Playing the format

Nowadays, most of my gaming is online.

In part, this is a practical decision. A lot of the friends I have who are interested in the same sorts of games I am are scattered across the world, so doing things in person is very infeasible. It’s also a matter of preference of social dynamic – I’m a lot more timid in person than online, and find the distance of a computer to help make a lot of interactions more comfortable. Plus, even today, the echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic pushed some of the in-person groups I had online, and they’ve stayed that way since.

There’s a lot of tools out there for playing online. If you go to the right places, and everyone has access to a microphone, you can get an experience close to what an actual tabletop would be like. Virtual tabletops (VTTs) abound, providing a shared battle grid for games that need that sort of thing, and they can have electronic conveniences like rules reference or automatic calculations of complex dice mechanics built in. Most RPGs nowadays have their rules accessible as a PDF, and filesharing is easy, so everyone can have a copy of their game on hand. If you’re the sort to want to see other people’s faces to read their body language, webcams exist. There’s a lot of individual tidbits of technology that can get the shared tabletop experience almost exactly as it was, save for the capacity to share food. It’s pretty impressive, all in all. And I’m glad I have access to it.

The tool that I think is most valuable in all this, however, is the one that entirely breaks from the parallel.

The most value I get out of an online RPG is the text stream.

In person, RPG gameplay is usually verbal. It’s a back-and-forth conversation, among other things. Depending on the system, a physical map with minis and terrain may be called for, or marking some pips on a character sheet or tracker. But, with those, too, you pack up the minis once you’re done. At a certain point, all you have left is memories and a character sheet as a sole relic.

And notes! You’ll also have those. Most of the more meticulous GMs I know have a classified file or notebook where they write a bunch of plans and statistics for the future. The players don’t get to read it until things are all over, since there’s secrets in there – but then you can get a designated player who writes down a summary of each session as it happens. If your table is committed to those, you can get a solid record to look back on fondly, with moments you might have forgotten.

It’s a lot of work, though. At the very least, for the one record-keeper player. And it necessarily limits the memory to what they found important or amusing enough to write down. If you rotate who does it from session to session, it’s more manageable, but also has a more inconsistent voice. It’s tradeoffs all the way down, forcing a reckoning with the inevitable impermanence of the past.

But I don’t like mortality. I think it’s holding me back. Nor do I like having to split my focus to write for a hypothetical future me, when I’m trying to play right now.

If the gameplay is already written down, that’s not a problem anymore. In fact, it’s to a higher fidelity that any note-taking less than a literal transcript can be. Whenever I want to see how something went, I just need to scroll back and read it again, just as it was first written. When I want to reminisce, or if I need to check a specific detail, so I don’t contradict what’s been previously established, that helps quite a lot.

Plus, there’s ‘space’ to consider. When at the table, if I go on an extended monologue, it’s gonna eat a lot of time, and I’ll probably fumble a few words trying to get to the point. I can type a lot faster, and have it read a lot faster, than if I was talking my way through it. And, I can read over what I’ve written and rephrase some things. Writing is easier than talking, in terms of revising until you get it right. The moment-to-moment gameplay of text is different, and I find it works a lot better for me.

Now, this isn’t actually innate to online play. I’ve been in several online games that haven’t had it at all. They work as a voice call, and the sound is as lost to time as it would be in person. Similarly, there’s actually nothing stopping an in-person game from being run with everyone writing down their actions on a shared record, rather than talking to each other. It’s not commonly done, I think it would be rather inefficient, but you could. It’s just that some formats work easier in person, and others work easier online.

So, really, it’s more an incidental byproduct, that my tastes skew online. Because what I prefer is the different play format.

The session

I grew up with RPGs.

An [esteemed gamer pedigree] is how I put it, when I’m feeling pretentious. My family has a gaming group they kept from their college days, and they have a gameplay schedule they keep quite regularly. Guests over every Saturday starting at teatime (every day had a regularly scheduled teatime, naturally), gameplay and presented snacks until suppertime, the game ends at that time or earlier, and then socialization and dessert after supper. A nice rhythm, certainly. There’s a whole space to discuss in-person RPGs as within the wider context of hosting guests as an artform in its own right, and as a child I certainly appreciated the consistent snacks and dessert that were established as part of the pattern. Honestly, it’s a good format to use for a lot of reasons.

But, while I do enjoy baking, and tolerate socializing, my primary concern is gameplay and the impact on that. So let’s focus there.

With wiggleroom depending on how long people take talking about their week and getting ready, teatime to supper gives about four hours of gameplay. With a whole week between them, and time needed to recap and get back into the swing of things understanding what we were dealing with last time, there’s a tangible difference between two beats that happen in sequence within a session, and one beat that happens at the end of one session and moves on to the beginning of the next. The gameplay style of that table is very “competitive thought experiment,” so to speak. The challenge of a given adventure is a set of parts of the world that are tangled together in some way, and the players need to pick apart how they want to rearrange them. (This is a bit vague, but unfortunately it doesn’t get more specific than that – it’s a table that heavily enjoys engaging with the metaphysics of a world, and usually the mechanical gameplay ends up tangential to the core of the experience, engaging with the GM’s proposed thought experiment and countering with a new model.)

