Handling A Legion Of Padded Supermen

Hi there everyone, this is Wyatt Salazar, the world’s only biological nuclear reactor (CAUTION CAUTION) from The Spirits of Eden and now also The Amusing Fantasy, standing in for the Chatty DM who’s currently questing for Gen Con, as you know. He still has plenty of healing surges and daily powers left and I wish him the best of luck on that boss battle. But enough about grids.

I’m Okay Guys, I Have 1 HP Left

D&D 4th Edition is my current de-facto choice for gaming. One of my favorite and least favorite additions to the game are the hit point and healing surge systems. There was something about D&D 3.5′s reliance on magic or money for healing that really bothered me, because I liked the rationalization of hit points that D&D 4th Edition uses now, and have always used it.

Losing buckets and buckets of blood and organs in a fight with an ogre only to have a cleric patch you up to lose that many buckets again in the next fight just did not make a lot of sense to me (yes, even with magic). I   liked the idea that hit points could represent things easier to recover, like morale or just manly grit. The punch to the face didn’t break your jaw and cause you to cough up your tongue. In fact, it might not have been a clean hit at all, despite the attack connecting and the hit points lost.

Might sound silly to you, but I love that sort of thing, rather than the idea that hit points represent, I don’t know, some esoteric amount of flesh and blood you’ve lost. I also happen to hate hit locations rules. That’s unrelated, but I just do. (Chatty DM: Wyatt, King of the non sequitur)

I like Healing Surges because they represent that ability to get back in the game, because the damage you’ve taken was not fatal. They also allow more than Clerics to heal reliably and potently. A martial character can “heal” himself or others also.

The Problem With This

Healing surges present an illusion of invincibility when looked at over a long term. A player or DM sees 10 healing surges on his Fighter and thinks of it this way: the Fighter can regenerate its full hp two and a half times today. This gives the player a sense of fearlessness and the DM a sense of dread. Your character can die three and a half times today, or become bloodied seven times today, and you’ll be back up in no time, just spend a healing surge and gain that 1/4 of your HP back.

Your instinct might be “well, if players can heal that much, and standard encounters aren’t hurting them, I should have really powerful monsters fight them that can deal a lot of damage, that’ll scare them!”

The problem with this is that it’s not really true – in the short term players can’t spend all their surges whenever they want unless they have enough surge outlets (powers and potions that can heal by spending surges) to cover them.

Second wind covers 1 surge each encounter, leader can do 2 each encounter with class feature powers and more with their other powers, non-leaders tend to have one or two outlets as well, and there’s potions. This may seem like a ton of things, but aside from leaders, I’ve not seen players picking healing powers highly over damaging or buffing powers.

So your super powerful monster may end up killing them all, not scaring them, and they may only be able to spend 2 or 3 healing surges in the process, unlike the grand 100% recoveries you imagined. Rather than add danger and lethality, you nailed the portrait to the wall with a bulldozer.

Usually the longing for gritty, difficult encounters and frail PCs is one that throws back to fantasy literature like Lord of the Rings, where you see heroes running from any enemy that seems too large and generally treating their mortality quite seriously. D&D 4e PCs might try to kill the Balrog and loot the body and that’s a state of mind not many people like.

So before trying to put a Level 15 Balrog analog in your Level 8 game to scare your players out of their metaphorical coat of invulnerability, try a couple of other things first and see how that works in ending the invincibility notion and adding some  element of danger (or at least, having your players act like there’s danger).

Wyattlutions To The Problem

So what do you do about this? How do you handle it? Here’s some of the things I do before I even send one enemy out.

•Ask Nicely?: Ask players to act more like regular people would in their situation instead of metagaming. Yes, you’re a legendary general who can make people move out of their turn, but you’d probably still be at least a bit frightened and wary of a 5 story dragon, not thinking about killing and looting it. Treat your character like the only one you’ll have, not an utterly disposable game avatar. Even if you’ve done all your HP math and you’ve realized that a string of balanced encounters probably won’t put a dent in you, don’t act like you own the world because of it. To your PC, healing surges don’t exist. It’s just him getting lucky.

•Tell Them Straight: I often tell my players that I will be presenting encounters that are unbalanced and that they should know this up front, all their metagame analysis will be mostly fruitless. I don’t say this with the intention of actually throwing an Oni at a bunch of level 3 players or to destroy the rules base as they know it. I do it to get them in the mindset that this is going to be my game, not the DMG’s balanced encounter guidelines that they’ve memorized. Even if it IS going to be the DMG’s balanced encounter guidelines in disguise, it can help cause a shift in attitude.

•Burn Surges: Wizard’s of the Coast has begun using this method to get PCs to spend resources. Newer skill challenges, for example, have consequences that require expenditure, or punish failure with the loss of, healing surges. Healing surges are entirely abstract, and if you feel like your players are riding too high and loose because of healing surges, you can now, quite within acceptable rules, find ways to get rid of some of them. Not only that, unless you run them entirely out of surges, this isn’t a highway to a total party kill like an over-leveled encounter might be, and still makes the players more wary.

