An RPG Optimised for Play-by-Post games.

[Jill]

I wanted to get some advice on the kind of game mechanics that might be most suitable for play-by-post games, because straightforward adaptation of existing tabeletop systems (A)  doesn't seem to be taking full advantage of the medium, and (B)  runs into significant problems.

The examples I've mostly seen are 3e D&D of one form or another, and the things that I noticed most are as follows:

1. IIEE is all wrong here.  Players get online to post an unpredictable intervals, so a strict initiative order for combat and the like leads to severe complications and slowdown.  A combat system where 'everything happens at once' is probably a better solution.  I've given some thought in particular to adapting/simplifying Burning Wheel for the purpose, since it's built-in scripting system and emphasis on gritty combat promises to get things over with quickly, and the Belief/Insincts mechanic also has some attraction, since it helps to define character priorities in the event of player absences (a problem in PBP,) as well as aiding role-play (see below.  An alternative suggestion has been Wushu, which I'll get into in a minute.)

2.  Since things happen so slowly, I've seen a lot of these games become very 'RP-heavy', partially out of boredom but partially because players have a great deal of time to compose their thoughts and writing responses (which has other effects, see below.)  This naturally suggests that heavy narrativism would be a good direction for PBP, and Wushu's 'Principle of Narrative Truth' does have a great attraction in that respect-  The players narrate what they want to happen, and the degree of descriptive detail/flourish confers a mechanical bonus to event resolution.  As a matter of personal preference, it's pretty much the antithesis of gritty, though- more seriously, the GM has to veto what they can or can't achieve in a given volley of description, which rubs against the simulationist in me, and smells of railroading.  Still, I can't deny it has the appeal of simplicity.

3.  The interval between player posts does afford certain opportunities- firstly, complex rules with large search-and-handling-times should not be a significant problem (or at least not AS significant) given the large delays between individual player posts in the first place- any time you spend rolling virtual dice is simply negligible by comparison.  In addition, you're not constrained by the physical limitations of tabletop games- you could roll 15-sided dice or take the cube root of strength without batting an eyelid.  Heck, with the appropriate javascript you could automate most of the rule set entirely.  (Of course, a simpler rule-set is still easier to learn and strategise within, which could well be important, but this does offer a chance to offset one of the major GNS tradeoffs.)

4.  Secondly, because the GMs of such games has such a large amount of time to prep material between individual posts, a simple railroad plot (or even covert illusionism) is, to my mind, unjustifiable, and I'd like to provide some explicit support for more flexible story development.  Tall order, I know, but I can't just ignore it.

5.  In a similar vein, I think that it might be fruitful to treat the story within a given PBP thread as less of a series of documented events and more as a continual work in progress, subject to revision and narrative improvement over time.  After all, it's trivial to go back and edit posts after a given event resolution.  Heck, you could even try adapting a wiki to the purpose.  (Again, tall order, but hey.)

I gave some thought to adapting Dogs in the Vineyard, which has some attractive features, but unfortunately the game is too dependant on rapid interpersonal feedback and (on occasion) initiative order for this to work.

Just for the record, I'm a gamist/simulationist trying hard to understand narrativism.  The ideal system I'd like to produce would probably be narrativism with simulationism in a supporting role, and there'd probably be a modest amount of metagame structure going on, to help cope with story dynamics.  But ultimately, this isn't about my preferences- if gamism with leanings toward narrative is more likely to attract players and help out GMs, then I'm happy to work for that.
The important thing, I would say, is to recognise the strengths of this particular medium and play to them.  Anything that requires frequent conferences between players or dependancies between character actions needs to be avoided or scrutinised, and the overall plot should be advanced relatively quickly, so that players can get the same 'kick' out these games as they would out of a tabletop session every week or two.

So, let me know if you have any particular suggestions, thoughts to add, criticisms, or complaints.  I'm not exactly stuck for inspiration myself, but I want to gain a more balanced perspective before heading off in any particular direction.  Thanks

[Eero Tuovinen]

My primary advice would be to get a sense for your goals and preferred subject matter - the notion of making a play-by-post game is by itself a fine and exciting mechanical constraint, but it's not enough for creating a robust game; you need to figure out what you want to do with the game, too.

