Back when I was a kid I used to RP a bit on aol chat rooms nothing serious, dice rolls were usually fast and loose and we didn’t use any set systems as they didn’t exist for what I was doing (Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy).
I found this site that hosts PBP with dice rollers set up for different games systems.
Wondering if anyone here has experience with this?
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I was obsessed with aol chat rp as a kid. I remember being in this “guild” called order of the crimson star. Also the first time I wrote code was to customize my profile with html
Anyway, I can’t really help you with your question
There was quite a bit of rp going on back in the aol days, like I said most of it now is on forums or discords.
I did a few 3.5 campaigns on Giant in the Playground forums back in the day. It was fun, but they usually run out of steam pretty quickly. People get busy and it requires everyone to be pretty dedicated to it. If even one person is much slower than the rest of the group, everything grinds to a halt and people lose interest.
It did give me a chance to do a level 20 gestalt all 3.5 books allowed one-shot though, which was fucking bonkers fun. Some of the most broken shit imaginable, and just steamrolling demi-gods.
Thanks I’ll check this site out
I tried play-by-post in high school, but I was real flighty and had too short of an attention span, so all those games fell apart pretty quickly.
I just started a play-by-post campaign recent using Discord, and it’s been a lot of fun. We’re playing a mystery/investigation game, so there’s less of an emphasis on 2D grid combat (which can be a real sticking point/weakness of traditional PbP).
Cool, I figured discord was probably going to be where most of the action was taking place anyway.
Even later here, but I have some experience with PbP and RPOL. Here’s a PMI analysis:
Plus (good things):
- The whole game record is there.
- You have time to think out your actions.
- In the hands of an experienced PbP GM you can have some sublime experiences. (Chiefly the GM has to have some good skills at discipline for posting speeds.)
- You’ll find people more willing to experiment with other game systems since there’s no rush to figure out the rules when it’s your action.
Minus (bad things):
- A lot of people who are absolutely terrible GMs seem so resort to PbP as a last resort. Playing under these is like pulling teeth.
- These same terrible GMs are really, really fragile and will smack-talk you or try to engage you in long debates about how great their GMing style is and how it’s your problem, not theirs that you didn’t enjoy the game, etc.
- The pace in even a well-run game is positively glacial. Not all styles of play can fit here, so if you’re interested in dungeon crawls … uh … might want to look elsewhere.
- (RPOL-specific) The UX when I played it was nasty. It took forever to internalize the weird way they structured and displayed their site. It has a lot of features, but it’s very hard to find them or use them. (The die roller is a case in point: very powerful, but so odd to use that I tried my hardest to avoid having to roll dice whenever possible.)
Interesting (good or bad depending on perspective):
- It may be the only option open for some people to RP without going solo.
- The different pacing lends itself to entirely different styles of game, allowing you to explore different styles of play.
I’ve never exactly played that way but I was in a long campaign where we were expected to post between sessions. Mostly did a ton of in character chat and some minor actions that didn’t require dice rolls. It made the in person sessions a lot better because we could just jump into the action while the DM was there.
I seem to be late here, but I do have some experience with PbP.
I like it for several reasons, including the fact that it allows one to be detailed in their writing, and the flexibility of scheduling. However, there is the issue that such games might be more prone to falling apart than the other common formats.
