Roleplaying Games via Chat

[Stephan Hornick]

Sometimes life isn't easy. You played with your folks regularly at your beautiful gaming table and suddenly circumstances changed and you switched to gaming via chat.
Have you tried playing via chat? It is very different. Interesting in its own right, but different.

Just some aspects:

You can describe thoughts and feelings, give flashbacks in your own right, and shine light on personality traits and split-second moments during fights. On the other hand, each and every person should write in an interesting way. It is much harder to formulate texts so that the others can react to it, to not overstep your boundaries as to what you actually can do or for which things you should roll, while also making a point and progress the plot.

And then there is timing. If it is a side story that is not relevant to the main plot, but shows interesting aspects of the PC's life or thoughts or background, then you can combin it with actual gaming. If you try to use it as an alternative to a lost week of gaming, you will quickly notice that it is much slower and you will never be finished in time for the next session.
Roleplaying and descriptions are easy, but only if you accomplish to have every one be at their phones and laptops at the same time you can make a combat work in which several PCs and NPCs / monsters partake.
Finally, it depends a lot on the number of players and their activity and writing skills.

I have been playing via chat now for almost 4 years. Shadowrun. I love it. It is great cinema! And I have been the GM for about 70% of the times.
There the ups and downs, but it is a medium with which you could make it worth it.

Now a call of arms:
Please vote.

If several of you have collected great gaming chat texts - like me, I think we can create another sub-forum to collect all of those great stories and go deeper into analyzing what works and what does not.
Please just answer shortly if you have some nice chat logs that you would be able to share.

 

[ExileInParadise]

Play by mail, forums, chat, VASSAL, maptool, SecondLife, virtual table top, discord, zoom ... all are just a lot more work for far less enjoyment.

I could go into a long-winded comparison of the pros and cons of all of those methods compared to simply sitting around a table.

The lists would all be cons except for a couple of pros - engaging with remote people and digitally capturing what happened.

The further you get from table, corebooks, paper, pencil, dice, imagination ... well... the less portable and flexible you are.

The more you bring in electronic elements - the more overload/overhead/stage management is needed which steals more and more bandwidth from simply collaborating within the game.

I'd rather just play an MMO or CRPG than try to force MMO/CRPG wanna-be elements into a table session with all of the setup, real-time wrestling, time lost to "technical issues", and teardown needed to do that.

And does all overhead really bring that much more fun for *everyone*, GM included, or just the *rest of the players* and not the GM?

 

[Stephan Hornick]

I seem to have a very different opinion on this.
I like movies and I like novels. Both are very different. Some stories are better in movies (e.g. action movies), some are better in novels (e.g. stories about lone characters and their thoughts). Both use the imagination of the audience, but to a different degree. Imagination is necessary in novels, not so much in movies. Movies on the other hand can be watched in one go, while I find it takes quite a while, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes even years to complete some novels (or series of novels).

I do NOT advocate to play via chat instead of playing at the table.
But I have made the experience that I like both. I am currently running no table game (covid and time and distance constraints), but I run one game via discord/foundry. I play in two others via the same media. This is more or less standard roleplaying for me these days.
On the other hand, I manage to write once or twice a week in a game that we play via chat only. It is now the 4th year of that story and I like it very much. There are some aspects of the game that work well and I can experience the character development and personality on a completely different level, some aspects that need work-arounds or are streamlined.

For me, it is not like convenient store lasagna and self-made lasagna, it is like a completely different dish. And it has very much similarity to reading a novel instead of acting on stage or watching a movie.
That's why I called for opinions (and I respect yours by the way), and to ask if enough people have experience with this.

Edit: Also, while I can show thoughts and describe emotions in novel-like chat roleplaying games, I can show and act mimic, posture and all those small facial cues and body language and tone of voice etc. that express so much which can't be expressed (all the time) in written text. Thus, both has its advantages for me.