But if you absolutely must have a high level, extremely dangerous and unbalanced encounter in your game to scare the bejeezus out of your players and make you feel all macho again as a DM, please consider doing the following things:

•Drop Potions Beforehand: The Potion of Vitality may say Level 15, but lets face it, at level 8 or so, the Potion of Healing is crap. 10 hit points per surge is a waste. If you want to have more difficult encounters but don’t want to massacre PCs, drop some of the next tier’s basic healing potion somewhere. This gives PCs a good, reliable healing surge outlet that can keep them from getting stomped, but it doesn’t do damage, doesn’t cripple the opponent, so it won’t downplay the difficulty.

•Have Escape Routes: Aragorn and company didn’t sit there fighting the Balrog, they ran. If your PCs don’t run immediately, give them the option to later. Most PCs playing D&D 4e, I’ve noticed, don’t think that running away is an option. They see it as losing XP because the encounter wasn’t completed. I know, I know, this mentality is unhealthy, trying to maximize the amount of XP you earn in the game isn’t a mindset I want in a PC. But if you give XP for running away, you encourage it as a viable option. Prepare a skill challenge for escaping one of your psycho overpowered combats and reward its successful completion. If they fail it, allow them to try it again, don’t just cut everything off and have them all get wiped by the monster. Show them that the world does have horribly powerful things that they can’t kill, and more importantly, that they don’t have to kill them.

•Add Houserules?: Most people hate house rules, I myself rather like them. I’ve collected a bunch. If you’re thinking of using overpowered encounters to make things gritty, but you also don’t want the players to just suffer endlessly at your grasp, you may be able to tweak the game to allow you to this. We’re moving out of known rules territory here, but it’s worth a look. I don’t think the rules intended for level 8 characters to fight level 15 monsters either, so you might as well break them a little more, no?

Well, that’s what I wanted to talk about today.

However, Chatty told me that I could “even post an anime picture” if I liked, and I’d been searching up and down for what screenshot I wanted to put up here. I decided to go with this animated one from K-On! after careful consideration, because it really illustrates how I view myself giving this information.

Playing Online Part 3: Wrapping-Up

Chatty DM: Here’s Part 3 of Wyatt’s wordilicious series on playing RPG through text interfaces online.  I wish to thank him warmly for stepping in when I needed the break!

Hey there, this is Wyatt Salazar, your DJ for the night, and as we have done before (and before) we will talk online gaming!

Now that we have an idea of how it is played, and where to go to play it, we’ll talk a bit more about some very important subjects, including recruiting and how to start running it once it’s on the run. This article will concern itself mostly with GMs.

The player’s job online is very easy – he joins the game and he plays, much like in real life. The last two articles showed him how to play online and where, and that’s really all he needs to know. Now, by reading what the GM needs to know, the players will know how to make life easy for him.

Recruiting

A lot of people who start doing online gaming already have some friends they can bring to the medium alongside them, but some don’t, and unless all of your group agrees unanimously to it, you’ll probably have some holes left to fill.

This is where recruiting comes in. This is a major part of online gaming that can make a game or break it before it even starts. Most RPG websites will have a forum for finding players or recruiting, especially those that also have play-by-post boards.

This is where you would go to find players. RPG Forums are the best places to recruit, but if you’re part of a private forum with a good community, you could try to get non-RPGers interested in learning. If you can take the time to teach them, having fresh minds may help keep the game aloft more than hardcore RPGers who are already in two other games. But that’s all taste, really.

Before you start, have a good topic title in mind. You’re posting on this forum, among maybe hundreds of other topics, to try to draw players to your game. If your topic title is “D&D 4e Game on Gametable” then it’s not going to catch any eyes.

Now, if it is “The Unseen Scourge of the Gray Vale (D&D 4e Gtable)” then you have a better chance to hook people in. (Chatty DM’s unasked for editorial comment: I’d totally join a game called that!)

The title of your thread should have the system you’re running and how you’re running it – if it’s via an instant messenger, write the acronym for it (AIM, MSN, IRC, etc), write PBP if it’s a play-by-post, or the app you’re running it with (Mtool, Gtable, OpRPG, etc). Some people just plain don’t like a medium for their own reasons, and you don’t want them thinking you’re running a Play-By-Post, when you’re really running on IRC.

Also, try to resist posting the name of whatever module you’re running as the topic title (if you’re running a published module that is) unless it has a gimmick people would want to know. In fact try to resist telling people it’s a module you’re running at all.A lot of people, like myself, have played dozens of modules, some of them more than once, and if you tell me explicitly you’re running Keep On The Shadowfell, you’re projecting an aura of “same old, same old.”

Now, if you get me playing Keep on the Shadowfell and I can’t tell that’s what it is, you stave off both precognitive boredom and metagaming at once.