Since that’s a very heady topic of gameplay, the gap of a week yields a tangible sense of “wait, what were we thinking about last time?” and having to get back into the headspace, before progress can be made. As a result of that, there’s a desire to not interrupt a given ‘step’ in between sessions. Usually, the puzzles that encompass gameplay are there to frame whole adventures, so it isn’t a matter of making them short enough to last only one session. Instead, the emergent gameplay pattern cut things down into a series of concrete steps to either get information or enact a plan, with a middle section that is entirely players talking back and forth to compose the plan in the first place. Whenever it’s time to hit the next step on the big list of how to save the world this time, but the cutoff time is only half an hour from now, that usually prompts a stop for later. And, conversely, looking for that advance stopping point became an incentive to write plans that split up into concrete steps that can be interrupted by dinnertime.

Plus, humans aren’t infinite idea engines. If the session end is looming, it’s very common to say “let’s stop and think about this for a week” – and usually results in better plans. Then, over the next week, the players percolate a few thoughts, and the next session’s startup phase of “what were we thinking about last time?” is accompanied by the new questions and schemes they’ve thought up during the break. Sometimes it goes the other way, as well. The players plan, or propose, or just impulsively do, something the GM hadn’t thought of or planned past, and they look at the clock and go “right, let’s call it here and I’ll take a week to think through how that would work.” The break between sessions becomes a resource of human thought time, and playing around that break warps the session to try to maximize its utility. This isn’t even an instrumental consideration – this is coming from players who are just interested in thinking about thought experiments in fictional worlds a lot, and trying to shape the format they’re working in to make that work as best they can.

None of the games that group plays have discrete rules on sessions of gameplay. Conceptually, they could be entirely continuous streams of gameplay that last until the universe collapses, and the game would be just as happy. But, the players are humans with lives and such, and the session structure is imposed as a set of rules to surround the gameplay and fit it into those lives. It’s just that, because of that imposition, the gameplay itself is reshaped.

Of course, it’s certainly still impactful in games that do have rules on the timing-structure of play. I’m in a game of Glitch – online, in text, but with a designated session time we all attend weekly and only play then. It’s rather more stochastic than the in-person full course hosting in my family group, ending when one of the players needs to leave and beginning at a less distinct time. But, it’s a consistent session, and it does have a few of the same effects. The break between sessions produces a sense of separation, and an in-character feeling of “wait, what were we doing?” that usually lasts for the first 30 or so minutes. It being in text helps backread, on that front, but it’s still there.

But, the thing is, Glitch is not a game where you can just flow through an endless stream of gameplay uninterrupted. It cuts the gameplay into discrete units called Chapters, as short subsections of the gameplay roughly trying to cover about as much as a chapter of a book might. Chapters set the pacing of recoveries and XP growth, and in turn have their own pace set by a resource called Spotlights, which players can throw at things to get more information and/or go “hey, that was interesting to me.” Each player gets two Spotlights a Chapter, and they serve as both a marker and a quota. Once everyone burns their Spotlights, the Chapter should be over – and, conversely, when the Chapter is over, the players are rewarded for having spent all of their Spotlights.

Glitch, in person, expects a session to cover a few chapters. A handful, depending on pace. But, one of the downsides of text (which we will get to, trust me) is that it’s a fair bit slower than talking. I mentioned that I’m usually faster at reading and writing detailed monologues than speaking them, and that is true of me. But not only is it not true of everyone, it’s also kind of focused on detailed monologues. Just writing this one sentence is notably slower than if I’d chosen to speak it aloud, even as a seasoned typist. (What a meager boast.) And, since text gives more room to revise and plan things out, and less potential to stumble over one’s own words, the format makes it more tempting to indulge in such a monologue – which, of course, slows things down even more. A feature more than a bug, to my tastes, but it means much less ground gets covered.

So, the implicit rule that emerged at the start was relatively intuitive. One session, one Chapter. That helped pair the bookkeeping from the end of a Chapter with the separation at the end of the session, aligning the needs of the format well. But, Chapters also have their own pacing and quota. The result of the intuitive answer had been that the players now each had to blow two Spotlights, every session, or things would lag behind. I proved to be one of the weak links here – Spotlights are a resource that have more and less effective uses, and I’m pretty strongly inclined to try to get the most bang for my buck in a situation like that. From the game itself, that would be expected. The sessions tended to cover only one or two scenes, which is light for a Chapter even per the rules’ descriptions thereof. Them being dense enough to warrant several Spotlights was in part emergent from the greater detail that text play can afford – but not eating the whole party budget would make sense. However, the session timing locked it in as an ending either way. The system no longer had the pacing control it was asking for. Instead, the pace was defined externally, and the pressure applied backwards. The pacing defined the length of a Chapter, which defined the rate in which Spotlights needed to be spent – the intention of the system was the rate of Spotlights being spent would define the pacing of Chapters.

