LibriumArcana.Games

I'm a pretty good table top GM, but as a Forum GM my results are decidedly more mixed. I've been doing some thinking about what has and hasn't worked in games I've been in and here's what I think so far about the differences in a forum game.

1) Forum games are slower by their very nature and that means they lose player interest and momentum a lot easier. The com lag of game mechanics add to this as side stories (interpersonal drama/attention whoring) that involves only a few people but sucks up game time.

2) Less GM control is good. The GM can't easily answer all sorts of little questions in a timely manner as easily as a table top one. In fact even an important question may wait a while for an answer. The players have to have some leeway in this area. They are much larger partners in the story telling experience.

3) More player responsibility for the game. Everyone wants a cool character, but with increased leeway comes the danger of increased chances for power level escalation and munchkinism.

4) It's not about calling hits. The best forum game had plenty of called hits, some against major villains. It was mostly pretty responsible. The telling detail is taking the hits. When players voluntarily take hits or have an enemy seize the advantage, that's when you've hit the sweet spot. If players are in position, however temporary, where they should get their asses handed to them and they post that, then the game is going well.

5) The last few points all relate to trusts, which becomes much more important when dice chucking is minimized and player and GM will become paramount in deciding outcomes. You have to keep it nice, shiny, and corrosion free.

I agree with the points you've made, Cat. I'm a bit guilty of the attention whoring as well.

So how do we keep this sweet spot going?

LadyTevar wrote:I agree with the points you've made, Cat. I'm a bit guilty of the attention whoring as well.

I'm trying to avoid throwing stones in this thread. This side of my palace is mostly glass.

So how do we keep this sweet spot going?

When we did the 40K RPG with Necronlord, it was mostly a rotating GM thing. What that meant was that we were clear who was GMing what part and that everyone who was active would have their character involved in doing something important. That's the key, I think. No one getting sidelined and everyone having something important on the agenda.

Some players push the game forward more than others. Frigid, for example, often pushes towards major plot points and operations. Lady T likes the interpersonal stuff. And so on and so forth. But the pushers keep the game moving and engaging so you need as many pushers as possible. Thus everyone needs to have something to look forward to and move towards, even if it is an evil GM red herring.

Sometimes I feel like I'm doing all the pushing keeping several games running, so I understand what you mean there.


Do you think a rotating GM would help certain games?

LadyTevar wrote:

Do you think a rotating GM would help certain games?

You need good players, but since that game was my best forum rpg experience I have to say it can work very well.

One of the more....Interesting Forum based RPG's I took apart of had multiple GM's, one for each "facet" of the game. It worked to keep most everyone involved, while keeping the GM's themselves guessing.

B4 and Havoc may remember this game, asit was on the URP boards (the Utopia Metaplot game).


Admittedly, Forum based gaming IS slower, and for those of us who expect this, it shouldn't be a problem. The problem comes in if you can trust your players. There are GM's who will let a player have leeway....but when he sees the players excercising that leeway to much, he will step in and take control. There are some GM's who excercise tight control over their games, and some whose only goal is to see the game move forward, and remain lax in their duties.

You cannot come to a Forum based game, and expect it like a Table Top one. Idealy, a Forum based game will go smoothly, the players won't take advantage of the natural leeway a GM may give them, but a GM has to remain attentive as time permits for his game to go smoothly.

Right now, with Mage for example, I'm attempting to run things as tight as I can, without stiffling the players. Will this work out? Don't know. I'm hoping it will, by making use of the dice roll mechanic for the game, it will stop some of the gimpy powergaming some of us are admittedly capable of, and have done in the past.


It's honestly up to trial and error, to see how the best way is. Once you find a "Sweet spot" with the players though, it's diffuclt to stay in that sweet spot. Idealy, if a situation breaks out between two players, it's up to the two to decide on how best to work it out.

Sorry. Rambling. Letme know if this made any sense at all.

Made sense to me.

Trust and common ground are the most important things for Forum RPs, in my experience. I've been doing freeform games of one sort or another for a very long time. Longer, in fact, than I've really done any rules-based systems. It's how I met Marcao, among other people I still regularly chat with.

You're right that the mentalities of tabletop gaming don't strictly apply well to forum games. In fact, for a long time, the freeform games I played in did not have GMs as a general rule. Everyone was a mini-GM and all plot things were talked about with everyone, or were pleasant surprises. When someone did something uncool, we all talked about it and worked it out as best we could.

People in these games often played multiple characters, but the key difference is that these RPs were done in chats, and groups of characters were commonly defined by who was online around the same times as other players. This allowed for seperate plotlines to progress mostly independent of each other.

I have to reinforce here just how much trust is necessary here. Once adversarial lines are drawn, it hurts the group. Other players are commonly brought in as impartial third parties, and in other games, there were nebulous "staff" members who acted to mediate disputes.

Forum RPs are a halfway point between chat and tabletop, in my experience. The nature of the forum allows people from different time zones to take part in the game, to a degree, without being too disruptive to the general flow of the game, which is still slower than chat, but at least at a constant level. The issue, of course, comes up with combat.

Combat requires that every player be able to post in short order, and post a lot. In my Dark Heresy game over on SDN, I've tried to mitigate the drag of combat by having combat sessions over OpenRPG, then letting players post a synopsis of the events. While I've still experienced post drag, it's not nearly as bad as it could have been. Mostly it's been set back by the sheer volume of players, which is slowly declining.

Having a rudimentary rules system is, in my mind, not a bad thing, because it provides common ground for players and GM alike to refer to. Without common ground, arguments start due to people having different expectations. It's like I've constantly argued over on SDN with regards to STGODs: Without an initial common ground, everyone comes in with different expectations of what the game should be, and then when that clashes, arguments start and get heated because the game can realistically only be run in one way, so someone is going to have wasted their time up to this point, which naturally will not sit well with them.

Anyway, that's a long, rambling post of my experiences. Take it for what it's worth.

The well understood common ground is a good point. The 40K game in question used no rules, but everyone knew the 40K universe so everyone had a basis of common understanding.