What is the point of PbP?

[Noje]

I have seen a lot of threads on this forum about PbP games, but I just don't understand the appeal. A TABLETOP role-playing game is meant to be played with a group around a table. While playing on a voice call can work fine, it still makes communication between players difficult and the game suffers for it. I just can't fathom the communication challenges with just text chat and not everyone online at the same time. Combat seem impossible. everything that make TTRPGs a unique experience just seem to be stripped away.

But that's just my experience with PbP. I may be missing the purpose of PbP entirely. So I ask all the PbP players on this forum. Why play PbP over just around a table? Why play PbP at all? What makes it enjoyable?

[Segev]

Like other forms of 'net-enabled play, it allows people who aren't able to get together in person due to distance and other factors to play together. It thus also opens up the pool of potential players.

It also allows those who lack a shared block of time during a week to spend together to play a game together, as they can post when it is convenient to them.

[Ninja_Prawn]

I'm tempted to answer with a barrage of sarcasm, but that's kind of harsh on a (relative) forum newbie. So I'll point out some of the advantages of PbP...

• Things that would 'slow the game down' in real life, such as splitting the party or looking up rulings, aren't a problem. In a PbP game, you can have the party split for weeks of real time without anyone feeling left out.
• There's more space to play the character you want to play; you can take your time composing your lines, figuring out plans, that sort of thing.
• It may be slower than face-to-face gaming, but it's 24/7 instead of once a week/month. Every day, I wake up to new posts, and the games are constantly moving.
• The forum environment is convenient for tracking numbers - you can go back and count up the damage if someone forgot to update their sheet, etc.
• You can play many games in parallel.
• You can play with people in other parts of the world, which is particularly good if you live somewhere remote or where D&D isn't very popular.
• There's a huge variety of games available, and many people here are open to untested homebrew.

[J-H]

I have a full-time job, a wife, a 2 year old, and a newborn. A 4-hour gaming session once a month isn't on the radar any time soon. Soon, I'll be in a county with a total population of ~40,000, making it even less likely.

PBP still lets me do collaborative storytelling, engage in moderate optimization challenges (best/most fun way to build X), improve my character, etc - do things that are fun - on flex-time.

Does it die a lot? Yep. Is it imperfect? Yep.

Is it better than not playing, or being stuck with single-player games or newer games that require $500 and a new OS worth of upgrades and headaches? Yes.

[Jormengand]

Because it's less a TABLETOP roleplaying game and more of a tabletop ROLEPLAYING GAME, at least to me.

[TheIronGolem]

• No scheduling conflicts. It doesn't matter if you're the only night owl in a group of daywalkers, because everybody just posts during whatever time of day works for them.
• No OOC time pressure. Any time you have an in-character decision to make, you have plenty of time to ponder the available choices and determine not only which one is "best", but which one is most appropriate for your character to take - and since those aren't always the same thing, it helps to have the extra time to figure out if the distinction needs to be made.
• You can "show your work" with in-character decisions, by weaving your character's reasoning and personality into the narrative description of their actions. This helps the other players get to know and understand your character better, which has a side benefit in that it helps prevent confusion when you do something that might seem counterintuitive to someone who doesn't intimately know the character like you do.
• Rules questions can be asked and answered in the middle of a game without interrupting the flow. Same goes for off-topic chatter.
• The game becomes self-documenting; you can always look up old posts if you need to dig up some detail about what happened earlier in the game. This also helps new players get up to speed if they're entering an existing campaign.
• PM's can be used for exchanging confidential information without tipping off everyone else (as opposed to passing someone a note or asking for an aside, which basically screams I'M DOING SOMETHING SNEAKY HERE)
• Players who are shy or socially awkward are at much less of a disadvantage, especially when they're playing characters who are more sociable.
• Despite the slow pace, combat scenes can sometimes end up being a lot more fun, because you can take the time to write a badass/funny/dramatic description for your character's actions.

Not that there aren't downsides, but you're asking about what makes PbP appealing.