I also have my own ideas for how to do postal roleplay, but laying the possibilities out just like that is a bit too wide a topic alone. Just for giggles I might suggest that one thing it might be beneficial to get rid of is the notion of constant consensus reality - I haven't done too much postal roleplaying myself, but it seems to me that forum games and such are usually played with a great fear of revision; perhaps they are harkening back to roots in improvisational theater, where it's taboo to block and revise content? In rpgs this is silly, and the quality of play might be easily improved by simply blessing the notion that even if something has been written in the first person and published in the forum thread or wherever, it's still not set in stone.

[soundmasterj]

The nature of the medium, examined by you, seems to demand for infrequent invoking of any symetrically, instantly interactive rules, especially rolls (is this called "low points of contact"?), clear narrational authority and long periods where the primary narrator does not change.

I would suggest a FitM- or almost-FatB - like Conflict Resolution mechanic that is iniiated by a single player. Say, the GM says when to roll and provides some circumstances, players roll themselves and narrate the result. I´d suggest looking at Otherkind and the semi-FatB The World, The Flesh and The Devil.
Also, flashbacks, I could imagine them working quite well; say, GM calls for a Flashback, framing the next scene. A player narrates his Flashback. GM does the next scene accordingly.

[Callan S.]

Hi Jill, welcome to the forge!

One of the easiest techniques I've seen suggested here is to write out a mock up of the sort of gameplay you would enjoy and sort of roughly allude to the sort of mechanics that would be behind that. Write something that would make you happy, making the players in the mock up write exactly the sort of things that would make fun play for you.

You can tell how that'll help alot in setting everything else up, right?

[Jill]

@  Eero, Callan:

Well, bearing in mind this is fully open to revision, my first idea was simply to adapt Burning Wheel techniques for the purpose:  The GM frames the scene and conflict, then the players announce their advance intent using scripting/contingencies, possibly in actor stance.  e.g, (during combat:)

"He'll stay at arms' length and use his ripostes.  If they charge, he'll block, and if they feint, he'll disarm."

The GM waits until every player has announced their intent, then crunches the numbers and announces the outcome in a straightforward simulationist fashion.  Players can narrate the details retrospectively as they desire, and announce their intents again.  (I've been working on a system for social conflicts or simple IC conversation, but you can't pair off opponents as easily as you could in combat, so it's tricky.)

The benefit of this approach is that gets any given combat over with, fast.  Since the players are announcing their intent for several steps in advance, (and everything happens at once,) with sufficiently gritty damage mechanics you could get a given fight out of the way and done with after only 2-3 full conferences among the players.

But it has drawbacks- Firstly, the GM would need to perform scripting, in secret, for the NPCs involved, and not 'fudge' the results during resolution.  The temptation to use Force could poison the creative agenda, if it's primarily narrativist.  Secondly, for mechanical purposes it's essentially a FatE system, and I gather that this is not ideal for narrativist games.  (It's possible you could use metagame resources to 'tweak' outcomes after the Fortune, which would restore a bit more 'ownership' of the narrative to players.)

I'm wary of using a 'pure' narrativist approach here, partly because I'm unused to it, and partly because I suspect most players are unused to it.  I kinda want to go the route of the Riddle of Steel here- use superficially simulationist techniques to disguise/introduce a larger narrativist agenda (After all the Burning Wheel Beliefs/Instincts/Emotional attributes setup could function much like spiritual attributes and/or Kickers.)

@  Eero:

I agree completely that the fear of revision is misplaced in PBP, but would you need some appropriate metagame to ration the process(?)

@  soundmasterj:

I agree pretty well with your analysis, (though I'm also a little unclear on what 'points of contact' means, exactly... is it simple rule complexity, number of if/then statements, or number of distinct techniques?  I dunno.  Unfortunately, Otherkind and TWtFatD seem a little hard to come by, but I'll keep an eye out.)

