Combining PbP and "Normal" Tabeletop Play

LordGraz'zt · May 13, 2012

Interested to hear peoples thoughts on this.

One thing I really like about PbP is that it allows both players and the DM to develop the PC's and NPC's personalities moreso than playing at the tabletop.

The downsides of PbP is the obvious glacial pace at which it moves.

I have been giving some thought to combining the two methods for one game - the split would be, for the most part, PC interactions and interactions with NPC's would occur through PbP while combat and exploration would occur on a virtual tabletop (Roll20/MapTool/OpenRPG).

Obviously there would be some scheduling issues, but for the purposes of this conversation lets assume that is not a problem.

Has anyone taken this approach to their gaming before? How did it work?

As a hypothetical what are peoples thoughts on this style of game?

Leif · May 13, 2012

This is a cool idea. What springs to mind as a difficulty is the fact that you could have characters moving through gametime at diffferent rates. Unless you are careful to kep the entire party together in TIME, if not in space, you could potentially end up with some problems.

renau1g · May 13, 2012

One thing I've heard someone doing is to use the pbp game to handle the book keeping and rp stuff, then the face to face for the exploration and combat. The combat resolution is probably the most challenging part of the pbp games.

This would probably be very useful in a sandbox adventure, letting the players get lots of hooks during the pbp rp time and then using the faster realtime combat to get through it quicker.

Leif · May 13, 2012

renau1g said:
One thing I've heard someone doing is to use the pbp game to handle the book keeping and rp stuff, then the face to face for the exploration and combat. The combat resolution is probably the most challenging part of the pbp games.

This would probably be very useful in a sandbox adventure, letting the players get lots of hooks during the pbp rp time and then using the faster realtime combat to get through it quicker.

Mowgli is doing something like almost the opposite of this in his game that you and I play in, renau1g: He uses Obsidian portal to maintain character records and also keep up with other OOC info, like the characters' knowledge of the world at large, and game play is done here at ENWorld.

Lwaxy · May 13, 2012

I do this all the time, more over mail than on boards though. If I'd not do that, some of my campaigns would be stuck as the PCs keep splitting up

Yes, the groups/players move through game times at different rates. It does not cause much of an issue though, because the way I set it up is so they usually do not communicate with each other while split.

If you only have one group, it is no problem at all, and the players love it. Especially when you give them the opportunity to interact with each other outside the actual story context, as in let them play out their evenings in a tavern if they want - in which case I usually give them an NPC each to control, too. Usually, you'd just say "you go to bed after an evening of having fun" or something the like, but until the next session, let them act on their own if they want. Same goes for campfires, long traveling segments, training/learning whatever. It is surprising how much interaction happens and how many new ideas for their PCs come up which would otherwise not have happened.

Edited to add - I also do that for RL campaigns. That's where we started doing it actually.

Tukka · May 13, 2012

I would have done something like what you describe if I thought my live group would have been down for it. I think that between the lengthy live sessions plus time spent between sessions shopping and updating their characters they felt like they were getting their fill of D&D during the week, or at least some of them did. Obviously everyone would have to be on board for this to work.

I think a lot of the exploration and skill challenge type things would be very well handled by post. One of the reasons I hate skill challenges is that I find that both as a player and a DM I have a hard time coming up with an action and description for the action that makes sense and sounds good in real time. I'm just not good at that kind of improv on the spot. PBP alleviates that issue.

On the other hand, I think a lot of the social/RP encounters may be better handled in person, depending on whether you and your players are more literary or more theatrical. It's harder to ham it up in writing, and I worry that in the PBP format, I will be either be too prone to give info-dumping monologues and soliloquies that the PCs can't interrupt, or spread out that info among multiple posts in a way that would be irritating to my players if they don't want to interrupt.

IronWolf · May 13, 2012

This would have been a good topic for the main General Discussion forum where it would have seen more traffic.

We've been doing something similar to this since our group started back in 2005-ish. We have a message board setup that I maintain for between session play. The message board has a strictly OOC, non-gaming portion, a IC forum for the campaign we are currently playing, an OOC forum related to the campaign we are currently playing and each player has their private forum shared with the GM at the time.

We cover all manner of topics between sessions. Sometimes it is just the splitting of loot, for Kingmaker it was the kingdom building portion, etc. Other times we make significant plot advancements or setup in the IC forums. We generally have all sorts of side interests getting covered in the private player forums.

It has worked really well for us. Some of us post daily between sessions and end up with a quite involved side story or NPC interaction. Others don't have the time or inclination, but it only results in a less in-depth side story for their character.

Most recently the GM pulled off a very cool scene by using the private forum for one of the players who is an enforcer/debt collector on the side for a major bank in the city. The GM set it up prior to our last session that that player was going to be collecting a debt during our in-game session. Turns out, it was my character he was collecting the debt from much to everyone's surprise. It worked out really well and was largely possible because of the between session play we can get in over the message boards.

Nemesis Destiny · May 14, 2012

My groups have occasionally taken care of OOC and sidequesting in between adventures via message boards in a PbP-like manner. We have considered the option you propose in the OP, but have never actually tried it.

Additionally, some of our RL games have migrated to forums (and back), while some of our forum games have migrated to RL. Worked well enough, after the usual add/remove players issues.

Blue · May 16, 2012

We effectively combine tabletop and PbP in several groups, thorugh not witht he split or formalization you suggest.

The games are primarily tabletop (well, one's now a Google+ Hangout due to distant players) that meet regularly. However, we'll often either fill downtime or advance what's going on with PbP. Different games also have things like wikis or stuff for people to do things like post information about their characters, write stories in the world, etc.

The PbP part doesn't happen between every session, and we try to keep it almost entirely RP to play to the strength instead of the weakness of that medium.

To sum up - we stay free-form on what we do at the table, and use PbP as a frequent addition to tabletop instead of a core part of play like you were suggesting. That said, it works very well, and I think expanding this to cover your concept would work well.