Online text gaming

[Dancingdeath]

The title. Has anyone had any luck with gaming that way? I'm thinking of giving it a try on rpol.net as that one looks solid and is free.

Alternatively I saw a site advertising "professional" DMs but it requires you to pay per session played. For $15 a session it had better be the best game I've ever played in. Anyone tried those?

[Lord Torath]

Roll20.net has a game called Knights of the Written Word, which is a multi-system text-only (I think they use tokens and maps, but no voice/video) hub. Find games and players there.

[GravityEmblem]

I play on a private ProBoards. It's a pretty basic PbP forum, much like that section of this forum. Unlike this forum, it's a much smaller, personal group of players. Certainly, people tend to ghost, and games do fall apart, but it has a strong "core" group of players that means most games do last.

[Segev]

I have played in IRC for many years. We tend to use Discord now, but it amounts to the same thing. It tends to promote more in-character “acting,” especially if you use different channels for IC and OOC chat. Dice rolling bots in the OOC channel work quite well.

I have found that play-by-post sadly tends to eventually die out as players keep putting off responding.

[Cygnia]

Most of my gaming these days is either here, RPoL or Myth-Weavers.

[Minty]

A friend and I built a website with a character/session database, originally so that players would have somewhere to post their session logs and character backgrounds for our tabletop games, but over the last 5 years we've added various bits and pieces to it, including a SignalR-based chat system with a dice roller for doing online text-based roleplay. We mostly use it to supplement our tabletop games, so if a player wants to have a long personal conversation with an NPC, or go off doing their own thing when the party is in town, they can do it in a text session with the GM between the main group sessions, so that it doesn't hold up play for everyone else.

My experience with it was that some players would reliably post within minutes as soon as it was their turn, and you could wrap up a whole scene with them inside a week. Other players would post maybe once a day at most, and sometimes go weeks without posting and cause the scene to be abandoned. So I generally limit my text sessions to only those players I know are reliable (fortunately, our GM is one of these).

I think because the nature of text based play is that it's much slower than a tabletop session, it works much better for character moments and conversations than it does for action scenes and running whole campaigns. When I retired one of my characters from the main group sessions because he was too powerful for the rest of the group, the GM and I tried doing a spin-off campaign for that character via online text based play. It took us a whole year to do one story arc that would have taken maybe 3-4 sessions of tabletop play. Part of the reason for this is that interactions tend to become much more detailed in text based play, because you're literally describing every word spoken, every action taken, every nuance of body language. Some of those sessions read almost like a novel, but that stuff takes forever, especially when people only have a few hours in the evening each day to post.

[Alteiner]

I have a group that exclusively meets over Discord. We use text for in-game stuff, voice chat for tabletalk, separate channels for posting jokes and memes, and have a dice bot to handle rolling and a music bot to keep things lively. We've been doing things this way for years and, after a small adjustment period, everything works out great.