here's one I'm in at present:
http://www.rpol.net/game.cgi?gi=7217&gn=%5BExalted%5D+Nothing+Sacred&date=1102003949

I'm sold on PBP because it's forum-based, and all your stuff is right there in editable format. Your post comes up and you discover someone's said something right before you that'd change your reaction? Go back and edit the sucker, and move on. Prefer to have your spoken text in a different color/format than the rest of your post? You can do that with HTML.

You can have separate threads for separate plots, so no having to comb through posts to find what your character's presently involved in.

Then there's private messaging for bluebooking (comes in so very handy) inviso-text for side convos with the GM during a post without interrupting game flow, and dice rollers that record.

Play by email, for me, has tended to be troublesome because of the email-keeping factor; it's harder to keep track of who posted when and in what order...and depending on the game, those posts can be VERY fast and furious, until you're behind like a mother.  If you don't have a dedicated email address for just gaming, your account can fill mighty fast. I remember the very short time I played on a Dragonriders of Pern online game with over 200 players. So. Many. Posts. *shudder*

-A2K

[greedo1379]

Play by email, for me, has tended to be troublesome because of the email-keeping factor; it's harder to keep track of who posted when and in what order...and depending on the game, those posts can be VERY fast and furious, until you're behind like a mother.  If you don't have a dedicated email address for just gaming, your account can fill mighty fast. I remember the very short time I played on a Dragonriders of Pern online game with over 200 players. So. Many. Posts. *shudder*

I do agree that playing by forum is much easier.  As far as playing by email, you really should set up a Yahoo group and just choose the "No email" option.  You just check in when you have time and read up.  The posts all stay in order and they don't clog your regular email account.  And its free.

[Ginger Stampley]

I do agree that playing by forum is much easier.  As far as playing by email, you really should set up a Yahoo group and just choose the "No email" option.  You just check in when you have time and read up.  The posts all stay in order and they don't clog your regular email account.  And its free.

One of my PBeM GMs HATES forum games with a deadly passion. Unless she gets posts sent to her, she loses track of the game. The phpbb board (same package as the Forge) for the game we're playing in together is spotty about mailing to her when there's a new post in her thread, and she's almost written herself out of the game. Worst of all, when the threads close, she's often left without notification and misses the start of the new thread. Other players have left the game over their problems with the board.

Among the PBeMers of my circle, Yahoo is widely despised for spotty/shoddy service. I know of more than one game that's moved off it to improve email delivery. I would never consider using it for a game of my own, but I have a private server to handle my mail needs. If a game generates too much mail for me to read, it's going to be too much mail whether it's in my email box or on Yahoo.

If you have a group in mind, always ask your players what they want.

[Adam Dray]

A similar kind of play is the MUSH world. Essentially, a MUSH RPG is a game server for a text-based role-playing game, generally run by amateurs/hobbyists for free. There are hundreds of active MUSH games running all the time. Each supports as many players as they want, but the maximum any server seems to attract is around 80-100 at a time.

If you've ever played on a MUD, you're part way to understanding what a MUSH is. Strip the kill-and-loot stuff out of a MUD and focus on role-playing, and that's sorta what a MUSH is.

If you've never played a MUD, imagine Everquest or something like that without the graphics.

A lot of the MUSHes out there are devoted to the World of Darkness and use its thematic material and system. The earliest MUSHes were built to run games in the Dragonriders of Pern setting and used a custom (very light) system.

I run a MUSH called Firan. It's more heavily coded than most MUSHes, meaning there's an intricate game system running the world. A lot of games give the players a way to record their character information and some dice tools and that's about it. Firan has a fantasy setting based loosely on a Rome-like world, the action taking place mainly in a large city. Play centers around the politics and social interactions of the city, which is the capitol to a Republic of eight competing monarchies.

Characters roam the city, send each other letters and meet in public and private places in small and large groups. The game's staff does inject a certain amount of situation into the world, causing trouble and creating opportunities for people to get together and interact, but much of the story is created without staff's help.

Staff generates hundreds of detailed characters. Each gets tied into the world with a background and complex relationships with other characters. It's essentially a large relationship map. A player need only play to those relationships to have instant role-playing opportunities.

Firan typically has 70-100 different characters connected to the game at any time, but has peaked at over 200 for special events. The game has been ongoing for 7 years strong. Its system is custom, based loosely on Storyteller dice pool mechanics, with a strong Sim bent.

I'm happy to talk more about it if people want to understand the differences between this kind of play and traditional tabletop role-playing or even between MUSH and MUD and the massively-multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs) like Everquest.[/url]