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View Full Version : DM Help How do you play Roleplaying Games over IRC?



McNum
2014-05-27, 03:55 PM
So, some friends of mine have expressed interest in trying out a pen and paper roleplaying, but there's a catch. We're spread all over the world, so the only way we'd all be able to communicate at the same time would be online. Now the channel we hang out in has a dice roller bot, so that part isn't a problem.

But I'm kind of thinking about the rest of the logistics, since having an actual table does help with a lot of things when playing. So, I'm curios if any of you have experience doing something like this?

The biggest losses I can see from not having a table is the lack of a battle mat or even a dungeon map for when the players are dungeon delving.

I'm thinking combat can be abstracted a bit. Describe your approximate location to the opponents and so on without actually having miniatures. Magic will suffer a little here, but it's pretty powerful, anyway, so if it loses a little accuracy in not being able to trickshoot lightning bolts or similar, well, it'll just have to be.

As for dungeon exploring, maybe do it like old text adventure games? "You stand in a dimly lit room. Two statues depicting a knight and a dragon stand next to a door to the north. A nice carpet connects the northern door to the southern door you entered from. Exits are South, North, and Southeast." Something like that? Since it'd be IRC, the players could scroll up to recheck the descriptions, or something.

I tagged this DM Help, because I'm most likely going to end up as the DM if we play. Got a little experience doing so in real life, I was a clueless newbie DM, though. But that just means I've made a lot of the newbie mistakes already.

As for system, I'm leaning Pathfinder, since it's all available online for free legally. Makes it easier to reference a rule, and I played a bit of 3.5 a while ago. But I'm open to suggestions, it just has to be easily available worldwide.

So, got any suggestions on how to pull something like this off? Or experience doing so that might be nice to know in advance?

Yora
2014-05-27, 03:59 PM
I once did a one shot over IRC. It was fun, but I wouldn't do it now that we got teamspeak and the like.
I recommend taking a look at roll20.net. It covers all that you really need and all additional equipment that is required is a somewhat decent internet connection and a cheap microphone.

Sallera
2014-05-27, 04:08 PM
In my experience, 3.5/PF works just fine without a battle map, doing much as you already have in mind - describe the situation with approximate relative locations, and assume your mental map has a good 5ft of give in any given position, after which it's just a matter of being fairly permissive with player actions. (And NPC actions, too, to a lesser degree; assume they can do anything the players have done in the given space, especially.)

Dungeon delving can pretty much always be done in the manner you describe if so desired, even face to face; unless one of the party is specifically mapping every room they go through IC, pacing off distances and the like, giving them the exact dimensions of the rooms they enter is a stylistic choice. (You probably don't want to minimalize too much, though; giving the players a sense of scale is good. Descriptions like 'a hall wide enough for four people to walk abreast,' or 'vaulted ceilings that could comfortably accommodate a giant' can keep things relative without risking running out of adjectives.)

Rhynn
2014-05-27, 04:21 PM
Plenty of people play tabletop without maps etc., and have no problem. The only thing you really need is dice-rolling functions, and IRC servers like DarkMyst provide those for you.

McNum
2014-05-27, 04:25 PM
So going all Zork on the dungeon exploration can work? I mean, yeah, it'd be a bit of work writing descriptions for all room, but I'd need to do that with a map, anyway.

I suppose this has the advantage that nothing exists unless either I or a player wills it to. So if the game was a swashbuckling game and one of the players wanted to swing on a rope to cross the scene, well, there wasn't really a rope there until he suggested it, but now there is, so give me an Acrobatics roll and swing away. I kind of want to go for a co-operative storytelling style, anyway. Be a bit large if the players have fun ideas.

I guess the easiest way to make this work is to do a bit of human testing. Gather some players, make some basic characters, a simple dungeon and do a one-shot, maybe. Find out what works and what breaks.

And yeah, the server we IRC on has a !dice command. !dice 1d20 or !dice 3d6 do exactly what they sound like.

Segev
2014-05-27, 04:38 PM
Combat will run slowly, but that's really the only problem I have with IRC gaming. I do recommend having an IC channel and an OOC channel, and running all of the mechanics and OOC chatter in the OOC channel. This will help your party keep in mind what's going on with the action much more clearly, and it will help you have a log that is almost like a screenplay of the action that happened in the game itself.

In all, I have had mostly good experiences with IRC gaming. It takes a little getting used to, and you'll want to establish your conventions for your gaming group, but it should work out.

(In my typical group, anything simply "said" is said in character in the IC channel; if you use a /me action, your character is doing whatever is described, and you can insert speech with quote marks.

e.g.: /me runs after the fleeing thief. "Get back here or it'll only be worse for you when I catch you!" he calls out in hopefully not-ineffectual ire.


We also tend to use * * to surround actions that get interjected into otherwise-spoken lines:

<Segev> Oh, come on. *grins sardonically* Like you didn't expect me to make that pun.



edit: Oh, and if you have lengthy descriptions, write them up in notepad or the like ahead of time. You can c/p boxed text in quickly. (Just be careful to do it not so quickly that you get flood-kicked from the server.)