Asynchronous Roleplay

[beingfrank]

The thing is, every player had a very limited notion of what they had control over, and furthermore, what was legit to post. Most posts consisted of a one-line, response to what someone else said, and a description of what was going on in their minds. This makes for very stunted dialogue, to say the least. So, it seemst that despite the richeness of Actor/Author stance play, Director stance gives the players the power to move asychronous play along, and it may in fact be necessary.

I think that this is a key hurdle.  A major problem with asychronous play is that it requires participants to have clear concepts of what's expected of them and what's inappropriate, much Social Contract stuff, but are the tools of developing the details of the Social Contract, feedback, non-verbal cues, immediacy and so on, are extremely limited.  So it requires much more effort to sort these things out.  It requires participants to address these issues explicitly, and to accept that some 'compromises', like changes in stance or specific techniques, may be necessary.

Huh... that makes a lot of sense.  The Directorial stance radically reduces the ego-investment that people feel in Actor and Author stance.

This is unfortunately the flipside. Two suggestions for fitting some more Actor-centric play (within, I think, a general Director stnace play):

(a) Players define "Tenets" that define their protagonizing characters, basically beliefs, instincts, inclinations and so on that are guidelines for their characters. A player can ascribe actions to a character he does not control, but only within the limitations of these tenets. (The author can, of course, contraene her own character's tenets.)[/quote]

I'm playing in a PBeM game that does this to a limited extent, and a little less formally.  Players are expected to control NPCs, but expected not to abuse it, or contradict what's know about that character.  Players can ascribe non-controversial actions to other PCs, but they're supposed to keep it to minor things that move the action to more important stuff.

The game is currently on hiatus because of Real Life issues, and the website (but not the archive of posts) is down pending a redesign.

Claire Bickell

[xiombarg]

I played in an Amber Diceless PBEM for a very long time a few years back. Unfortunately, the web page for it is dead, but with the help archive.org, a couple of relevant documents might be worth looking at:

Document One (in fact, tho it is not credited, I think I wrote this one, or contributed heavily to it)
Document Two (I wish I could remember who wrote this one)

As you can see, we did a lot of thinking about "asynchronous" play, and found the easiest way to deal with it is to be highly flexible about timeline and engage in multiple "threads" of play. This actually has a host of advantages and disadvantages -- a lot of play, even more than a tabletop game, with lots of history, can be accomplished this way, though consitency becomes a problem, requiring adjustments to the Social Contract, i.e. the whole "relax" thing mentioned in Document One.

This way, people could play at their own pace, but it didn't get bogged down -- impicitly, people could start a new thread if they wanted to "get on with it", simply by emailing the appropriate people and stating when the thread happened. Consistency was established through consensus and, in some cases, via some heavy-handed Force by the GM, who was cc'd on all threads. It helped that Amber lends itself well to PCs scattered all over the place doing their own thing and yet interacting with each other frequently via Trump and similar mechanisms.

Tony's observations when he opened this thread were right on the money for the Equinox PBEM.

Trust me, Jay, there was plenty of social connection this way, even more so than on, say, a forum on the Forge and a lot of face-to-face games I've been in. The social contract was not weak, tho it was heavily negotiated and often relied on GM Force and, in some dysfunctional cases, outright social manipulation by the various players/GM. However, this doesn't mean it isn't a valid model, minus the dysfunction, which had more to do with the GM's ego than the medium.

A lot of the sort of contingent moves that M.J. mentions were also used, tho not as much as you'd expect. Also the situation where NPCs were farmed out to players that Claire refers to was heavily used, and quite successfully. In many cases, people had, in essence, multiple PCs, which increased the number of threads one could be involved in, as the genre made things rather clique-oriented, so sometimes you needed to have someone of a particular political clique to engage in certain plotlines.

Also, I will note one advantage of the email medium that people haven't mentioned: It was easy to "pass notes". For a highlly political, paranoid game, this is vital. Every PC in the game had spy networks, and the results of those networks were represented by the GM quietly forwarding messages from private threads to other players. (As I said, Craig, the GM, was cc'd on all threads...)

In fact, I believe this game is still ongoing successfully, tho I dropped out because of OOC issues with the aforementioned control-freak GM. Which is too bad, because we did a lot of interesting Social Contract work in that game, in retrospect. (Tangentially, to get an idea of the sort of game and history we were dealing with check out the Misery FAQ I wrote for the game, written in reaction to new players who didn't like bad stuff happening to their characters. In retrospect, it was an attempt to communicate certain aspects of the Social Contract (i.e. "this is an angstbunny game") to new players, perhaps in a slightly disfunctional manner.)