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View Full Version : Hybrid gameplay: can live and PbP coexist?



Dire Panda
2013-05-01, 07:14 PM
My group is in the early planning stages of a (heavily homebrewed) 3.5 campaign which will focus on nation-building in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. One of the biggest problems I'm running into is the issue of timescales: adventures take place over hours or days, but it takes years or decades for a village to become a town. Since it's obviously not possible to run everything on "adventurer time" I've been toying with the idea of splitting the campaign into two separate game modes: "tactical," played around the gaming table like any other D&D campaign, and a play-by-post "strategic" mode allowing the PCs to govern their nation, conduct personal research, etc. between game sessions. Strategic play would last two weeks of real-world time (since my players can't make time every week), but in-game it could be months or years before some event demands the PCs' personal intervention.

Has anyone ever attempted something similar before, and if so, how did it go? Any suggestions to integrate the two modes smoothly? I plan on there being plenty of feedback between the two - for example, after deciding to colonize a given area during strategic play, the PCs have to wipe out the local monsters (and in the process discover some ancient artifact that needs to be researched during the next strategic play) - but if anyone has specific advice, I'd be grateful.

Kilbourne
2013-05-01, 10:59 PM
The Pathfinder Adventure Path called Kingmaker does this fairly well in their later books, focusing alternately on adventuring and kingdom management. There's a book called Guide to the River Kingdoms that I think has all of the kingdom management rules.

shadow_archmagi
2013-05-03, 02:41 AM
Has anyone ever attempted something similar before, and if so, how did it go? Any suggestions to integrate the two modes smoothly? I plan on there being plenty of feedback between the two - for example, after deciding to colonize a given area during strategic play, the PCs have to wipe out the local monsters (and in the process discover some ancient artifact that needs to be researched during the next strategic play) - but if anyone has specific advice, I'd be grateful.

I attempted something similar in my campaign where the players were trying to liberate a city, and we could only meet every two weeks, so on the off week they'd tell me what they were doing and I'd post a writeup. It wasn't very structured and was mostly just devoted to RP things.

The players all really liked it, and I think it went a long way towards helping them roleplay better, partially because their characters could pursue goals that didn't involve the party without slowing the game down, and partially because when they were exchanging emails to me they weren't interacting with each other, which means that they spent more time RPing and less time making bad puns. When they did get back to the table, they'd spent the off time thinking about their characters motivations and goals and whatnot, so the roleplaying there improved too.

That campaign did eventually collapse, as I was taking a number of writing courses that semester so my creative energies were directed at producing other things, but the players expressed a great deal of remorse at its passing.

Jerthanis
2013-05-03, 06:04 AM
I've seen a couple ways of incorporating online resources to add to a campaign outside the game, mostly game oriented forums with things like NPC listings and location info, session summaries and public notice boards. The biggest advantage of this is that it gives players reason to think about the game between sessions, which can increase interest in the game.

I think the most potential I ever saw in one such attempt was in a Hunter game, where Hunternet was represented by an online resource and the ST logged in as various NPCs and any posts we made were made in character and occasionally when we met NPCs, they might mention a detail we mentioned in our post. The direct feeling of Roleplaying while not at the game was great. It was almost LARPing anytime I sat down at my computer, since checking up on Hunternet would be what my character would be doing too. The biggest disappointment was that it was so rarely used to drive the story, and there were never any rewards from it. I could have made a post inquiring about tactics or information about various monsters, or how best to craft my own bullets or... whatever kinds of information hunters would exchange on a forum, but I wouldn't get the experience points to buy the dots associated with that knowledge from doing so, and once I had the points, I could have abstracted getting the learning to fill the dots in question.

The best overall online component I've seen used was for a D&D game in which we were asked to summarize the events of each session in our own way, in in-character voices essentially. We would also describe downtime activities, and generally just think about who our characters were when they weren't fighting goblins in caves.

Neither experience sounds much like your idea to segregate two aspects of the game into separate arenas, but you seem to have a pretty good lid on that idea. For me, the best advantages of utilizing online resources is to keep people thinking about the game between sessions.