[soundmasterj]

http://web.archive.org/web/20030206052321/http://www.123.net/~czege/WFD.html
http://members.shaw.ca/vdiakuw/reverseRPG.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20041209151419/http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/pdfs/otherkind.pdf

Of course, none of these will be usable on the spot, but I´d think the earlier the fortune, the better.

[Jill]

Thanks for the links.  Otherkind looks quite interesting, in particular- I like the way multiple parameters of the scene are resolved at once.

[Jill]

So, is there a general agreement that I should be using FitM?

[soundmasterj]

No. I think you should be using Fate-as-early-as-possible (IF you´re going to use fate).

[Jill]

Okay.  Eero, Callan, do you have any thoughts to add?

[soundmasterj]

Points of Contact
The steps of rules-consultation, either in the text or internally, per unit of established imaginary content. This is not the same as the long-standing debate between Rules-light and Rules-heavy systems; either low or high Points of Contact systems can rely on strict rules. See Vanilla and Pervy, Pervy in my head, Cannot stand cutesie-poo terms, Pervy Sim, points of contact, accessibility.

, so says the glossary: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/27/

If I understand that correctly, it goes like this:

High points of contact: I roll to hit, you roll to parry, I roll for damage, you roll for amror save, you roll for soak.
Low points of contact: We roll 5d6 each. Whoever got the most 6s narrates the whole combat. He has to narrate 1 wound for each 1 a player rolled and for every match, a character using magic once.

High points of contact, lax rules: I want to climb a wall. You say, roll climbing. I roll 6. You make up how I climb a bunch of metres. I roll again, 4. You say how I climb some metres. And so on.
Low Points of contact, lax rules: We roll dice whenever we want to. Whoever rolls highest narrates until we next roll dice.

[Callan S.]

Okay.  Eero, Callan, do you have any thoughts to add?

I was actually biting my lip and not posting, because it seemed you wanted to move on, but all I could say is "STOP, I still can't see what you actually find fun in the process??" And I'd be, yet again at the forge, a wet blanket. So I bit my lip.

Maybe you wrote what is fun and I didn't read properly (I genuinely mean that). I totally agree that if somethings fun and takes ten minutes, it's about twice as fun if you can make it take five minutes (or with PBP, if you can make something that takes four days and is fun take two days, its twice as fun). But it has to be fun somehow to begin with. Doesn't have to be amazingly fun and it certainly doesn't have to justify itself as fun to anyone (if I don't think its fun, that doesn't matter...what does in terms of design is that you do). Even if its a mild feeling of 'wow' or 'mmm, nice' as mild as the enjoyment of sunshine on ones back, that's fine. But currently I'm not sure if you find anything in your brief example fun, or if you think making it go faster will make fun somehow come to exist?

[/wet blanket]

[Jill]

I was actually biting my lip and not posting, because it seemed you wanted to move on, but all I could say is "STOP, I still can't see what you actually find fun in the process??" And I'd be, yet again at the forge, a wet blanket. So I bit my lip.

No, no- those are actually the precise circumstances under which you should most definitely be a wet blanket.

I guess what I'd find fun- within the context of that example- is the usual simulationist/gamist agenda- following the internal cause/effect of the world to formulate a sequence of moves that are effective for the purpose while being plausible in 'realist' terms.  But what really excites me about PBP as a medium is the ease with which it offers freedom for players to truly determine their impact on the story, without railroading or illusionism, and that's ultimately narrativist territory.  So, now that you mention it, I can see that I'll either have to eject the gamism or abandon the overall narrativist agenda.  So, thank you for calling me out on that.  No joke.

Y'see, my problem here is that I can analyse the requirements of the medium in the abstract, and it's telling me that narrativism is the way to go, but I have so little experience with pure narrativism that it's hard for me to even grasp what I want in those terms.  I mean, should I just go off and do more research, or is there a more specific mechanism I should be using here?

[Jill]

@ soundmasterj
Thanks for the clarification, but I'm not sure rules-consultation is the bottleneck here so much as people-consultation.  As I've mentioned, time is not at a premium here, because there are necessarily large delays between posts- player communication is.

