Online Actual Play

[Laurel]

After a weekend full of phone calls and a lot of emotional blackmail and a little bribery, I've been convinced to go back to White Wolf and rejoin their online volunteer Storytellers after Thanksgiving.

(Shoot me.  Please.  I already begged Paul in private email, but he calls us gaming chicks looking for Indie-loving groups an endangered species; he's not gonna do it.  *sob*)

On a more serious note, what advice/opinions do Forgers have about online role-playing games.  Has anyone here -liked- playing or running an online game?  What made that game a success?  

The particular game I'm having to deal with is a crossover World of Darkness, extremely "by the book" despite enormous internal inconsistencies in that notion since the WoD games were deliberately written to make crossover impossible without drift.  Its got 1000+ players and 6000+ characters, maximum 35 GMs (called STs), 35 Assistant GMs and will reach the 2 year mark in April.  

[Epoch]

You poor, poor sap.  You're willingly involving yourself in New Bremen?

I've played and enjoyed online WoD games -- I was a regular player on the MUSH "Night & Fog" for essentially its entire four year run -- but New Bremen gives me shuddering chills.

My theory on how online gaming works is as follows:

The meat and drink of a MU*-like game is social interaction, or "bar RP."  That is, you sit around and have soap-opera discussions of your life, the universe, and everything.  You steal each other's SO's, get in arguments, have teary reconciliations.  Happily, this doesn't require GM's.

However, that social RP is like a clockwork.  If left alone, it will slow down and slow down and eventually grind to a halt.  It requires "winding" now and again.

That "winding" comes in the form of TP's (tinyplots, for those of you unfamiliar with the jargon).  They give you something to talk about and they expose aspects of your character that you would otherwise keep hidden.  You might think of TP's as being less about solving a conflict, and more about forcing character X and character Y to reveal that they both know about Vampires, or that character Y is in such-and-such a clan, or just that character X is a bad person.  As such, present hard choices to the players during TP's.  Make them expose themselves, whether it's their nature, their capabilities, or their morality.