I’ve had a lot of fun grilling Sarah Kahn over in the interview. Now it’s your turn!
So, if you’ve got questions for Sarah, or comments or anything really. If you’ve been involved in the online freeform scene and you’re experiences are the same or different from hers, this is your chance to speak up.
I’m hoping that this will be a pretty open discussion, free-ranging and all that. So, if there is something you wanted to ask Sarah to expand on, or a comment you wanted to make, here’s your chance!
Tags: Interview
Well, if no one else is going to jump on this…
Sarah, I wanted to ask you about some of your actual play. Now, you mentioned that some (many?) smaller functional games are secretive, so I don’t want you violating any expectations of your fellow players, but… Tell me about your play! I’m curious!
Thomas
No question, just a big thank you to both of you for the very insightful interview. :)
- Christian
Thanks, Sarah, this was awesomely interesting.
What do you want to know?
I’m playing in two fandom-based online games right now. One of them is a PBEM, and the other is journal-based but friendslocked (so it’s not so much a matter of Fight Club rules in my case as it is that I’ve just got nothing that I can link you to). They’re both Potterverse games.
The PBEM has just started up, really, and we’re contemplating moving to some form of blog software in the near future. As RPGs go, I’d say that this one is rather over-the-top with the meta-fiction. The PCs are a group of totally pathetic minor minions from the books–most of them little or nothing but names in the original source text–and the game takes place mainly within the time frame of existing canon. The narrative structure is parallel timeline/nested flashback. The tone is a blend of pathos, horror and black comedy: much of the fun of this game derives from the related facts that (a) these are characters who the original author writes flat as a pancake and has never treated with anything but the most utter loathing and contempt, and (b) it’s already canonically established that every single one of them is going to fail – and to fail Big Time – at most of the goals that any of them are likely ever to have held. Think something a bit like “My Life With Master,” right? Except that everyone is virtually guaranteed to fail. At everything. At life. And they don’t even get to die, the poor sods.
Heh. Okay, so thinking it over, I’m not really sure if this is the sort of game that has all that widespread an appeal. I think it’s great, though–it’s one long drawn-out role-play of “tell me why you fail”–and I’m enjoying it immensely so far. Then, I’ve a notorious fondness for the Pathetic Minions of Evil Overlords (which is one of the reasons that I was invited to play in this game in the first place – the group knew me and my fictive tastes all too well), I don’t mind hopelessness or depressing foregone conclusions in my games, and I’ve an extremely dark sense of humour. So this game is really very much up my alley, even if
I can see that it might not appeal to everyone.
On the system front, this particular PBEM uses a highly idiosyncratic rule set, much of which is designed to limit each scene to a single narrative voice. We also use more formalized rules for turn-taking and scene-staging than is at all the norm.
The other game I’m playing is far more traditional in system, but exceptionally quirky in premise. It’s an apocalyptic future AU with a genre-shift towards magical realism/horror, and although the setting is ostensibly Potterverse, the premise involves some rather drastic twists to the canonuniverse. Unusually for a fandom-based game, this game does not allow ‘major canons’ as PCs at all. Original characters are permitted, but ‘minor canons’ are preferred (bear in mind that the distinction between these two can be very slim indeed in this particular fictional universe).
This game falls far more into the “just borrowing aspects of a popular and well-known setting for convenience sake” category than the other game does. It’s also still a fairly young game: so far, the plot has involved a good deal of “shifty characters all telling lies to each other while trying to further their various secret agendae.” It’s heavily reliant on player collaboration in regard to plot, but there’s also a good deal of secrecy going on: this is definitely a group that enjoys springing things on each other. The combination means that the mods take a fairly active hand in direction, mainly to keep the plots from tangling each other up too badly, but also to keep the pacing continuity on track.
This is a journal-based game which uses both character journals and third-person thread-based RP to carry the game. Chat or e-mail logs are also permitted. The character journals aren’t really “journals;” they’re used for posting internal monologue, flashback reminiscences, and other such reflections of the inner lives of the characters. The main community journal is where all of the interactive role-play within the main continuity of the game gets posted. There’s also a “backstory” comm, which is where you post the results if you decide to role-play out interactions from the PCs’ pasts. And of course, there are also the usual plotting and OOC comms.
I’ve just started in this one, so I’m still really just getting to know the other players and only beginning to settle into the game proper.
So, um, is that at all helpful? I wasn’t altogether sure what sort of things you wanted to know.
Followup questions!
How many players are in each of these games? How much time do you spend per day/week contributing to the games? How long does it generally take players to respond to queries?
I want to know about nuts and bolts!
Thomas
The pbem group has played together for many years as a group of six. It’s recently grown a bit, though — I now make
player number nine — which is one of the reasons that we’re now talking about switching formats. We’re finding the mailing list a rather awkward and unwieldy format for so many players.