Your recruiting thread should, hopefully, have the following things, that will almost certainly ensure people are interested:

Introduction: This is where you give people a feel for the game you’re going to run. Like the title, this is another chance to hook them. Tell them the system, some backstory information (but not too much – this is a hook, remember, just enough that they can make a proper character), the kind of game (dungeon crawl, intrigue, etc), and how you’re running it.

You can supplement this basic information with any maps, images, short stories, your campaign wiki or blog, whatever you’ve prepared for the game beforehand. This is a big part of how a player will start judging your DMing if they don’t know you. That’s why I include a short story along with the plain introduction – to show people that I’m a creative type and give them something to go on about me.

Application Form: Best case scenario is you’ll have about 5-8 people interested at any one time, and in truly exceptional cases maybe a dozen or two. The only way you can pick one complete stranger over another is by, basically, a contest of some form. This is where your application form comes into play. Ask players to give you some information about the character they want to play. If it catches your eye, it’s in.

Stuff like Character Name, Gender, Race, Class (or role, or equivalent descriptor), Appearance, Personality, Backstory, Friends/Enemies. No crunch just yet – just imagination. People will either post this in your topic or Private Message (nearly every forum has this function) it to you. This is like a reverse of the intro – it’s what you will use to judge your players, based on how much effort they put into the application.

Terms: This is important. You have to lay the ground rules right now: What books you use, what point buy or dice rolling method for character generation, the level of the game, the starting equipment you allow, the date and time the game is on (if Real-Time) or the minimum number of messages you want per day (if Correspondence), but even more than that, etiquette concerns. This is where you address the level of maturity of the game you aim for, whether or not you’ll tolerate swearing or certain descriptive levels of violence or other mature content, or any other specific rules you wish observed.

Also, be sure to end with something like “You may ask any questions now” to cover yourself if you missed something.

Well, now that you’ve done your first post, you need to watch the people that join. A few things you can do is to look at their posting history. If you see them getting into a lot of arguments on forums, or if they’re already in a lot of games, you might want to consider that when you make your decision. This is something I skimp on a lot that has come back to bite me time and again. You’re playing with people you know nothing about, so it’s best to learn something about them before you pick them.

Some places offer average posts and total post counts. If somebody is active in the community, they tend to make good candidates for gaming. However, some people might be lurkers who have accounts for a long time but never post, and you might be overlooking them. It’s a toss-up and might seem complicated, but most people who apply for games tend to be decently nice. It’s very rare you’ll find somebody applying just to mess with you.

Running The Game

There’s different sets of things to do depending on what kind of game you’re running.

Correspondence: The basic things you need are a game thread (where in-character stuff happens) and a talk thread (for out-of-character discussion). If you’re playing in a place that gives you control over your forum, you can create subforums for this sort of thing. Otherwise, be sure that the OOC and the IC threads link to each other for easy access (provide the URL for the counterpart in the first post).

Your OOC thread is for talk related to the game, and (very importantly) for absences. If you’re not going to be able to post, say so. If you forget to say so, apologize after and explain why you couldn’t.

For players, it is important to warn of absences in advance, or to take a small moment to say “I can’t post today.” The first post of the OOC thread should contain links to the player’s character sheets (if you have control of the forum, make a separate subforum for sheets instead). Ideally, you will have these links because players made their sheets in an online sheet place – be sure to link your players to your favorite one so they’ll have their sheets in a format you know and enjoy.

Your IC thread is the game. Be strict about OOC talk inside the game – you don’t want to see your IC thread with a new post, and then have that new post be mostly about your player’s experience with Fallout 3.

Be sure to have your threads in order as close to the end of the sign-up period as possible. If sign-ups end, and you let a week go by without establishing threads and beginning the game, people will lose interest. For players, be sure to have your sheet set in stone as close to the end of sign-ups as possible. You want everything to rocket forward after sign-ups.

Real-Time: You want to keep logs of your chats for players who are absent to be able to read, or just for your campaign history. If you have a private wiki or campaign blog, keep the chats here for even easier access by the players. You should ask for a way to contact your players if they miss a session or if you need to send them materials to peruse before the session.

Some players have a habit of not handing you their sheets for real-time games. Always ask for a sheet. Either as a text document or a hosted sheet. Preferably both. Courteous players will have a sheet ready to go for you after signing up.

You want to be timely. Don’t cancel too many sessions unless you absolutely have to. Even if other players say they won’t show, you show up for anyone who does. Reward them for showing up. Be the rock that the players can lean on, so they know that you’re serious about running this game, and that if replacement players are needed, the game won’t just fall apart and waste everyone’s time. It’s the internet, so try to be as visible as possible, or you may become invisible.

Allow a few minutes before the game to just talk about whatever, socialize. Then right after the game, talk to the players about the game. Feedback is important. Ask for it. This also lets you see the player’s personal character. If they’re enthusiastic, or if they seem like they don’t care, or if they’re bitter about things. Make probing questions, and give good answers. Log everything. Make sure your players know that you are open to discourse. Even online, they might be afraid of approaching you about your game. Everyone should be open as possible.