[Joe the Rat]

In short, Asynchronous gaming.

[DigoDragon]

What others have said. I used to have a local gaming group, but after one member passed away, everyone drifted apart. These days they refuse to come back together for game night, and attempts to find new players have not been successful. I turned to online PbP because it's an alternative that has some success.

[Lapak]

It's also particularly well suited to games which have a strong narrative element. Not everyone is skilled at improvising plot and character details in real-time, but in a PbP environment you can take 20 minutes to write up your next move if you're at a critical juncture or if you've got a really cool idea for where the game should go. (Or simply to ramp up the drama in a major confrontation.) One of my favorite all-time games was a PbP of Dungeon World, because all the players really got into it and spun ideas freely as we went.

[Vitruviansquid]

I'd be pretty interested to see systems written specifically for a PbP format.

A lot of PbP doesn't look good because they're using systems that assume face-to-face, or at least realtime communication.

[goto124]

I'd be pretty interested to see systems written specifically for a PbP format.

Storium is the closest I can think of, it's basically a collaborative story-writing system for newbie writers. Which is kinda what PbP is, come to think of it...

[Ninja_Prawn]

A lot of PbP doesn't look good because they're using systems that assume face-to-face, or at least realtime communication.

This is true, and I would also like to see a system written specifically for PbP.

I've just started learning the High School Harem Comedy system, which (as far as I can tell) was invented on this forum and is designed with some awareness of PbP... It works fairly well, though I still feel like face-to-face play would add something to it (such as acting-out of the physical comedy elements).

[Eldan]

All the things about no group or difficult timing dont' matter much to me, but I still play PbP. Why?

Because the experience is wholly different. As a GM, at the table, I restrict myself to very short descriptions of situations, characters and landscapes to keep tempo up. In PbP, I can bring out my literary side. And as a player, I can write like a novel. I can describe my chharacter's actions. I can even describe his thoughts. And everyone can take time to write out their posts, so if people do, the quality goes up a lot. IT's not as spontaneous and fun, but it's better written.


PBP is the collaborative fantasy novel to Tabletops collaborative fantasy improv theater. Both are fun, both are very different.

[Faily]

I find PbP is excellent to get a really immersive experience of a game compared to what you might get in tabletop.

Playing Legend of the Five Rings on tabletop, we're more forgiving on everyone not speaking properly, following the proper social protocols, yadda-yadda. Playing it on PbP, I get to have an experience of really being in the setting of the game and taking my time to compose posts that fit into the expected social skills of my character.

Also; I find roleplaying romance to be much less awkward on PbP than it is during tabletop. It's much easier to relate to the characters when you can see the avatar next to their text... rather than the person playing the character. This could just be me, but I like a bit of romance and love in games, because it is a natural emotion for people to express, and I much more enjoy it in PbP than tabletop.

[Necroticplague]

I would like to play some tabletop with some other people. I lack access to any form of group, and besides that am vitriolically unpleasant in person. Solution: play online. In my experience, PbP, while harder to keep alive, has an advantage in letting you build better narratives. While in-person detailed descriptions are usually discouraged because A: it makes you sound pretentious and B: it uses up a lot of time, both to think of such and to say, PbPs allow for very rich descriptions to take place. The miracle of copy-paste also means that routine tasks aren't as tedious, because the copying of dice roll code and actions speeds things up quiet a bit. In person, rolling for 10 claw attacks would take forever and grind the pace of the game to a halt. In a PbPs, I can copy-paste one attack block by slamming on control-v, barely taking any time. There's also less pressure to memorize rules, and less rules argument, because you have time to just look up rules as needed without killing the pacing. In essence, PbP is a more thoughtful experience than in-person or real-time online methods of playing.

[The Insanity]

What is the point of anything, really?

