Exchange of Realities

This is for Storyteller, in connection to his series on the Three Types of RPGs—he missed my favorite way of playing, so as a devotee of the medium, I felt it necessary to inform him of all the fun he was missing out on.

As you may have read here, I am a particular devotee of the play-by-chat format, particularly for the writer-turned-gamer.  What can I do, then, but recommend it?

The advantages to a play by chat are numerous, even without taking into account the extra bonuses for the writer-GM. For the cost-conscious casual gamer, it’s one of the least expensive gaming media: IM programs are generally free (AIM, which in my opinion provides the best results, definitely is). Its pacing isn’t much slower than a face to face chat, and if anything, it’s smoother; table-talk can be removed to another chatroom (and done at the same time as active playing!), someone can go use the restroom without missing anything that won’t take a few seconds of scrolling up, and you don’t have to worry about people losing their trains of thought halfway through long, dramatic speeches. Its other, and perhaps most important, advantage is the ability to connect people anywhere in the world, though since it requires a set time-slot, it’s less flexible in that regard than a play by post. (Let me tell you, when you’ve got a game in which the players’ time zones range from the US West Coast eastward, and the GM is in England, arranging times to meet can be difficult.)

There are other advantages, many of which are more important to the writer-GM. One of these is the ability to color-code NPCs in order to tell them apart: not only does it allow you to run a scene with seven different NPCs and make sure everyone knows exactly who’s speaking at any given moment, but you can even give your group a certain amount of first impression from the color and style you choose. For instance, I have a rather comprehensive color and style code for my Exalted games; my group’s been able to get a vague idea what kind of character they were dealing with by how I render the text alone.

Another is the ability to log one’s game sessions. This can be both advantageous and disadvantageous; on the one hand, you don’t have to worry about forgetting anything, but on the other hand, if you manage to forget something anyway, it increases the odds that one of your players is going to catch it. It also allows you to watch a character change as the game goes on, or to be able to recover a less regular character’s voice by rereading scenes in which they had made prior appearances; as an added bonus, for those chat programs in which you don’t need to be online to look at your logs, looking over them can be an enjoyable entertainment on days without internet access.

And of course, there are the advantages of the written medium in general, particularly self-editing and the ability to see the sentence as a cohesive unit. Have you ever begun a really long sentence, and then somewhere in the middle of it you get distracted by planning the next sentence and realize you’ve forgotten where you were going with it and which word you were—er, where was I? Like that. When you’re talking it might be a problem, but when the words are on a computer-screen, it isn’t quite so much.

Its greatest strength as far as a smooth chat is concerned is allowing the GM to multitask cleanly. Imagine a five-person group splitting up to go do three different things. In a live-chat, they need to be handled one by one, leaving the inactive members of the party to listen, kibitz and snark—or to play video games in the other room. In a play by post, they’re handled simultaneously and show up interspersed, or the scene cuts from one to the other; in the case of the former, this creates difficulties with flow, while the latter results in the same inactivity and disconnect as in a live-chat, and both result in the inactive members of the group knowing exactly what’s going on. Playing by chat, however, makes splitting the group as straightforward as opening a couple more chat-rooms and selectively inviting people into each one, and allows the GM to simultaneously run them, albeit with a decrease in speed. More importantly, it allows secrets to be kept, avoiding out of character knowledge.

There are, of course, a few catches. One is the difficulty of using visuals; it takes a lot of work to be able to update what you’ve got and make it accessible to everyone on the internet. There’s also the difficulty of finding a group; as noted above, time-slots can make life difficult, and you’ll usually need to either have a group set up in advance or be on a message board from which you can recruit one. Type-lag can interfere with pacing, particularly when some people type faster than others; sometimes, it can downright ruin the mood of a scene. One of the biggest handicaps, at least as far as my friends are concerned, is the lack of visible body language—when you’ve got interactions between players and not just PCs, but you can’t see someone’s mood, it can make life difficult. (On the plus side, it does mean that you don’t have to worry about someone avoiding your plot twist because they can see you snickering.) Text limits can be a bear if you’re prone to long, descriptive posts (I find in AIM, four lines and a little bit of extra in plain 10-point Arial will usually be just enough to fit in the character limit). It requires a working internet connection. And of course, nobody’s going to be fed by anyone but themselves.

Overall, though, it’s an excellent way to play, and not one to be discounted.