You’re Online, Take Advantage Of It!

For real-time games run using map software, tokens are very important. A token is your character. Nobody wants to be “blank chip with a number 2 on it”. Grab an image, learn your software’s preferred token size (Gametable, for example, uses 64 x 64 tokens) and format, and make a face for your character.

Tokentool is free, easy, and does it all for you. But watch out, because Tokentool doesn’t handle megabyte-heavy images. This is important for people like me, who collect images online that range from a megabyte and above that they like to use. You may have to downsize them to get Tokentool to work with them.

A game soundtrack is awesome. Online, where a game soundtrack won’t interrupt the narration, it’s even more awesome. That said, I couldn’t really find many places that did what I wanted – to be able to upload an Mp3 from your computer and stream it to others. There are applications that do this, I’m sure, but I’m not much of a wiz at that sort of thing. I did, however, come across 8tracks.

It has its limitations, but it lets you make a small playlist of songs, save it on their site, and link to anyone to stream it. This lets you create mini-soundtracks and link your players to listen to. It’s also fairly fast and simple. Hopefully the audience here knows of some better ways they can tell me, but thus far, I’m digging this site. Here’s a sample playlist by me of some music from my computer. Yes I’m weird.

Guess voice and video chat go here if you’re so inclined, but again, I don’t recommend it. It just didn’t feel right to me whenever I did it. Try to live through your text, and see if you like it that way. It’s as slow or as fast as you want it to be, and as alive as you want it to be. And less technologically demanding.

Get into the online log trading community. I’m the creepy guy over there reading some other creepy guy’s romantic Eberron campaign. Ask people nicely for their campaign logs, and you’ll find that you’ll never run out of ideas for games. If you’re feeling down about your own game, read some logs. They’ll empower you – even if it turns out the guy’s game is worse than yours or far, far, far more elaborate and you feel like an ant.

Take advantage of image props. For forums, you will need to provide your own maps if you’re running a game that uses a map of course. For map software, you can get creative. For example, in gametable, you can turn practically any image into an underlay.

So you could, say, buy some of Wizard’s Dungeon Tiles, break them up, scan the pieces, and photoshop or GIMP them a bit, and you’d be running with pretty grids just like at the table (Chatty DM: That’s probably illegal but then again what isn’t with media today?). Or you can take a piece of grid paper, draw on it, and scan that too.

Your game is online, so you can even run it from your mobile! You can post in your play-by-post with any phone/mobile that has internet functionality. You can run chat games off of one if they can use AIM or something close. You don’t have to miss a session this way, especially if you’re using online sheets and image storage for your props, so every one of your resources is online and thus accessible from your phone/mobile/doohickey.

Also worth noting – all mobiles have some sort of text message and the really nice ones have email. Fast email. Email in your hands, all day, every day, everywhere. So as pointed out by Walkerp in the comments of the last article, play-by-email is quite viable from your mobile, especially if everyone has a mobile with good archiving and email features. What’s more, if the mobile also has full fledged internet, as mentioned above, a campaign wiki or blog, character sheets, everything is very accessible.

Run a joke game. Make fun of the fact that you’re playing online. Make video game allusions such as save points and cutscenes and even tutorials. Create an underlay of David Hasslehoff’s face on Gametable and use that as your combat grid. Make a grindcore soundtrack and tell your players it’s the boss music. Invite a guy named “Tarrasque” into your IRC chat then kick him after your players are scared enough. Run Maid: RPG. You won’t lose face – it’s the internet, you don’t have a face. Loosen up and see the possibilities.

And I guess that’s all for this series! Thank you all for being so welcoming and responsive. Special thanks to the Chatty DM for allowing me this great opportunity. And word up to the posse, Master Epyon, Helepolis, Dragoon Andrew, Mikeloop, Kuronoa, Faury, Nanoka, and all my other e-friends who’ve shown me such wonderful gaming experiences so far away from their homes.

Until we meet again, have lots of love, platypuses and black sheep.

Chatty: Once again Wyatt, thanks, I owe you one!

Playing Online Part 2: The Mediums

While I’m back in the saddle, I still have a few more guest posts for you during the holidays.  Enjoy!

Hey there again folks, thanks for the warm reception before, this is Wyatt Salazar from this place and that place again, continuing our chat from before about online gaming (and not the type you usually encounter).

Now that we’ve covered styles, it’s time to cover mediums, which also have a lot to do with styles. Each medium of online gaming has its own intricacies which will determine how you play, who you can rope into playing with you, where you’ll play, what you’ll eat during playing and whether or not you will leave play with your sanity intact. (Just kidding.) There’s something for everyone here (or almost everyone).

Now, though there’s numerous ways to play online, they all fall into one of two categories, which I like to call Correspondence Gaming and Real-Time Gaming. We’ll tackle them one at a time starting with the one less likely to give you any trouble.