Eventually, we just got into the habit of doing intermissions at session breaks. Some Chapters could cover multiple sessions, that was fine. Most did, in fact, and this allowed Spotlight spending to slow down to match its more natural pace. It helped me appreciate the mechanic more instead of fretting about it as a quota. (It also became one of the core motivations for writing this post.) Decoupling the power of the session from being a force to reshape the game directly worked out well, when the game was already working to do that in its own right. But, of course, it still impacted it in some ways. After every intermission, there’s a bit of a “hiccup” in the characterization – everyone moves, slightly, and focuses on things they weren’t focusing on just a moment ago. After all, for the players, it’s been a whole week, and they’re trying to catch up to where they were.

Glitch‘s pacing mechanisms are, admittedly, not the most common form of such things. I like them, and I find them interesting, but I’d expect it to be a bit of an outlier to some. But, defining the pacing and timing of a game is a thing a lot of rules do, even if they don’t look it.

I’m in a game of Wyrdwood Wand.

It has a similar format to the Glitch game in how it’s run – text gameplay, set-time sessions, a bit of wiggleroom for when it ends. However, unlike the Glitch game, the players are all on a call to discuss things, make jokes, and plan out what they’re going to do as a group. This helps with the social feel of it a bit, but more importantly – it’s there for planning things out in combat.

Wyrdwood Wand is a tactical game. You’re playing students at a wizard school, and that means roaming around with magic getting into fights because wizards are all irresponsible hooligans at heart. I’ve talked about my appreciation for tactical combat games on here before, so it’s probably not much of a surprise that I’ve been having fun with it, but, for now, the important thing is – combat is expected, complicated, and takes a while to resolve. Running a round takes a while, fights last several rounds, you need to consider your position on a grid map and coordinate your actions with the other players to push things your way. In short, for a roughly-three-hour designated session time, a fight is gonna eat up a lot of the time budget.

In fact, it results in a similar shape as the home game. A longer fight takes the full time, and a shorter fight takes enough time that we usually call the session after it’s resolved, to resume after the fact. The session division wants a logical stopping point, it always will. Emerging from that, sessions can be split into two categories – [combat sessions] and [fluff sessions]. Splitting up a combat is pretty awkward, if it can be avoided, so it works the other way, too. If, in a fluff session, we make it to a point where the next thing we’d do is a fight, we’re likely to call it early and do the fight next time. That, of course, makes the distinction with a combat session even starker. There’s very little overlap between the two.

To some degree, this has its upsides. You can prepare yourself differently based on what sort of session you’re going into, if you know what’s coming. I can relax more if I know a fluff session is upcoming, and I can spend less time thinking about characterization if I know it’s a combat coming up. Honestly, it’s a rhythm I like! But, once again, we can see the shape of the session impacting the shape of the gameplay, and there very much are knock-on effects. The idea of a [random encounter] is essentially unimplementable without disrupting this setup. If a fight is upcoming, there needs to be enough time before it to run the setup for a fluff session, or, having it close enough to be able to jump in with relative speed once the session begins. That takes a fair bit of advance planning on the GM’s part, and foreknowledge on the player’s part once a session hits its end. That also works pretty well for our group, and I enjoy the result of the format, but, for a group that didn’t? This rhythm would be a solid problem. And, if they didn’t follow it, they would hit many more consistent interruptions mid-fight from the end of a session. Considering the relative complexity of a tactical combat, the “where were we?” phase at the start of the next session would have a lot more impact in that dynamic. …That’s a difficulty parameter! Depending on how fast it takes a player to boot up and get a handle on everything, that could just make the fights more difficult with everything else being equal! Because of the play format, something entirely outside of the designer’s control!

And, that’s just what sessions can do.

You don’t even need to have those!

Perpetual play

I’ve also run a game of Glitch.

It never had a single session.

The game was run “play-by-post” – technically a misnomer, it was done over Discord rather than a forum, but, Discord posts are also called posts, so, I’ll call it that nonetheless. (Or rather, I’ll use pbp from now on, it’s a convenient abbreviation.) Players wrote back-and-forth asynchronously, whenever they had the free time, and the game progressed at a pace determined largely by when they were available to keep writing. Nobody else needed to be active when they wrote, either. People who needed to respond came and read what’s been posted when they had the free time, and responded only then. A session has to have every player experiencing the same thing at the same time. In pbp, the text backscroll isn’t just a tool for reminiscing or catching up, it’s integral to seeing what happened since you last played.