I'm also worried the lack of any reliable initiative order could undermine FitM mechanics, because whoever narrates first is going to introduce changes to the shared-imagined-space that could undermine the intent of subsequent narrators, or simply introduce time-related dependancies that aren't really appropriate in this context.  On reflection, that's part of the reason why I favoured a scripting-of-intent simulationist approach- it disciplines player interactions with the world and other characters over time to insure they don't tread on eachother's toes.  To my mind, it's not so much a question of personal enjoyment as it is of being fair.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jill,

Four years ago or so, Goldleaf Games published a game called Code of Unaris which was optimized for chat play. In a lot of ways it was the opposite of what you're describing, because the problem it solved wasn't so much delay and return as the dogpiling created when fingers were flying. I'm bringing it up because instead of struggling to enforce familiar ordering techniques, it simply utilized the medium itself. The one thing you can be sure of in chat is who said it first, because the line is obviously right there on the screen. Although said-it-first = goes-first is often problematic in face to face play (I only know one good exception: Dead of Night), in chat it turns out to be a great backbone for the system - especially the neat rule that you can spend points to change one and only one word in the line right before yours.

Turning that inside out for play-by-post seems like the design goal. That brings up my question, which is a lot like Callan's, but (shock) not about Creative Agenda so much as whether there's a design issue in the first place. Don't people already play PBP with enormous posts, basically writing huge reams of fiction back and forth? I had a roommate 'way long ago who played something like this with his brother using ordinary mail. The brother mostly wrote lengthy stories with the character (a dwarf) as protagonist, pretty much in neutral third-person voice, and my roommate wrote lengthy monologues or experiential takes on the events, sometimes with a few new events. They'd been doing this for over ten years, non-stop. I'm given to understand, although not with any direct contact, that PBP is often successful when it's like this, rather than trying to emulate face-to-face play.

I'm getting the idea that's not what you're looking to design, but if that's how people are maximizing that medium, then, well ... what is there to design? Based on your description, you're seeking to engage everyone in simultaneous investment in fairly small-scale events - what to do in a particular moment in combat, whether to do X or do Y ... all those consequential and high-risk in-conflict choices that make the three games you rightly link (BW, Sorcerer, TROS) so much fun in the clinch. Yet the essence of all three is the fact that you cannot simply shout out what you do; there is an ordering to things which can really interfere with what your character can accomplish, creating a fleeting, insta-initiative moment of choice about it. If I'm reading right, one of your notions is that given the long delays in communication, whoever communicates next actually gets to go next. That works for Code of Unaris (much better than it does face to face), but it seems like the opposite of making full use of the PBP medium, the wrong direction even, if what you're after are those peaks and valleys of risk and consequence. It's certainly at odds with what makes those three systems work as they do (enforced limitations on input).

Of course, the upshot of that idea is yet more delay. I'm not even sure whether the conflict time-scale of physical combat in those three games is even doable by PBP, unless you don't mind play taking weeks at best to conduct four or five seconds of fictional time.

Regarding your answer to Callan, it's clearly over the place. Realistic! Player impact on story! Cause-and-effect! Gamist! I think you saw that yourself, but your conclusion is also shaky. I think you may be conflating Narrativism with wide-open authority to say whatever you want about what's occurring in play, as if "pure Narrativism" were the same as those tightly-scribbled ten-page letters my roommate used to send to his brother. Whereas any of the three Agendas can be achieved with a powerful focus on in-fiction cause and effect, and with serious constraints on what one's authority to say might be. So that angle still needs a lot of work.

Speaking of "all over the place," this post is rapidly turning into a drop of water on a griddle, but here's one last reference: Bacchanal, by Paul Czege, halfmeme press, which pushes Fortune about as close the the beginning as it can get without becoming a boring exercise in narrating whatever the dice tell you to say. I'm not sure I agree that this method is what you're looking for, but it was mentioned, so I thought I'd toss in the reference.

Best, Ron