IRC add-on

[J B Bell]

Just a few minutes ago I wrapped up a nice session of online Universalis.  An invisible world, laid over our own, with inhabitants bound to unbreakable laws and vows; 1920s San Francisco, a dark and stormy night; a desperate Outsider from the invisible world, seeking his human love and their son; a terrible creature, translucent and shining, able to cut through flesh and bone with all its angled surfaces and dread claws; and more!  Amazing stuff.  I will post after one more session in Actual Play, and hopefully get a game F2F to happen, and post a review on rpg.net.  Meantime, I have ideas for an add-on for IRC play (some were implemented for our game, others I came up with but didn't want to disrupt the flow of things as they'd already begun):

1. All players are chanops; observers aren't
2. To indicate you are done with your turn, give chanop to the next player
3. To interrupt, give chanop to yourself
4. "Sealed" bids:  this is pretty much on the honor system, but just have everyone indicate readiness; once you have typed "ready" and hit return, type in your bid.  Then after the last person indicates readiness, hit return; everyone's bids should show up quickly
5. Indicate your current balance of Coins in your nickname, e.g. "JoeBlow_17".
6. During Complications you can track your Pool similarly, with another separator, e.g. "JoeBlow_17_4"
7. During Complications, if your dice bot does not support labelled dice, assume the last dice are Edge dice, if you have any.

We used the Coin tracking, bidding, and Edge dice tracking outlined here.  I find typing "Interrupt" breaks up the text of the game somehow, and so the various rules about how to pass or grab the turn.

Let me know what you all think of this; a good IRC add-on would be a nice thing to have on the Universalis site, IMO.

--JB

[Valamir]

Hey JB.  My online TRPG experience has been pretty much limited to basic chat rooms so I'm not real familiar with IRC or the IRC tools, like the ChanOperator techniques you mentioned.

Mike I think has done more of this sort of play than I.

I'd love to put something like at up on the site.
Care to write it up in more lay terms for people who aren't IRC regulars (including such basics as where to find it and how to host a game)?

[Mike Holmes]

That sounds perfect JB. The Coin recording is very much what we've used in play in online chat. I always just attached it to the end of the line, but the wya you have it looks good. I also, actually list exenditures in the text as in:

"As John is running, it turns out that he is much more Agile (1) than anyone had thought (Pool 1)."

That sort of thing.

I'm sure it can be worked out.

Ralph, if players are familiar with IRC, then they know what he's talking about. What we should do is just figure it out for chat in general, and then have hints for particular chat formats like IRC. For example, using AIM (I know, but it's popular), one could interrupt by using one of the smilies or an appropriate sound or something. I'm sure that there are lots of ways to handle these things, and lots of cool ideas people will get with each client.

But there are to many clients to make any but general statements. What to do if you have a dice server, what to do if not? Etc.

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

Here's what we did last night on IRC add-on wise. The text of the game can be found at the Indie Net RPG site.

We had two rooms one for narration, and one for OOC and accounting (which is sorta becoming SOP for Indie-netgaming). Players after their turn would post the number of Coins they had remaining in the OOC room. Play order was by the list. To interrupt you typed Interrupt on the OOC room. We rule that if you Interrupted, that you got one sentence at least, lest there be timing problems. And if two Interrupted the same player turn that the first to appear on screen got the next turn. We did the bid for the one scene in play order instead of secretly (allowing only one bid from each player), which doesn't seem to be a problem.

I had reservations about using the nick changing method for this game. Would that change the list order? In addition, it just seemed like a lot of work. OTOH, occasionally your last posted amount would scroll off he screen, and you'd have to hunt it down. Maybe a third room for just posting totals? Including Pools? Those we just kept track of as we went.

As I figured, what teaching I had to do was laborious online. As such I did less playing and more explaining. If at all possible, try to ensure that players have as good a handle on the rules as can be arranged before play. I had most players reading the summary just before play. That made things more difficult. That said, we used just about every mechanic. A couple of challenges were negotiated out, and never went to bid. But that would have gone fine, I'm sure. Everything else seemed to flow well. The only problem was the slow speed of play due to lack of familiarity.

That said, I'm looking forward to the next session. Speed should be up, and players more confident in what they can do. Should be a blast. Just confirms my belief that Universalis makes a good online play system. Might be what a lot of Freeformers are looking for.

Any suggestions to improve play? I was hoping to find some smiley or other easy to produce symbol for interrupting. I am customizing my interface a bit to try and get these things to go even faster.

Mike

[Paganini]

I had reservations about using the nick changing method for this game. Would that change the list order? In addition, it just seemed like a lot of work. OTOH, occasionally your last posted amount would scroll off he screen, and you'd have to hunt it down. Maybe a third room for just posting totals? Including Pools? Those we just kept track of as we went.

Mike, I agree with you about nick-changing breaking up the log. However, I don't think that entering coins in the OOC room is going to work. The entries get lost in the shuffle. It's very difficult to find the last amount you entered when scrolling back through the buffer. I'm thinking that next time we might try three rooms... one for the narrative, one for the OOC discussion (dice rolling, interrupting, etc., just like we did last night), and one devoted exclusively to coin accounting. That way you'd never have to scroll back, and everyone could check to see how many coins you have.

Re: interruption, I'm not sure what JB is talking about, passing Op status around. As far as I know, you can't op yourself.  With the OOC room, though, it's a pretty moot point.

Any suggestions to improve play? I was hoping to find some smiley or other easy to produce symbol for interrupting. I am customizing my interface a bit to try and get these things to go even faster.

Mike, once you come up with something you like, you can turn it into an alias, which will allow you to use it like an IRC command. That is, if you want to use "Interrupt!" as the signal, you can alias it to /I to save typing time.

[J B Bell]

Re: interruption, I'm not sure what JB is talking about, passing Op status around. As far as I know, you can't op yourself. With the OOC room, though, it's a pretty moot point.

If you're an op, you can op yourself; that's why I had the rule about all players being ops.  You can give yourself ops only when you've already got them, and it's obviously redundant--the main idea is that it's usually a point-and-click affair with any but the most butt-ugly IRC client.  Since it usually means nothing at all, it's free to have its meaning assigned to something in the game.  It would take the place of the "nudge" from last night's game.

Tracking coins is indeed pretty vexatious--they go like mad in a normal game, so the usual nick-changing isn't as useful in Universalis as with e.g. The Pool.  A custom bot to handle banking and bidding would be a really nice feature.  I haven't the mojo for such a project at present, unfortunately.

--JB