Real Time Gaming

Pros: Real Time, more likely to succeed in the long run, easier to adapt to for tabletop folks

Cons: Scheduling troubles, learning curve, having to dig up the right tools

Real Time Gaming is any program where you can receive messages instantaneously. This might be as simple as an AIM Chatroom, or it might be an IRC chat loaded with bots and macros of your own design, and there are even programs designed specifically with this kind of gaming in mind. The basics needed are a chat room and a die roller, but for more complex games you’ll need more complex programs, and that involves getting into tabletop simulators.

Tools:

•Any instant messenger, including AIM, IRC or MSN, works well as a bare-bones tool for this kind of game. Some don’t have die rollers, so you’ll have to play by the honor system. If you want to avoid that, both AIM and IRC have ways of rolling die in chatrooms, so you might want to stick to those.

•Maptool is a dedicated program that allows you to host games and produce maps for them. Now, I will admit that I couldn’t get the hang of Maptool so I’m not the best guy in the world to recommend it. I would look into it if you’re a power-user who has time to get under the skin and make this baby purr. It’s lean, mean and loaded with features, and even if you don’t roleplay within it, you can use it to make maps. Therefore it’s not a waste to give it a look.

While you’re at it, Tokentool lets you make “tokens” or “pogs”, personalized character icons that take the place of minis on the virtual tabletop. It comes highly recommended and breathes a lot of life and personality into your game. It works with any online tabletop that supports square or circular tokens, so don’t be fooled by its status as an “accessory to Maptool”.

•Gametable is what I use for this sort of gaming. It’s small and easy to handle, but it does less than Maptool. For example, Gametable can’t produce a map for you to print out and use elsewhere, it can only make maps for itself.

However, it did what I wanted it to and it did it before my wire-thin patience ran out, so this is the one I can personally recommend. It supports tokens, which I feel is extremely important, as well as a very easy and intuitive system of “underlays”, pieces you put on the map that always appear beneath a PC token if a PC token is standing on it, which allows you to greatly customize maps. It also has dice macros that you can save and import later for use during your games (and every player can customize their dice macros or even create some from scratch via the program itself or in a text editor like notepad or Apple’s Textedit for Mac users, creating makeshift “character sheets” they can upload).

I also recommend an absolutely excellent blog for learning to use Gametable and other online tools, By Decree Of The Czar.

•There is also Fantasy Grounds, which is pretty and robust, but it costs money, and it was kinda clunky in my computer compared to the fast little java programs mentioned above. But it’s an option nonetheless, and the learning curve is very small compared to the java programs because of its developed user interface. They recently came out with a second version of it, which I have not tried and which might be far better and faster than I’m giving it credit for. Also, it’s Windows only.

Style:

As mentioned before in my Style post, the way I tend to play these games is not with cameras and voice chat, but using the text chat room built into these apps. That’s what I’ll be talking about. All these apps come with a built-in chat that supports basic things like bold, italic and underline text, differentiated character names (some support more advanced things like color text.) My last blog post briefly talked about a difference in the styles and etiquette differences in online gaming. We’ll cover that with a bit more depth now.

In a chat room, the game can go by in real time, like a normal session around a tabletop. However, because messages appear instantaneously, you have more freedom to talk longer in each go. You can write, as said before, like you were writing a character in a piece of literary fiction.

However, because this is real time, you have to type fast enough to get your message across, and you have to keep an eye for what messages might appear before yours so you can correct anything you say. It’s happened to me more than once that I wanted to talk to a specific character who said before I could finish that they’re leaving the room. This meant I had to delete everything and start over, or follow the character, or otherwise change my message.

Also, many chat rooms have a text limit, like AIM. It gets very annoying when AIM tells you your message is too long, but it’s a reality you have to adjust for if you want to use it. Find a good medium between the sort of brevity you encounter at a tabletop, and the lengthy novel posts you find in a play-by-post.

Be descriptive, but not so that your single message eats the entire chatroom window. Keep in mind a few tips novelists use – some details are unimportant except where they aren’t, don’t devolve into purple prose, and don’t be afraid of omitting “said” or an adverb string if everyone knows who’s talking.

Because there is no face to face contact, roleplaying is much easier and freer. Players can roleplay male or female characters without having to fake a voice that might be awkward for them, and can say much more that they would around a tabletop, so it’s great for getting shy roleplayers to open up.

That being said, this can breed a kind of hard-ass gamer who thinks they can do whatever they want. IRC chats have a kick feature that helps get rid of people like that, but it’s something to watch out for when you’re building up a group. Set clear limitations on what you want in your game. Just because it’s text doesn’t mean raping, cursing, racism or bigotry is perfectly okay with everyone. Just like a book can offend, a text chat can offend. However, if the overwhelming majority of the group enjoys these kinds of elements, and a single player does not, then that single player may want to find a different group rather than disrupt the mechanics of the majority.

