A bit of an adjacent topic to the third question - as someone who's been roleplaying in text _in real time_ (i.e. having standard 3-4h sessions, just without voice chat) for about 10 years with the same group, it presents a similar set of challenges and advantages as play-by-post, and it might be useful to Tim: 1) It's about 1/3rd as fast as voice; after lots of practice, me and my friends managed to make it about half as fast. Depending on your challenges with focusing, this might be too fast, but it has a lot more breathing room than a live game. 2) Just those 20 seconds needed to type a response will lend a more "bookish" vibe to the proceedings, while curtailing the wannabe-novelist impulse. Descriptions will be more elaborate, and dialogue will be more thought-out, so conversations don't suffer from the same inconsistencies as with live improvisation. You have just enough time to do some... well, writing. 3) It supports a very particular kind of game. We've found it to be a miserable experience with many classic modes of play (structured exploration, combat, chases and multi-sided conversations - anything dynamic, really), but it conveys mood and tone very well. So, stuff like mystery, intrigue, horror, interpersonal drama, and emotional scenes become more straightforward. In our experience, the extra layer of detachment also makes it easier to open up and perform vulnerability, especially for people who have trouble doing it live. 4) It has the more constrained structure of regular roleplaying, which you might be more familiar with. If you planned to be the GM, you'll find it easier to control pacing and tension than with a continuous campaign. However, you will have to account for the extra time - essentially, every session becomes a two-act play, so you have less room for unrelated scenes and stuff. It _definitely_ isn't a format in which you would run a sandbox campaign or west marches or anything that isn't strictly forward-moving. 5) The sessions are easy to archive, searchable, and the flow of the conversation makes them quite entertaining to read later. It also has many downside. In particular, I don't think it gels with PbtA style GM-ing, since back-and-forth conversations slow everything down. It feels a lot better if everyone takes turns giving strong, declarative statements, and there isn't really time to discuss ambiguities or compare opinions. It's also the slowest form of RP in terms of plot progression - whereas live you can get lots of shit done in 4 hours, and in play-by-post the story can continue throughout the week, with just text you get maybe one or two scenes per evening, and campaigns tend to crawl. Also, despite what you'd think, it's more tiring than it sounds; less like casually chatting with your friends and more like... doing remote customer support. For all of those reasons, my group is slowly moving away from it. We're now playing trashy D&D in a voice channel with minis and maps and rolling and shouting and, after a decade of intensely narrative roleplaying, it feels _AMAZING._ However, you might find it useful.
I've been following your channel for a couple of months now. I immediately knew there was something genuinely sincere about you. That being said, the way you approached giving advice to Frida's question really warmed my heart. You have a good soul, my friend. People as open and honest as you really give me a lot of hope for Humanity.
I also have a lot of feelings about play by post, and Adam hit most of the big points. It is very appealing as an introvert who isn't great at using the mouth words or being put on the spot, but gods I get hit hard by the asynchronicity of being held hostage by the slowest player, or the reverse when everyone else goes too fast, checking in when I wake up and finding I missed out on all kinds of juicy role play. There's also the free form aspect, which will always have a place in the pbp medium, but I often want something a little more structured with codified rules for conflict resolution and a progression system, and it's quite hard to find systems specifically designed for the pbp style of play. There's a site called TavernKeeper where you can find text based games run with popular systems, though I'm reticent to try one because those systems weren't designed for that style of play and there's apparently a void of systems designed to take text based challenges into account. I just wanna play role playing games but using mouth words with people in real time is scary :(
One of my DMs really needed a break today, so I ran an absolute hot mess of a Storium game. We got through three totally improvised scenes, with folks chatting in a voice call and scrabbling to type the fastest. It was great fun. I think people underestimate the amount of style variation that you can still do with text-based games. Not all forum RPGs need to be written like novels. You can still do beer and pretzels style if you want - the only difference is the typos.
Gotta write up a new spell... Koebel’s Sphere of Eels As a cantrip you can summon a small sphere of energy, containing several eels. The sphere appears to onlookers as a brown leather ball, suitable for sports game playing. However if the sphere comes within 5’ of another creature it will lash out and attack. The Sphere uses your Spell Attack Modifier and on a hit does 1D4 force damage. Once the eels make an attack the illusion dissipates.
Adam, now you have made me want to play sphere of eels ball, or at least least suggest it as something for my DM... My mind had this GREAT mental image of Sphere-Of-Eels-Ball, and I about spit out my sip of water when you said that!
Whoever asked the third question should play BattleMaster by Tom Vogt. I was in that game fifteen years ago, and it was so addictive I quit and joined World of Warcraft so I could have my life back! It seems to be still going. Or try Tom's new game Black Forest. Old-school nerdy RP-strategy at its best. Adam, do you know Tom? battlemaster.org/ blackforest.lemuria.org/
What's funny with not having endanger yourself emotionally for roleplaying games is that it only applies to people on the left. I have found thru personal experience that if you're a politically conservative person who believes in lower taxes, the freedom to own firearms, and merit-based qualifications for employment and education then that automatically makes you a racist Neo-nazi to people on the left. And while it is unacceptable to be sexist, racist, or transphobic it is conversely perfectly acceptable to pigeonhole anybody with central-right political economic views as a horrible homophobe. It doesn't matter if you support gay marriage, legalization of drugs, and equal opportunity of all. As soon as you say anything about maybe lower taxes on corporations promoting job growth you are instantly ostracized as a "problematic" person who creates a hostile environment. It's not okay to say that something's bad is gay, but it's perfectly okay to say that anybody who ever possibly voted for a Republican 20 years ago is automatically a Nazi and should be banned from the hobby. I remember the case of some designer who had a photo taken with Jordan Peterson and for that people started a campaign to get his products banned from drivethrurpg. The social justice fanatics are just as bad as the right wing nutjobs. And I say this as a disabled person who deals every day with people looking at me and treating me differently because I can't walk.
For question 1/Frida, although it was totally unexpected, I've actually found that since I started playing Burning Wheel that I *never* (yet) have come across anyone who has previously played BW and wants to play again that I could label as bigoted (I play with different groups of strangers every week). I don't have a good explanation for this....maybe someone else does?
Most of us enjoy spending time with like minded people. When it comes to our leisure activities I hope our first thought and action though isn’t to first seek out those same like-minded people. This self-conducted segregation is a barrier to communication, understanding, and creating acceptance. We do not have to be the ambassador or activist for whatever our demographic is. We are probably doing that already through simply living our life as a good person. I hope our first thought and action is to reach for what we have in common and build up from there to a realization that we really aren’t that different. Even where we are different it doesn’t have to define us as opponents.
@Adam Koebel, Hey Adam, I just noticed you lately tend to use a lot of discourse markers ("fillers") in particullar "right" comes up very often, This makes it much more difficult to follow your videos. Please by all means do not take this the wrong way. After watching multiple dozens of office hour videos, I just felt the need to tell you. I do like the format a lot, but the last videos I actually aborted because of this. 08:09 08:25 08:33 ...