Naturally, this means that the players were not experiencing the same thing at the same time. Nor were they ever gathered in the same place. There was a shared space of the chatroom, and occasionally they all spoke together at the same time, but, that was the exception. Even there, it was often a conversation with only two players, or three, at any given time. In play, this was enforced further. The vast majority of play occurred in back-and-forth scenes between I, as the GM, and exactly one player. Their character, alone, dealing with the world. In cases where there were multiple players present in a scene, predictably, gameplay slowed. One “pass” of responses had to wait for the schedule of three or more players – if players A and B were available, but it was C’s turn to go, that window of opportunity would be wasted.

For some games, where keeping the party together as a group is desirable or necessary, this would be untenable. The format and game would be a bad match. And, indeed, when doing pbp with such games, it’s generally best practice to keep the whole group together in play – and thus, deal with the resulting slowness. For Glitch, however, a game of largely solo scenes is a functional way to play. It just is also not a way to play that one would so easily arrive on in different formats. In a live session, a scene with a subset of players is empty time for those not involved. The ability to facilitate more solo scenes is a virtue of asynchronous play!

Format shapes gameplay, and gameplay shapes format in turn. In the interest of leaning into these strengths, and avoiding the empty time problem, I had the chatroom contain multiple active channels of play at a time. Each one would be “occupied” by a given scene, if someone was active there, but, if another player wished to play their own scene, they could go to another channel and occupy that. This put strain on me as a GM, in that I was running multiple scenes at once – but, since they were running asynchronously, I found it manageable. (Undoubtedly, though, that strain is a limit on the utility of this format, for GMs who aren’t up for handling all that.) In return, it allowed all or most of the players to be active at a time, despite doing solo scenes. This would be impossible, or at least highly awkward, in a voiced game – two strings of sound running at a time conflict, whereas two lines of text do not. (A synchronous text game, like the aforementioned Wyrdwood Wand game, can pull it off, but the strain on the GM is magnified due to time pressure.)

This, then, introduced a new question of its own. Timing.

Two scenes are running concurrently. They both run the risk of resolving in a consequential manner for the world at large, or at least the playgroup.

Which one happens ‘first’? Which scene is in the past of the other?

The simple answer is that they are parallel in-world as well as in the real world. But that opens up its own questions. Scene A finishes, and scene C is commenced as a followup some time later, all while scene B is still running. Was scene A contemporaneous with scene B? Was scene C? If it’s both, but the in-world distance between A and C was sizable, then we have forced scene B to occupy a long stretch of time. Awkward, and arbitrarily punishing, too, if scene B has slowed down because the player involved suddenly got real-life busy. You would not want to force realtime and in-world time to be synchronous like that, at least not casually.

So, what, then? What if scene A refers to the events of scene B? A casual choice, which then becomes awkward as scene B resolves in a way that contradicts what was said. Do people just agree to not acknowledge events in parallel scenes until they resolve? What if scene C is a narrow window of opportunity to resolve one of the problems opened in scene B – but only if that problem is not resolved within the remainder of scene B itself? You could pause scene C until scene B resolves, but now the busy player in scene B is holding up the game for everyone, and that stresses them out unnecessarily.

This is the problem of atemporality. It’s a problem that any parallel process will have. If the gameplay is dependent on the results of a given scene, and often it is, it’s something to worry about! And it only exists if you’re running a format where multiple scenes can run at the same time.

If you want a clear linear sequence of events, and no risk of confusion or unclear continuity on that front, a parallel-scene format is a bad pick!

(Of course, looked at it another way – if you want to give each individual character room to shine in their own scenes, a parallel-scene format is quite valuable for managing play in a timely manner. If you want both that and a clear linear sequence of events, one scene at a time is better, but then play slows down considerably, and many players are inactive at a time. It’s all tradeoffs, based on what you prioritize.)

That’s not the only problem I encountered in my Glitch campaign. Pbp may be a format I quite enjoy, but it has its downsides and tradeoffs all the same. Among other things – after about a year to a year and a half, the game fully petered out. Posting got slower and slower, some players ended up fully checked out, and, eventually, I just had to call it. This is possible in any format, of course, but it speaks to one of the implicit virtues of a scheduled session, be it voice or text: a sense of obligation.

A regular event is a habit. A regular group event is an obligation. Once you do something consistently, a sense manifests that one is expected to be present – that not showing up is letting people down. Scheduling something is, in a sense, a method of locking it in as something all participants must consider, and avoid intruding on with other obligations. …Now, admittedly, that’s a somewhat controlling way to view this, and social dynamics are more complicated than just sets of obligations and demands. But, a scheduled game has much more of a sense of obligation than a loose one.

For some, this can be a feature of pbp. Without the stress, they need only get to it when they can. However, it means habits build on themselves. It is easier to keep delaying it, to care less and less. That way, play slowly fades out to slower and slower paces. Pbp games are well-know for dying in this way – it’s a common observation about the format.