Correspondence Roleplaying

Pros: By correspondence (leaving a message for later), therefore zero consumption of time and zero schedule

Cons: Less likely to hold in the long run, can be grindingly slow if the group isn’t dedicated to it

Correspondence Roleplaying comes in two forms – Play-By-Email and Play-By-Post. I will politely discourage play-by-email, because play-by-post does practically the same thing with better archiving, better tools, less confusion of who’s turn it is or chronological order, and play-by-post is a smidge faster most of the time. Play-By-Post is the way to go for this, in my humble opinion. There are numerous message boards with play-by-post, but I’ll be giving ones with large and dedicated communities, ease of use, or ones that are focused mainly on play-by-posting as opposed to general RPG discussions.

Tools:

•Myth-Weavers is in my opinion the best one. It’s got a large community (as far as this sort of thing is concerned) and easy-to-use, intuitive tools for gaming.

You create an account, and then you can create a game, which gives you your own message board with up to 20 sub-boards, wherein you can set it so only people you allow can read or post. You can recruit on the boards or bring your friends.

It has a built-in dice roller, spoiler tags that hide text unless the viewer clicks a button, private tags that hide text in plain sight so they are invisible except to the person you intended to see it, beautiful hosted character sheets with linkable character portraits, and all the bbcode functionality (and more) of any professional message board. Among many, many other things. It is free, gorgeous and easy to use, and the admins are very approachable and visible.

•RPol is another very large one. The community is utterly gigantic. I will admit I don’t have an amazing amount of experience with this. The game interface is less intuitive and pretty than Myth-Weavers from my personal experience, but it seems to accept hard HTML code in posts and character documents (I made fancy table-character sheets for an Exalted game there once) so anyone who can make that work will find they have a lot of control over how their text looks. It also comes with your basic forum functionality. This is another one to try if you feel like scouting the options.

•Nearly any gaming discussion board you already frequent is likely to have one. You can find ‘em in Giant In The Playground, Wizard’s Official Forums, wherever. These are not dedicated, so you don’t get your own forum with subforums to control and all of that, and they might lack the advanced tools others have. There are some fixes for this

– Invisiblecastle provides a dice roller with archived rolls for players, and you can always use Myth-Weaver’s sheets without hosting your game there (though you HAVE to make an account in order to use their sheets – it’s worth it even if only for that!)

•Photobucket or Flickr can host those character portraits, maps and any other image props you’ll be wanting to use pretty easily. How will you make them? It’s as simple as making a bunch of grid maps with a spreadsheet chunk and Paint, or firing up The GIMP or Photoshop or Maptool and making something pretty. I prefer photobucket for maps because it has built-in painting tools for making quick cruddy-looking sketches and dots on maps. I prefer Flickr for character portraits because it automatically creates and offers multiple sizes from your original pictures and it’s a lot less ugly-looking to deal with, but its painting tools don’t cut it much.

Style:

There isn’t much to say about the style of a play-by-post that hasn’t already been said in the first part of this series. Posts can be very long. You might want to set a limit as to how long they can be, and what elements they can or can’t include, such as pictures or fancy fonts or colored text.

There are also some things you should watch out for in play-by-posts – for example, it is very rude to assume that an NPC or PC will do something for you and therefore including that in your post. This is called “godmodding” in some forums, and means taking control of a character not your own within your post. It’s best to avoid this.

You should set a limit on the minimum number of posts and minimum number of activity you expect in a game. I expect 1 or 2 posts a day, 5 days a week. If you cannot comply, I will unfortunately have to find another player. I also like to ask for any instant messaging or email addresses of my players so I can nag them.

This is unorthodox and rude of me to do, but it comes with the territory. This is why I often game with the posse, because I know they’ll respond and I know I can go nag them. If you don’t have a posse, and game with strangers, you can find the problem of dedication. A lot of PBPs fold because of a lack of dedication.

Because there’s no schedule, players become lackadaisical and make the game even more sluggish. As a DM, be active yourself and expect activity, and reward activity. Set a good example and be demanding. Also, get a posse. It’s the best.

Some basic niceties you should look for in a forum are spoiler tags that actually hide the text (button-click drop-down spoiler tags are my favorite – mouse-over ones are annoying to me) and image tags so you can post maps and such. Private text is cool, but not needed. A lot of people like color text to differentiate characters talking – if each player has only one character though, I don’t see the point. Dice rolling is nice, but most forum dice rollers are annoying to use, so I tend to default to invisible castle, which is easier than the often arcane rolling algorhythms most forums concoct.

And I think that’s all I wanted to say about that. Tune in next time when we’ll wrap up by talking about stuff you can do to spice up the game, more online tools, and maybe any questions anyone wants answered or topics anyone wants covered.

Once again thanks to Chatty for having me, and to the readers here for being welcoming and appreciative, and I wish everyone a lot of love, platypuses and black sheep.

I also apologize for how huge this post is.

Chatty's Guest: Playing Online, Part 1: Style

Chatty DM: I’m on blogging Hiatus until the week of December 20th.  In the mean time I post some of my old articles as well as guest posts.  Today, I’m treating you to the masterful penmanship of Wyatt Salazar, a rising blogger who’s got more talent than I could ever hope to develop.  Enjoy!

