Play by email, play by post, play by written correspondence... asynchronous roleplay. A different style with (I think) different techniques. I can think of a few that I've used, and a few more I want to use, but I'd love to hear what other people think can be done with the format.

You lose much of the ability to control the way the game is paced for the players. They get your email and they can respond to it in a fury of desperate typing, or mull it over for hours (or days). Has anyone found ways to get any of that set of techniques back?

You gain the ability for the players to multitask and fugue. Groups can, if cooperative and loose, handle dozens of unrelated scenes simultaneously. Dramatic cross-cutting occurs as a form of Found Art, seldom intended but often powerful, as events with similar stakes and themes are presented in accidental interweave.

People post at wildly varying rates (from a post every few minutes to no more than once a week). This is traditionally seen as the fatal drawback of the format, but I think that's because of attempts to use face-to-face system (everybody taking turns equally in a single thread of narration) in an inapplicable format. Why, for instance, shouldn't people who post more have more happen to their characters?

And finally, most of these formats are textual rather than spoken. I've become enamored of the collaborative possibilities of having somebody describe an element of the game only up to a certain point and break off mid-sentence, leaving the next section to be described by whoever thinks they have a good idea. Obviously, that would require trust. Has anyone tried something like this?

TonyLB wrote: And finally, most of these formats are textual rather than spoken. I've become enamored of the collaborative possibilities of having somebody describe an element of the game only up to a certain point and break off mid-sentence, leaving the next section to be described by whoever thinks they have a good idea. Obviously, that would require trust. Has anyone tried something like this?

coxcomb wrote:
This raises the contentious question, "What is role-playing?". What you describe here sounds a lot like collaborative fiction: the process of writing a story as a group. I have participated in this activity, and it can be extra-cool, but I wouldn't call it role-playing.

Also, one additional advantage of asynchronus play, especially on a Wiki:

You can edit past occurences.

I've been wanting to do something with this for a long time. Maybe a time travel game in which you can change the past. Maybe a game where your powers can alter reality. Maybe a game where the threads branch off in divergent directions/realities and then merge back together. Maybe a Dune/Seventh Son-like vision of a thousand alternate futures where most of them end in death. It's an idea waiting to be used.

Also, another idea might be to combine this form of play with regular "role playing" in between adventures. This could really help to fill in a lot of the story and enrich the whole experience. I find that it is hard to fit in a lot of storyline in the sessions as the individual encounters take up a lot of time.

In fact, I'm going to try that with my group now!

Hey Matt. Another technique to try to get that effect is "Winter Phase" type stuff from Pendragon, also seen in Ork World. Those are specific uses for what is essentially a mini system for determining what goes on in between game sessions. They also are ideally suited for asynchronous play.

Where could I find these resources? I've never heard of them before. I'm quite interested.

Ummm...In Pendragon and Orkworld?

:-)

More seriously, I did a bigger revised set of Winter Phase rules for Orkworld at one point, I could probably find those with a little digging.

In both cases they are part of the core rules of the game.

In Pendragon, the Winter Phase covered what your knight did when he wasn't out knight erranting. There was a series of solo adventures you could run through. Hunting, Courting marriage prospects, manageing your estate, doing garrison duty, etc. The rules themselves were largely chart driven, but as GM I was pretty free at allowing players to embellish as much as they wanted within the scope of the results. I remember a couple of feuds being invented into the game world because a Winter Phase chart result came up "attacked by raiders" (or something like that) and the players embellished who it was.

In Orkworld, the Winter Phase is when you determined the factors that effected your tribe's survival. So lots of adventure seed possibilities from discovering that your tribe is starving; or has just produced a surplus of trade goods; etc.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, is there a URL to this information? I really haven't heard of them before, as I am a little new here to the forge.

Sorry that this has deviated from the original topic, but I need to know! :)

Since no one has mentioned it yet, De Profundis by Michal Oracz which is a game of letter writting. The difference between it and other PBM games is that the letters are letter in that game. The characters are writing letters to each other and this is represented by the players writing letters to each other. That's a rather clever way aroung the slow responce time of snail mail by making it a part of what is going on.