The commitment cost is also a factor. The more effort it takes to consistently participate, the harder it is to “justify” not doing so. In a pbp, it’s trivial. At most times, most players are not participating, in fact. There’s a state of [on call] where someone is next in line to post, but even then, the obligation is rarely to post now. In a scheduled text game, there’s more of an obligation – but there’s a significant bump, even in text games, if someone needs to take the step to join a voice call. The play actually being done by voice makes it even more stark when someone is addressed and doesn’t respond, because of conversational flow.

This is what in-person games do strongest, as a format. You have not only a designated time, but a designated place. Travel to and fro becomes part of the obligation as well, and, in turn, neglecting to appear leaves a very sizable space of absence. The more your absence would be noticed, the stronger the sense of obligation is to attend, or, at least, to inform in advance if that attendance will be disrupted. The more effort it takes you to attend, the more it remains in your mind as part of the calculations of what you are up for at a given time, and how you need to budget your attention and energy in life. A strong presence-in-mind and a strong level of consistency are what keep games going in the long-run. For both of those dimensions, pbp is a format that struggles.

There are ways to address these problems, but they’re often internal. For instance: “I will make a minimum of one post per scene each day. If I’m really not up for that, I will make a minimum of one post per scene each week.” That’s a set of internal rules I built from my own pbp experience, and it informed how I ran Glitch. It wasn’t a standard I forced on my players. If it had been, it might have helped when momentum flagged – but it also might not have. The rules are essentially a mental shorthand for a pbp-discipline I had to practice as a skill. Willfully keeping the game’s presence in my mind, and forcing a consistency upon myself, so that I could participate regularly. That does indeed work for me, and for the other pbp afficionados I’m familiar with, but it’s a skill and a form of discipline that had to be cultivated. RPGs are a taxing hobby in terms of mental dedication and stubbornness already, depending on the demands of a specific game. Adding another on top based on the specific format, and not one that is proxyable through the mental model of a social obligation to attend an event (which people tend to already have on hand), is a tall ask!

Plus, some games are simply not built well for play-by-post. There are complex factors that can determine this (a complicated-combat game is going to be a tall order due to a large amount of state tracking, and it’s even more awkward if there are a large number of reactive abilities, for instance), but, most straightforwardly – some games are just built to take a session as given. Fabula Ultima has character progression informed by XP, which is defined to be received at the end of a session. Several games have listed powers that are used once per session, or at the start of a session. Sometimes, like in Fabula‘s case, they try to provide a conversion rate. In that case, 4 hours of gameplay is penned as counting as one session – but, an hour of in-person gameplay will cover much more ground than an hour of play-by-post. For that matter, some playgroups may be faster or slower than others, even within the same play format. Patterns like these don’t really have a better answer than shrug and eyeball it. In the transfer of play formats, that eyeballing becomes necessary if the game takes a different format for granted.

There are, when getting into play-by-post, decidedly a lot of caveats and pitfalls to worry about.

Yet I’d still say it’s my favorite format of the lot.

The joy of writing

The flip side of the social dynamics of pbp, the loose time and the lack of obligation, is that each instance of a post has a lot more leeway to do its own thing.

I like monologues. I do them in real life. Arguably, this blog is an extension of that propensity. There’s a special joy in assembling one’s thoughts in detail and belting them all out, following tangents as they come up and making a whole show of oneself. I recommend giving it a try sometime! Find a topic you care about, collect some of your opinions on it, and just start bombastically declaring truths to the world. It’s a hoot.

RPGs, in part, I like because I can invent a whole new person, with entirely different baffling opinions on the world, and perform monologues from their perspective for a while. It makes for a nice change of pace. In reality, I will only ever get the chance to be myself. That’s a bit repetitive for my liking.

The trouble, as you may have discovered if you took my advice two paragraphs up, is that these things have a time and a place. People tend to react poorly to getting monologued at – or, at the very least, they may ask you to not be so loud. And request that they get a word in edgewise.

The same thing, unfortunately, happens in RPGs. Especially in in-person ones, or voice call ones, or any other occasion where sound is the primary medium of play. While you are speaking, everyone else can’t, after all. Processing two audio channels at once is not a trivial effort. If you really want to keep going, get everything out there, then everyone else needs to wait for you to be done first before they get to do anything of their own. If they’re not on board with this, you’re hogging all the gameplay time. If they are, then everyone rotates spending time on their whole thing – and that makes gameplay very slow. Even in the tables I’ve played at where that sort of thing is appreciated, usually the result is that only one player really gets to be in focus on their pontification for a given arc, just so the game can actually get a move on.

Now, to be entirely fair. My personal propensity for melodramatic self-centeredness should not be a higher priority than the smooth proceeding of gameplay. I don’t think it should be, and I wouldn’t want to play at a table where it was. We’re here to play a game, and that means actually going through and doing that is what matters most. Sacrificing that self-interest is something I’m perfectly content to do.