The journal game has sixteen players at present.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with the pbem group these past few weeks, but that’s largely because (a) I’m still getting to know them and their play style and their rather unusual rules set, so we’ve been running through backstory scenes together, as well as having lots of OOC chat; (b) it’s a new game, which means that everyone’s doing a lot of backstory work and OOC talking about the characters, how we want to structure the narrative, and so forth; (c) we’re also gearing up to a format switch right now, so there’s been a lot of logistical planning as well; and (d) I’m going out of town for two weeks soon, so there’s some pressure to get some of this stuff cleared up and out of the way before that happens.
Oh, yeah, and this week, I was also “volunteered” to come up with some tasty fanwank to clear up a few of the canonical inconsistencies relevant to our game. (I have, er, a bit of a rep as a dedicated fanwanker, you see.) So I’ve been spending quite a lot of time on this game this week – but that’s pretty par for the course, I think, for the start-up phase in any heavily collaborative gaming style.
In the journal-based game, I deliberately chose to app for a support character, so that I could see how well I liked the game before committing myself to a role which would take up a lot of my time. So I suspect that it’s not going to be at all time-consuming — unless I decide I want to be spending more time on it, of course, in which case probably one of two things will happen: either I’ll find my “support character” becoming far more protagonistic, or I’ll take on a second character to supplement my play. (Probably the latter – I think that the character I’m currently playing really works much better for this game as a secondary character.)
The journal-based game has a weekly minimum participation requirement. “Participation,” in this case, can mean either playing through interactive scenes (time-consuming), or posting non-interactive IC narrative to your character journal (potentially less time-consuming). Like most things freeform, though, this “rule” is rather loose and culturally determined and negotiable: the group would get rather annoyed, I think, with someone who never actually engaged in interactive play but only monologued. Similarly, if a player was being very active in plotting, then it might not make too great a difference to anyone if their character didn’t see play for a while – especially if their character was positioned in a secondary/support role within the context of the story.
Anyway, I’ve just finished up my first threaded scene in that game. It took about four hours to complete. Sometimes scenes take more time, sometimes significantly less – it really all depends on what’s happening in the scene, how many players are participating in it, how people’s time zones work out, and so forth. Sometimes a thread rp scene can take a couple of days to finish up, if there are time zone or scheduling disjunctions. I don’t like it when scenes drag out like that, though, so I usually prefer to try to schedule times for rp with other players over IM or email or in the OOC comm before launching into something. The other players in this game seem to share my preference there, so that’s all to the good.
Really, with these sorts of games, the amount of time one spends often depends on how much time one wants to put into the game. People who know from the start that they’re going to want to spend a lot of time playing usually apply with different sorts of characters than those who only want to spend a few hours a week on the game do. Unlike most traditional table-top games, there’s no expectation that all of the played characters in an online RPG are going to share an equal level of protagonism. The character I’m playing in this journal-based game, for example, would probably be an “NPC” in a typical table-top game. It’s established on-line role-playing etiquette that if you don’t want to commit yourself to a lot of play time, then you don’t take on a character who is positioned to enjoy a high degree of protagonism, or involve your character in plotlines which you don’t have the time to see through.
Level of involvement can also vary a great deal from week to week. We all recognize that people have lives outside of internet gaming. If someone’s having a busy period and can’t devote too much time for a while, then they say so and everyone else either tries to accomodate their absence by running scenes which don’t involve their characters for a while, or they agree to wait on the game until the relevant people are available to play. Similarly, if someone’s got tons of time and is in the mood to do a *lot* of RP, then they’ll also usually say so, so that people who similarly feel like getting in a lot of play know that they’re a good person to contact. Play-by-post games usually have a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiation over this sort of thing going on.
That often depends on time-zones and people’s personal schedules. My journal-based game has a formalized 48-hour rule: unless you’ve given warning that you’re going to be away, you are expected to respond to queries from other players within 48 hours – even if your response is just to give some indication of when you’ll be able to give better attention to the matter (ie, “Sorry, life got busy this week, can we hold off on that until Sunday?” is Okay; ignoring a query entirely for more than two days is Not Okay, and serious apologies/explanations are in order if you do so.) A number of larger/more formal online games have similarly explicit response rules. Most of them, however, are not nearly so strict as this one is: the 48-hour rule is a bit fascistic, really, which is part of why I like it (non-responsive players were one of the things that really got my goat in my last [not very good] PBP game).
My pbem game, on the other hand, has no formalized rule at all for response time. So far, though, I’ve yet to see someone go more than 24 hours before responding to something that clearly requires their input, unless they’ve already given warning that they’re going to be away or out-of-touch for a while.
Yeah, it’s all very ad hoc.
Hey Sarah–
Not sure if you’ll see this or not, and sorry for hijacking this blog, but it’s Shell from Oberlin (PULPFan!), and I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to/where you’ve been at. Would love to catch up. You can email me at umbo@livejournal.com.
If I may be permitted to comment on a rather stale article, I should point out that the dichotomy between tabletop and online FFRP may be less distinct than presented here.
For example, the massive, highly successful, and long-running “House of Cards” Amber PBEM uses the Everway rules, a tabletop system, for resolution.
(Administrator’s note: this comment was moved from the interview proper.)