For a number of years now, my group has essentially engaged in a dual track series of campaigns, one at the gaming table and one on a series of websites hosted as Yahoo groups. The dual tracking worked well because it allowed the more intense role playing (and the ever-present combat) to take place at the table while off-stage actions and character building could take place at a more controlled and thoughtful pace via the site. Some of my players preferred the in person game, others preferred the electronic communications.

The system worked. As a nice note, it allowed players who wanted to devote the time to being more active to do so and allowed the players who wanted to essentially lurk to do so without missing the action.

I hope that this is helpful.

Andy

Well Pendragon's been in continuous print since...1983 I think. Originally published by Chaosium, its now published by Green Knight

Orkworld came out in 2000 as the first independent RPG from John Wick (Legend of the 5 Rings, 7th Sea). The official site is long since down, but surprisingly, my own Orkworld site (not updated in years) is still up. I say surprisingly because it was a free host that went to a pay schedule...and I never paid...heh...guess that shows how long its been since they've cleaned out their server.


http://www.ravenhold.lpk-computers.co.uk

I am in one d20 D&D (Forgotten Realms) campaign that is played in person every other week and for the rest of the time we have a message board set up for character interaction.

I have to say that for our group it has been very successful, and I even had to write a little online diceroller script so people could do stuff and post the results as well.

As has been mentioned the pace is very difficult to control because somedays one player is busy and another is waiting for a response and other days there is so much activity that it's hard to keep up and respond quick enough.

As for what systems it would work best with I thought that it would work really good with a MURPG type of diceless resource management system. The characters have their "stones" to work with and the GM could put in a pool refresh post for scene breaks. Of course, I haven't had a chance to try it yet but it would save the trouble of dice rollers and I think allow things to flow well without going completely into collaborative fiction.

We've got a long-running play-by-post Multiverser campaign going on The Official Multiverser Forum at Gaming Outpost.

One of the rules is that all sides have to post contingent moves; that is, I'm going to do this, and if this happens I will do that, but otherwise it will be this other thing.

Another rule that has arisen through play is what might be called multiple sequence play. For example, because of the contingency aspect, Graeme recently wrote that he was going to spend time in the hotel pool and invite Marta to play squash with him, that he was going to visit local sites with Mary, including the local church, and that he was definitely going to go to the local museum. I responded with what was happening in each instance. He then responded that while he was at the church, he was going to attempt to get a moment with the local priest; and while he was at the museum he was going to look for ancient artifacts that were believed to have magical properties ages ago. Now, both of these threads of action have continued side by side through the past several posts. I'm not sure which of these actually occurs before the other (I could probably work it out), but as I don't expect either to get him killed or otherwise prevent the other at this point, I don't really need to know that.

Our game timing works rather simply. Once a day I come to the forums and I read all the posts that are there and post my replies. The game goes as fast for each player as he wants.

Of course, with Multiverser, they're usually not in the same scenes, so that's not a problem; when they are, there's a tacit understanding that they will do what follows from holding the scene together. That is, if Eric and Matt are together, and Matt says, "We're going to pack up and head north," and Eric doesn't post before I get there, Eric is presumed to go along with Matt.

There's also a certain amount of space for "rewrite"--in essence, if someone assumes that a post means A when it was intended to mean B (and A and B are both possible understandings of what was written), anything that was done based on A is altered to fit B when the confusion is rectified. I think people do this in real play all the time; they just do it quickly ("I'm sorry--I'm still standing in the doorway"; "Oh, you're right, I should have known."). Acknowledging it as a functional rule in play makes play run smoother.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

--M. J. Young

I've currently in a 2 play-by-post games, both with some similar problems: that is, the play gets mired in a lack of action altogether. In one in particular, the GM has repeatedly had to just flash-forward to "and so, the indecisive company went on to choice B, and then..."

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.

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

Dev wrote: 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.

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

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.)