But if I could have my cake and eat it too, I sure would like to.

Text is, in the moment, somewhat asynchronous. Even when it’s a session run in text, as with the Wyrdwood game, multiple people can be writing at the same time. It doesn’t disrupt anything, unlike multiple speakers at the same time. Thus, there is a lot more theoretical room to embellish. There’s also the benefit of drafting. Once you speak a word, it’s spoken. Without a pre-drafted script, long speeches often get winding, miss key details, or fail to express what the speaker is trying to say. RPG play often gives a leeway for sloppy presentation on all parts, given that it’s usually done by amateurs for the fun of it, but still. Writing out a monologue lets you read it over and revise it before making it exist for anyone else. Drafting in text lets you make a second draft before you run with it – something you can’t really do in a verbal conversation. (Nontrivially, at least – you could go “I’m sorry, I fumbled that, can I get a do-over?” but whether your partner would allow that, and how much of the first draft they might still keep in mind, is quite variable.)

The downside of text session play, in this regard, is that it’s a race. You can spend time writing a whole long speech and revising it to suit your needs, yes – but at the same time, the other players are writing, and the circumstances may have changed by the time you’re done. If you still send the post, it has the atemporality problem in microcosm – the “canonical time” of your writing is a few posts before when it actually got received. If you don’t, then, all that effort is wasted.

In my experience, most groups are pretty good about “matching time” to one another. Giving everyone room to respond to something, and adapting how long it takes to write so nobody lags the whole table. The temporal looseness becomes an accepted oddity of the format, and rarely impacts too much, and everyone more or less spends the same amount of time working on a given response.

This works! But, it means that unless everyone is on board to write slow detailed monologues all the time, I don’t get my fix. Most commonly, the ideal post size to match up with everyone else’s time is either short rapid-fire conversation responses or a couple paragraphs of description for bigger actions. It’s just not the same.

The problem is [space consumption]. Fundamentally, a lot of words will take up a lot of space in the game. If you’re using your voice, that’s space nobody else can occupy. If you’re writing, it’s space that other people can occupy, which means they likely will – which means your foundations are unsteady, and you need to finish up before the window of opportunity vanishes.

In play-by-post, whenever you’re next to respond, you have as much space as you want. Even if what you write takes a long time to read, your partners have their own infinite window to read it, and respond as much as they like.

As a result, alongside the aforementioned room for monologuing, pbp often ends up with more of a detailed focus in its narration. …Not a focus on anything in particular, per se – rather, since there’s more room to grow what you talk about without worrying about space consumption, people write about what they want to focus on. There’s a lot more detailed visual description, for instance. (Though, detailed visuals in text are always struggling against the medium.) There’s often a lot more exploration of character interiority and psychology, which I find gratifying. Narrating not only what a character does, but why, and how they feel during it. Entirely doable in any format, of course, but competing with other space considerations. In a group that doesn’t really care about that, playing in-person would leave that sort of narration as a sometimes food, if that. In play-by-post, it’s a lot easier to just keep at it.

With space limits no longer a concern, a new upper bound comes into focus in play-by-post: how much is there to say?

When monologuing, or discussing character interiority, I find there’s a lot to work with. Area descriptions are another case where you can just keep writing. Visuals are difficult, of course, but poetic analogy is an excellent hammer for a world full of nails. In those case, you can often keep writing forever.

Those aren’t the only cases that exist, though. And in the proceedings of an RPG, often “what happens and who did what?” is the most important piece of information to focus on in gameplay terms. Narrate too many actions in one post, and you’ll be accused of running afoul of action limits, or robbing others of the window of opportunity to respond to a given action. (Even in games with no strict definition of either of those.)

Not an unfair accusation, to be clear! In a sense, you would indeed be weaponizing the format to dodge those windows. But, for the sake of avoiding the ensuing argument, this means the new ceiling on narration in play-by-post is the amount of room one has to do things in.

Most interestingly, the same sort of pace-mirroring that happens in session-based text games, or even in in-person games, also happens here. People tend to respond to larger posts with larger responses, to smaller posts with smaller responses. Since [the maximum amount a post can contain] is a vaguely-defined limit, people respond to one another’s signals of how much is in bounds. Doubly so, when the primary source of [what to say] is responses to the prior post. The more they say, the more room you have to respond.

That matching pace is one of the big obstacles to text gameplay as a whole, in my experience, and really something every play format struggles with to some degree or another. If players aren’t able to get somewhere in the same order of magnitude in terms of volume of play, and speed of play, and finding a balance between the two, then the game is going to flounder. Play-by-post as a format is most vulnerable to that sort of misalignment – another reason why it’s a format known for falling apart.

Often, the responsibility is on the boldest players to set the pace, and the other players follow suit. Not ideal in comparison to a detailed negotiation in advance, of course, but that’s how social interactions tend to go. As someone who is bolder in text than in person, and happy to write a lot, this works well for me. It especially works well for me as a GM – the GM role implicitly has more authority to set the pace, after all, and also has a lot of subject matter to write about.