Well, hey there. This is Wyatt Salazar from Spirits of Eden (and from the yakuza hideout of RPG blogging) filling in for Chatty for a bit.

For these posts, you can think of me as that kid from Live Free Or Die Hard. I’m here with my laptop filled with documents and software and doohickeys to talk to everyone about a style of play that I think is misunderstood or gets a bad rep. And beside me is this wise, experienced, badass dude with a gun who can take metric tons of punishment (yes, measured in metric tons) and survive before shoving a pistol down somebody’s throat, while I cry a little and IM my best friend who lives in his basement using my mobile phone.

I apologize for that simile.

A little background. I started playing D&D around 2004-ish. I say -ish because I have a notoriously bad memory. It might have been 2003. Nevertheless, I started during the 3.5 era. Since then I’ve tried out pretty much every edition of D&D, with 4th Edition becoming my de-facto right now, as well as numerous other games.

My second-favorite games are Maid: RPG, Dive Into The Sky, and Cthulhutech, all three of which are probably not very well-known (except maybe Cthulhutech).

As well, I started D&D, and RPGs in general, in a very peculiar way. A friend of mine from a popular video game message board gave me a message on MSN Instant Messenger that he wanted to start a D&D group. He was looking for people who had experience with storytelling and since he liked my short fiction and fanfiction a lot, he thought I’d be perfect for it.

I thought “D&D? I hear that’s a little time-consuming to learn, but it could be fun.” So I jumped in. That changed my life pretty much entirely.

You ruined my life Master Epyon, and I will someday hunt you down for it! Sleep with one eye open!

Ahem.

But the point of that was this – I didn’t start D&D by getting invited to a guy’s house and sitting around a table, like probably most of you have. Rather, I began playing D&D online. This is probably something rather alien to most of you. You might even feel pity for me, that hasn’t experienced “real” D&D gaming. Well don’t – I’ve played tabletop plenty of times. I honestly prefer online. But that’s not my point either.

My point is to talk about this kind of D&D that’s “not real” to many people out there. Discussing the tools, the techniques and the styles of the trade, and maybe to ultimately cultivate an understanding that might even help you to try it out. All of this is based on my (hopefully wide enough) personal experience.

For the first post in this mini-series, I’ll lay down some rough basics, and discuss style. Style is very important, I feel, more than the medium is. Medium will be the next post, then finally, a post about sprucing up the game and avoiding pitfalls regardless of the medium you’re using.

What You Need:

•An internet connection and a computer

•Internet buddies

•A text-based communication method of some form (forum, IM, etc)

Now, I’ll have to put a disclaimer here that I don’t advocate the usage of voice communication, and video, and cameras, and all that fancy stuff these days. That stuff’s cool, don’t get me wrong, but I like the psychic distance created by not having anything to relate to from another player but text.

We’ll get to that in a moment.

So Skype, Google Talk, all these video/audio chat thingies, don’t use ‘em. At best, you’ll be trying to over-emulate a world of gaming (the tabletop) that you cannot satisfactorily create online. The physical aspect of the game is not easy to transplant over to the online medium. Seeing and hearing a person does not accurately represent being with them physically. This is why I never tried, and probably will never bother to try, a very high-tech sort of D&D gaming of that form. Rather, I was brought up on an entirely different style of gaming.

Literary Gaming? What Cannabis Is this?

There’s a major difference between speaking words and writing text, and it’s not merely in the senses utilized. When you write a long forum post or instant message, the entirety of the message appears in your recipient’s screen instantly (or when they refresh). It can then be skimmed, re-read, ignored completely, with ease. When you talk, people have to listen to you. Your entire message does not appear – it has to be given, sound, by sound. A person has to pay attention to it and allow it to gradually be known in full. So if you’re around a tabletop having a soliloquy, you are taking up a lot of everybody’s time.

At the most basic level, for this communication to be effective, nobody can interrupt you, or talk at the same time as you. You have monopoly on this time. For a DM, this is expected – but there are also three, or four or even five players around that have to share this time effectively, listen to each other, and express themselves. This often results in a brevity of the messages involved.

On the internet, communication is instantaneous and simultaneous. Furthermore, it is archived (to an extent). All this lends itself much better to a fatter textual style than a tabletop game would have. The description I often give to new people is “play like you were writing the story down.” Let me go dig up a post of mine (with some editing to take out all the BBCode that wouldn’t display, and make it more palatable to a blog post) from some game I’m in to kind of show you how it’s done – don’t worry too much about the medium just yet. For now, it’s just important to know that this happened in a forum, a message board. Here:

“Sophia is knocked slightly off balance by the attack, but quickly finds her footing, plants herself before the ork in front of her. Panting heavily, she swings her sword. Glowing black and purple aura surrounds her blade as she drives forward into a horizontal slash, giving a raging scream as she does so. She flows cleanly from the strike, leaping back and covering the giant ork with her roiling phantasms. She quickly delivers a slash to the smaller ork in front of her as she lands on her feet, as though to get it out of the way. “Don’t say I never tried to defend you,” She shouts to Adelpha, before steeling her eyes on the giant ork.”

