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View Full Version : Roleplaying How to get into Voice/Realtime games?



Captain Shrug
2018-06-19, 11:27 PM
Okay, this is probably an odd question. But for the longest time I tried playing text games. At first it worked, when IRC was a thing. Unfortunately in the last several years I've basically struck out completely on finding a text game for a variety of reasons.

I've tried voice once or twice, and most of the time it hasn't gone well because it's been 90% ooc chat, or inane giggling, or Monty Python references.

[edit] Lemme rephrase. What I mean is- how do you get into the RP when it's just a bunch of guys saying "I DO X!" without describing anything about it storywise? And how do you say "no, seriously, guys, I want to actually go for story, not just goofing around oocly?"

Kaptin Keen
2018-06-20, 12:36 AM
Um ... can I just point out that there is a bunch of text games, here on this forum?

I'd say voice only works if you know the people you're playing with.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-06-20, 01:37 AM
Play games other than D&D. Seriously. There's good D&D players out there but a game that's less focused on fighting tends to attract a better class of player, on average.

Beyond that, look for games with recruitment criteria that are kind of picky and elitist.

Kaibis
2018-06-20, 01:41 AM
I have tried play-by-post RPing, had a couple of sessions DM-ing a face-to-face game, but predominantly I do voice RPing.

They are all very very different styles, at least I think.

With play-by-post I often felt like all the players were playing their own game, we never became a team. It makes sense, you spend a lot of time typing out what would take a minute or two to say. The descriptions are not interactive and you do not get immediate feedback from the other players, so you just keep on typing and describing what your PC is doing. The players are not writers, and I often felt like we were an amateur writing group. I felt like the focus on the game was very much on being a writer, rather than being a team (my take).

I loved face-to-face, it is great being able to scan the table and gauge non-verbal feedback. You can see surprise, annoyance, horror, fear, everything. Body language cues are amazing and add so much to the game... Unfortunately getting a good group of people at the same location is not as easy as voice.

The tricky part of voice is not being able so see non-verbal feedback, and not always being able to interject something (using a bit of text chat kind of helps, but that has its downside too.). I personally find voice chat works best when combined with IC chat between sessions. E.g. One session we ended in a tavern, and mid week we all decided to go fishing down by the lake. We RP-ed the whole thing, and basically sat and chatted and fished, it was a tonne of fun. Next session the DM was prepared with a whole side-quest that began at our fishing spot. Same again, we had a few long travel sessions this week, and during the travel session I said that I was chatting with another PC, mentioned what I wanted to talk about, and said we would RP the conversation in retrospect mid-week. So mid-week we get into a private chat window and RP the conversations that we would have, it takes us about 4hrs to RP what would have been an hour long conversation (because of life interruptions, and how long it takes to type descriptions), we end up with a much more in-depth RP session than we could possibly have had in a face-to-face game (or a voice chat, or even a play-by-post).

The thing with Monty Python jokes (or whatever poison your group has injected this week) is that it really does help the bonding, it helps make the players friends, it helps make the RP-ing easier (and therefore more likely to occur mid-week). I know that mid-week we will talk a lot of rubbish OOC in text chat, and that will carry over in little in-jokes during the game.