It is a big if, but if you can get a group prepared to follow suit and match your pace, it’s a format that gives much more room for detail in play than many others.

The best* of both worlds

Play-by-post is my favorite format. But, my favorite experience in a game born from the play format was only partially that.

Lancer, as with Wyrdwood, is a tactical game with fairly hefty combat. Again as with Wyrdwood, said combats essentially take a whole session to do. So, similarly, this would give room for the same split dynamic. Either a [combat session] or a [fluff session].

Instead, the game was run exclusively as [combat sessions].

That could easily have been the end of it. Lancer is a solid combat game, and it can function perfectly fine with characters in the margins orbiting around the events of play. In prior campaigns, that had more or less been what happened, in fact. But, here, the players were rather more invested in exploring the characters in detail.

So, in the time between sessions, the game was run play-by-post. Specifically, all the parts that would have gone into a [fluff session]. The game had a preexisting hard gameplay division – by extension, that became a natural spot to put a format division.

The foibles of each format worked quite well for their respective needs. Combat is regimented, requires group attention and coordination, and needs everyone involved at the time. So, it served as a regular session, with everyone on a call to plan and act. Between-combat character moments are essentially optional, and can fit as much or as little as people feel like. Pbp’s infinite space let people get into the weeds of writing and character psychology, if they so wished, and players who didn’t want to engage didn’t have to, due to the non-group scene format. Where play-by-post runs the risk of running slow or having people fall off, the weekly sessions established a hard cutoff time for each phase of scenes before the game would trundle on. Essentially, the game had a structured space of paratextual interlude scenes, running in between the actual gameplay. This was quite fun, and ended up spiraling out of control. Pbp does that, when it’s got a group of passionate writers.

While I don’t imagine this to be the upper limit of what play format can do for gameplay, this was a very strong showing. For games that can work for it, with such a division between mechanized gameplay and interlude moments, it’s more or less my ideal format, and potentially ideal RPG experience period. I would recommend it highly.

Howwwwwwwwwwever.

The very big if from the last section is orders of magnitude more troublesome here.

Let’s look at this another way. There is the same weekly obligation of a session, with lots of mental bandwith necessary for the session itself. In between, every week, there will be several running scenes of character interactions. Often, a queue of several interactions people planned to have, requiring a pace of around one scene finished per day. On top of that, the posting was doing all of the detailed psychology narration I discussed in the play-by-post section, and quite regularly got into emotionally fraught circumstances. That is a massive investment of time, energy, and emotional wherewithal. Frankly speaking, I only handled the game as well as I did because I was in college, and could tank staying up until three in the morning semi-regularly for the sake of some over-emotional mecha character drama. I can’t in good conscience present that as a cool and normal format to play your games in. It’s incredibly taxing, and for people who have many other things demanding their time and energy in life, that’s just not tenable.

Realistically, as I am now, I’m not sure if even I would be up for it again.

That’s the flip side of it. Every format has tradeoffs. Player time and energy are parameters that can be taxed to support the others. You can buy a consistent pace and detailed narration, but it’ll cost ya. And if your group isn’t all, as individuals, on board for that tax, that game is going to fall apart all the same.

There’s no format that doesn’t tax its players at all. It’s a human activity, that will require a nonzero amount of human effort from the participants no matter what. Sessioned games require having an obligation and sticking to it. In-person games require travel, or being a good host. Play-by-post games put the most weight on their players of the lot, because they’re always on. How much bandwith someone has to spare, and how much time, in particular, will determine what formats can or cannot work for them.

This fused format worked out well because everyone had the energy necessary to play it. This is true of every campaign, when you get down to it – people need to meet the requirements, or it won’t work out. But, understanding the requirements of the play format you’ve chosen will help you predict if it’s a good fit, before things start to go wrong.

Sometimes, of course, things change. At the start of my Glitch campaign, everyone had the momentum and energy for a dedicated long-term play-by-post game. After a year, many of their circumstances had changed. That’s just how it goes.

Building for the format

A lot of what I’ve discussed here today is roughly, for lack of a less-tiresome phrase, system agnostic. An RPG can be played in a variety of formats, so long as they facilitate the communication of game actions and the miscellaneous fluff that people expect. The texture of the particular play format chosen will have a mutative effect on the feel and shape of the gameplay, but, in a sense, that’s out of the designer’s hands. It shapes gameplay significantly, but they can’t really control it.

Speaking frankly, for as much as I am an advocate of designer authority, there isn’t much we can do about that. These varied play formats evolved in part due to practical limitations. Play-by-post appeals to players who cannot make a consistent committed session, for example. A game that insists it can only be played in one format, but is still meaningfully possible to play in another, will be played in that other format.