(I attacked an ork, marked it, and then smashed a guy beside me. Also note, for this game, we were treating Orcs as Warhammer-inspired Orkz.)

Never minding the weirdness of this game (I’m not in very many normal games of D&D 4th Edition right now, as I prefer over-the-top crush the world down games), this is a pretty standard bit of gaming in the online world. You write so that people can see the action play in their head, like you’d imagine a good book you’re reading, being played by all your favorite actors. I tend to imagine what’s going on as a manga or comic book, but that’s just me – I’m a big fan of cartoons of any sort. I also read way too many comics, and imagining that event as a two-page spread is really awesome to me.

Though the post has to be left vague enough to allow the possibility I might miss in my attack, I expressed myself and the surroundings pretty thoroughly. Then, my DM would post, describing the scene how it played out from my roll results, and though the continuity might be a bit buggered at times, we don’t really mind as long as we can end with a good idea of how the scene played out.

Not all posts are like that though. As with a real novel, there has to be a rhythm, rather than just thick paragraphs all the while. Or people get tired. For example, later on in the thread, some of my creative juices for the day were exhausted and I came up with this masterpiece:

“Sophia tries to knock down the giant ork in front of her.”

Yeah, I’m a real Thomas Pynchon. People will dissect that post after I die for all of its deep literary themes.

The former, I would never try to do in a tabletop game. It would be weirdly involved and really an absurd monopolization of everyone’s time involved. The second would be more along the lines of what I’d do for that. But in an online game, it’s more fun if you do it the first way.

There have been posts and IMs in games where I have to copy and paste them into documents (which I have since lost, bloody screw) because they were so unbelievably badass. There was so much emotion and consideration in the writing that if I could have clapped and the person heard me, I would have.

This is one thing I always try to tell people about online gaming. You’re missing out on something if you just try to project the table into the online world, and try to see everyone through cameras and microphones. Rather, I encourage people to try to project themselves into text instead.

“We will try…Chak’s, first. If any of you lack faith in him, look at this as an opportunity to see that faith restored.” Sophia says. Whether or not she in particular views this as a test of any sort, she does not make known. However, she is betraying a hint of weariness now, at least in her face, and in the slowing down of the horrible effigies and ghosts roiling over her armor.

How do I see or interact with the other players? I don’t. It’s not really about us. Instead, it’s about our characters. Sure, we have out-of-character dialogue and planning, but it’s short, and in a forum, would be confined to spoiler tags or to a separate board. But in the game, it’s about the characters.

I use a third person writing style when I game to exemplify this. I’m not Wyatt, here. I’m Sophia Athanasia Peithos, Evil Paladin of Bane. What Wyatt thinks is unimportant at this time – the information the players and the DM want to see is what Sophia feels, thinks, and what she does or wants to do, not what Wyatt says he’s going to have her do.

Whenever Sophia swings her sword and calls upon her Blasphemes (a fluff change from the 4th Edition D&D Paladin’s “Prayers”), she is thinking and feeling. Even an acknowledgment of her current basic state, such as anger or frustration or even calm, arrogant sureness, is enough to spice up what might normally just be “I use my staggering smite power on the Orc.” Sophia isn’t using her staggering smite – she’s bringing down her sword on the enemy’s shoulder, the blade crackling with cold, black necrotic energy. When the orc’s flesh yields to the sharp steel, his body is seized by cackling phantasms, launching him away from Sophia (he is pushed her wisdom modifier in squares away, as Staggering Smite says).

This might seem time consuming, and it probably would take some getting used to for most people. This is in part why many play-by-posters and Chat gamers are also fanfiction writers, or aspiring creative writers in some other way. We’ve already got this love of descriptive prose ingrained, and we can spit something out rapid-fire in that way. When we discuss the differences in the mediums and their separate codes of general etiquette more in-depth, you’ll find that there’s sort of a barometer for this – play-by-post being what you saw above (and beyond), and real-time mediums being less dense and perhaps less intimidating.

And the reason we can do this is the simultaneous, archiving, textual nature of the internet. If I make a really long post or message? It can be skimmed. Or even ignored (though that’s not very cool of you). Or read later on. But it doesn’t consume as much of a session as it would if I tried that sort of thing in a tabletop, and it’s also a lot easier, I think, to pay attention to. Hence, why it manages to become its own type of game. It might not be the “real thing” to some, but I feel it is a legitimate entity, and a stunning and beautiful evolution of the game.

Next time, we’ll talk about the mediums of online gaming. Which one’s for you? Where do you find good places? What should you know? Good news is, the barrier to entry is very low once you have the style in mind! Until next time, have lots of love, platypuses and black sheep.

And give a round of applause for the Chatty DM folks!