[2D8HP]

My reasons are similar to @J-H's, with my duties as parent, spouse, and worker, I simply don't feel that I can spare the time for tabletop. This last year, I had a brief "second childhood" playing tabletop Dungeons and Dragons again which was great fun, but with a newborn (b-day June 1st) that not going to happen anytime soon, so I've recently started playing PbP.
Is it as fun as the best tabletop?
Well no, but neither has it every been as bad as the worst times playing tabletop. While my literary skills simply don't match.up, the people I've played with so far can spin some really good yarns! Plus before this year my last time playing RPG's was in the early 1990's with settings that just weren't to my taste, and the games were just not as fun as the good old-fashioned Dungeons and Dragons I played in the 1970's and 80's (Shadowrun was the most fun of the 90's games by far, but still not as fun for me as D&D, the others? Let's just say the deficit of AWESOME rendered them LAME).
I also think that so far the PbP players have all been higher quality than many of the table top players I.encountered "back in the day", and I can't tell if someone hasn't showered!
Do I miss tabletop? Well yes, but I'm very grateful to have discovered PbP, and to the DM's and other players who are willing to game with me.

[Ninja_Prawn]

What is the point of anything, really?

This wins the thread, for me.

[Noje]

What is the point of anything, really?

You know a thread is dying when the nihilists come out to play

There are some interesting perspective here. I always thought of PbP as just an inferior way of playing tabletop rpgs, but I guess its just a different game. It seems to me that those of you who prefer PbP write your characters rather than play them, which is an interesting idea to me. For me, ttrpgs are an an improv exercise on both the player and GM sides. While you guys have explained the appeal, I definitely would not like to play a game in this style. I want to play my character, not write a fan fiction about him. That being said, I do have more respect for PbP as a game. I hope people try to design more games for PbP so you don't have to deal with rules made for a game with a faster pace in mind.

[TheIronGolem]

It seems to me that those of you who prefer PbP write your characters rather than play them

I want to play my character, not write a fan fiction about him

I'm glad you learned something, and to each his own on preferences. That said, these passages are wrong. "Playing" a character means deciding what actions they take in response to the situation presented to them, which you do in both PbP and tabletop. I'm no less (or more) playing a character when I play by post than I am when I sit down at a table and roll dice.

[Ninja_Prawn]

I'm glad you learned something, and to each his own on preferences. That said, these passages are wrong. "Playing" a character means deciding what actions they take in response to the situation presented to them, which you do in both PbP and tabletop. I'm no less (or more) playing a character when I play by post than I am when I sit down at a table and roll dice.

Yeah. Furthermore, I would say that when you're "deciding what actions they take in response to the situation," having the luxury of being able to sit down, think about your character and make edits as you write means you've got a much better chance at actually making the decision that your character would make. When you're having to improvise off the cuff, you're more likely to default to stereotypes, caricatures or just playing as yourself, because you don't have time to properly get into your character's head.

And it's not fan fiction if you're all playing original characters! That's just regular fiction! Besides, not all PbP involves successive posts of flowery purple prose; you're welcome to take a glace through, say, the most recent page of one of my games as a sample of how fluid dialogue and action can be in PbP.

[2D8HP]

@Ninja_Prawn,
I had a theory that in PbP

the best writers don't stick around.

, but then I saw your post:

Besides, not all PbP involves successive posts of flowery purple prose; you're welcome to take a glace through, say, the most recent page of one of my games as a sample of how fluid dialogue and action can be in PbP.

which blows my "the best writers don't stick around" theory out of the water: I checked out the link, and they're more than 86 pages in the IC threads alone for that game, and pretty much sll of them are better writers than me.
This tells me that it's my bad role-playing/writing that drives the other PbP players away.

Also, judging by your game thread you may be a fan of "Faerie" fiction, since I'm a big fan a such books as:

Stardust,

Jonathan Strange & Mister Norell,

Our Ladies of Grace Adieu, and

Lords & Ladies,

so if you have any recommendations, please let me know.
-Thanks

[Ninja_Prawn]

@Ninja_Prawn

Just in case anyone reading this thinks I'm so impolite as to not respond to this, I'd like to say for the record that I have responded by PM.

That will be all.