To some degree, mechanical constraints can hinder that, but even then there are workarounds. “This power can be used once per session” type options would appear to prohibit play-by-post, but in practice a given pbp group would just define their own custom pacing for the power. One could criticize that as failing to play the game as its own object, but, on the same token, a group with shorter sessions is mutating that power’s frequency when compared to a group with longer or snappier sessions. The variability is there from the get-go, so the homebrew is easy to defend. And we can’t ship the designer in with the rulebook to force them to stop.

It is possible to make games that are harder to play in certain formats. Lancer‘s large amount of reactive abilities makes it a struggle in play-by-post, as a player might come online and realize they need to contradict or interrupt something that happened three posts ago. (Atemporality turning into active retcons of gameplay, and that is a headache and a half.) Similarly, and perhaps more usefully, it’s possible to design games to be easier in certain play formats. The combat/fluff split of tactical games is excellent for the hybrid format, if your playgroup is up for it. A system with clear back-and-forth without interrupt powers allows for play-by-post, even with a given post containing a complex series of actions. Realistically, most games end up fine enough in a variety of formats – some dimensions just make things easier or harder. The best thing to do is to play in a variety of play formats, learn their needs and pitfalls, and just try to avoid designing something that leans heavily on a weak point (like precise reactive timing in a play-by-post). If you want to open yourself up to that format, that is. It’s a design goal to be measured against any other – I like Lancer‘s reactive gameplay enough that I think it’s worth the inconvenience specifically for pbp players, for instance.

Most interestingly, in my eyes, are games that design directly entwined with a given format. The fascinating This Discord Has Ghosts In It is an excellent example of precisely that. …It’s also kind of mutually exclusive with everything I’ve discussed thus far. There is one correct format to play Ghosts – on a Discord server, with defined channels both text and voice. You can do it in other contexts, but only by trying to reshape those contexts to form the same format-shape as the necessary Discord server. It’s fully pre-defined.

This is a somewhat-expected quality. Ghosts describes itself as a live-action roleplaying game, just, done on Discord instead of live. LARPs are somewhat fascinating in terms of play format, and a bit of a glaring omission from this post. I simply do not have experience with LARPs myself, and don’t want to speak in hypothetical there. However, I’ve read a few LARPs, and, the notion of one on Discord isn’t incoherent much at all. Actually doing a LARP in live-action is the least important factor – primarily, the requirements are that each character has their own defined role, navigates the space individually, and off-and-on interacts with other players based on the structured rules of the LARP. More than anything, it’s a parallel branch to the GM-and-party roleplay setup, rather than being about physical space per se.

However, the physical space directly informs that design, in a way that does line up with what’s been discussed prior. The real world can parallel-process. While you read this, around 8 billion (at time of writing) other humans are contemporaneously doing their own things in the world. Hence, a LARP can be designed more directly around one-on-one interactions, in the same way that those can occur in pbp. (Ghosts transplanting the format to Discord, where I do play-by-post party-based RPGs, tracks perfectly.) LARPs tend to want to be able to accommodate more players than a party, and have them serving as opposition to one another – the format of a group of people running around doing things is a lot hard to coordinate and have everyone negotiate towards a common goal, after all, than a smaller group sitting at a table.

Interestingly, of course, this is an evolutionary branch from TTRPGs. (At least, partially.) One of the most popular LARP games is the famously-tabletop Vampire the Masquerade. Transformed to remove any semblance of party unity (which was already somewhat tenuous-to-nonpresent in the tabletop version) and setting people with competing agendas against each other, while also discarding mechanics it’s more awkward to resolve when not sitting down at the table with many rulebooks and notes to reference (no great loss, in that Vampire‘s weakest aspect historically is the game part).

As for how best to design for LARP as a format, again, I don’t want to speak in hypotheticals when I lack the experience to be confident about what does and does not work in the medium. But, the self-declaration of Ghosts as a LARP reveals the sizable impact of format, specifically by rejecting that format. It is not played live action. However, the shape of play is taken from games that are played live action – and that shape emerged in response to the foibles of live action as a format, with an attempt to focus on its strengths and bypass its weaknesses! And then, choosing Discord as a new format, because it can leverage similar strengths.

Ultimately, I suspect these observations are most useful to a GM, rather than a designer. Unless someone is designing strongly for a specific format, such as Ghosts – and if they are, I’m sure they don’t need me to tell them to consider the quirks and needs of the format they’ve chosen – the design pattern just needs to be functional in terms of the game itself. The designer needs to make their game board the right shape, but there’s only so much they can worry about the various tables of the world. It’s worth thinking about, but it’s not the primary focus.

As a GM, however, this is a major factor in how a game will feel, how a game will play, and what parts are emphasized or omitted.

Learning to pick the right format for the right system, and the right format for the right group, is as much a skill as learning to pick the right system for the right group. They all impact each other, quite significantly.

The same game with the same group in a different format is not the same experience.