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!
A very nice (and lengthy) article. I would say the chosen method of gaming depends entirely on the group dynamics. You were introduced to D&D through online gaming, whereas most others (as you state yourself) physically rolled their first dice at the table.
If you still play with the same group as the one you started in, and never have been forced to brave the internets in a quest for gaming buddies, the game will become more and more of a social event where you drink and eat with friends and fool around a lot more.
Now I’m not saying that playing online can’t be a social event… Au contraire, it can probably be great fun and you can still drink and eat and talk about other stuff. What I am saying is that such a transition from desk to desktop would be awkward to gaming groups in the same ‘phase’ as I am.
But your article did shine a light on a different aspect of online (text) gaming; the writing and the role-playing aspect. The bar for role-playing (and contributing in general) for shy players is probably set much lower in an online environment, and I never even thought about the nice practice and sharing of writing techniques and styles that online gaming facilitates. This stimulation of writing and role-playing will probably not exist when you play online with skype and cams…
Anyway, I get the point and see the advantages now. I would be very willing to try it in the way you described it. Since I plan on leaving my country for a few months next summer, it might even be a great way to keep the group playing in my absence, which is (go figure) one of my “major” problems should I leave my home and native land.
Finally, again my compliments. Good form! Looking forward to the next part. Many black sheep and platypi (keepin’ it pseudo-Latin, yo) to you too!
Nice article, one small thing to add.
Having all those posts/chat logs archived in one place makes the game’s history much more alive to people. My game has been running for 15+ years with the last 5+ years of it being online.
The stories that have become our own little mythology from ‘the old days’ are seeping farther away as newer players refer to stories that they read in the chat logs. Just having all the content from a game session in one place really helps to clear the debates about “wait a minute you ruled this way last month” or “what was that lead dwarfs name?”
I have found that I have a small handful of people that can not make the leap into live roleplaying but do like to read the chat logs and or contribute character sketches, etc. on the site.
I do feel that online roleplaying is the way of the future, as it stops a lot of the ‘how do I compute that attack’ problems from happening. The program of your choice handles it and you just worry about the role, not the roll.
BOB
@Dutchman: Yeah, I definitely realize that my strange beginnings have a lot to do with my comfort on this medium, and the sense of community I have. For those making the transition to tabletop, it would be awkward at first, especially if you constantly have to play with strangers because you don’t have net buddies who D&D. I’ve sort of been desensitized to that by now, because nearly all of my games have been with different crews at the helm. But I think there’s also a bit of fun in playing with strangers, at least in the real time mediums (in play-by-post there’s more of a disconnection between the players, and you really play only to play.) Thanks for the compliments!
@Bob: Indeed! I love reading chat logs myself, and I’m always asking around for them whenever someone I know is having a game I’m interested in. A massive drive crash a few years ago practically wiped out all of mine, and I mourn their loss to this day.
Wyatts last blog post..What the heck is a drabble?
Two years ago, I GM’d a play-by-post game for my old gaming group, which was scattered across the globe: I was in China, someone was in Australia, another two were in Scotland, one was in the States and another in western Canada. That’s four continents! The game lasted a decent length, but it eventually fell apart. Three months of real-time was about 36 hours of game world time.
And that can be the only issue with PbP or online gaming (other than the lack of direct social interaction): What could be done in person in a 4-6 hour game can take weeks to accomplish in a PbP game.
Rafes last blog post..The Three "R"s of Session Planning
Great post Wyatt, thanks for stepping in.
When you said that you did online gaming, I didn’t know that you were playing text only. The points you bring about making this more of a literary experience and exploiting the practical realities of text RPGing gave me many good insights in my own interest to play such games.
Once again, thanks my good man!
@Rafe: Yes, PBP is extremely slow. That’s one of the cons I will be discussing when I hit the “Mediums” post. It’s also got problems with flaky attendance.
@Chatty: In D&D 4th, we also have maps as a general reference. For Gametable, we play with the map for combat, and pay more attention to the chat block at other times. But yeah – thanks to you for the opportunity and praise!
Wyatts last blog post..What the heck is a drabble?