Your experiences with PBP?

[Ravellion]

Do you know when sometimes, you want two NPCs to talk to eachother? On a messageboard, that is not quite so ridiculous as doing it in person, at the end of a dining table, with four people watching you try to pull it off. I also found it to be easier to do cinematic interludes with NPCs elsewhere: "Meanwhile, back in castle Blah, Lord so-and-so is speaking to his trusted advisor..."

I found that players that normally won't roleplay suddenly do cool in character dialogue.

I ultimately gave up because:
1) I moved back to the Netherlands and could game face-to-face again with my old group.
2) Combats were cinematically described and evocative, but a tedious chore for me to do as a DM. This was 3e, but I expect little improvement from 4e in that regard (haven't actually tried though).

 

[Tinker Gnome]

Do you know when sometimes, you want two NPCs to talk to eachother? On a messageboard, that is not quite so ridiculous as doing it in person, at the end of a dining table, with four people watching you try to pull it off. I also found it to be easier to do cinematic interludes with NPCs elsewhere: "Meanwhile, back in castle Blah, Lord so-and-so is speaking to his trusted advisor..."

That is actually one of the reasons I am interested in PBP. I have tried doing that in F2F games and it IS awkward. It would be much easier to pull off in a PBP.

 

[tylerthehobo]

I ran a long running Greyhawk Age of Worms game on the dndonlinegames.com boards for a few years, and it was a lot of fun. That said, it's a huge commitment and you need to have players who optimally would be able to post a few times a day, because to be real about it they won't - so if the commitment is to only post once a day, figure it's going to drift more. That game falling apart was fully my fault, I'd add for the record, as I was the worst offender of the lag-between-posting problem.

 

[sfloyd]

I had an entire proboards forum dedicated to roleplaying once. It was pretty intense. We'd roleplay for hours every night at the same time. People got really into it and then some nasty drama happened outside the rpg with some of the players and I had to shut it down because only two people ever came anymore. Some people couldn't make it some times so we made seperate boards for each party. They'd eventually catch up again. I had my brother play an extra DM and we both had our own PC's.

 

[Thanael]

The one PbP i participated in was a Ravenloft game. It was a great albeit slow experience and in the end it fizzled. It was a 3E game with 2 Co-DMs and much RP. Cut Scenes were a definitive highlight, as were the flashback threads for background stories by the players. The Players also shared the narrative powers for some NPCs reactions in scenes.

So if you want to start one i suggest get a Co-DM or two and share some of the work with the players, also read up on Cut Scenes and of course check up on general PbP conventions and possibilities.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

Not to say interactive storytelling is the way to go, you need some rules that go beyond the whim of the GM, but the less, the better, IMO.

Actually I've found that no rules works just the same as having rules: you need good people. Have that, and you can do it however you want.

I'd also like to advise, however, that you be careful in thinking that just because something's rules-lite or -heavy that that's what's going to reflect on how it works in PbP. What's really the big deal is how much back-and-forth the rules need because communication is so slow in PbP. A rules-heavy system would work just fine so long as when you play everyone can post once and be done with their actions. Likewise a rule-light system that might depend on getting group consensus would slow the game down.

 

[Akaiku]

I was in a PbP Besm game of all things for a year or two. Upside is that you can monologue forever. Interludes, backstories and the like are easy.

The downside is meaningful interaction with other players. Or the lack thereof. It is exceedingly difficult to talk with others via pbp. Try doing common things such as interjecting in a rant. It runs across a gross disregard of conservation of detail in that many people seem to describe minute details that are largely irrelevent in every single post. It's slooooooooow. The party didn't even get together entirely in the entirity of the life of that game. It also more or less requires terribly introspective characters so that they can acutally post a rather large block of text for every action they take, even smileing, nodding and commenting on the weather.

I personally do not believe that PbP is a decent methoid of what I consider roleplaying to me. Obviously it works for other people. It seems to me to be a more literal colabritive fiction situation, in that everyone writes short stories about some character they made and the gm tries to add the links to make them relevent to eachother.