#12: Play-by-Post! 💬
hello!
[Other People Are Typing…]
*waits*
I. A Long Sea Journey One Discord Message At A Time
This week, I wrap up a game of Across the Endless Sea, a storytelling (rather than roleplaying) game of a long journey across a vast ocean. The game self-identifies as a Powered by the Apocalypse game but there are no characters so you can be assured that it’s a very distant descendant. The game is built around a series of scenes on this long sea voyage. Every scene has one person who frames the encounter. Another person describes how the voyagers respond to the encounter. And another person chooses what is lost or gained by the end of the encounter. It’s pretty simple. The game text is mostly the rules of conversation and prompts for when its your turn to speak.
Predictably, we departed from the rules really early on. The game idea was pitched as a re-imagination of the last voyage of the elves fleeing Middle Earth and going to Valinor. It was a neat idea and we had fun with it. Lots of purple prose and Tolkienisms. It’s never just “light” - it’s “the soft twilight of the world’s evening”. Mhmm.
We, my two fellow players and I, played this game of Endless Sea over Discord. All three of us are in separate countries and separate timezones. We just posted when we could. So while this would’ve been a relatively short game in-person, we’ve been playing it since the end of July. Or roughly 3 months. The slow pace of play-by-post (PBP for short) is one of the big ‘culture shocks’ of this mode of game-play. And it can really irk people. It irked me when I started. But like with so many aspects of the medium, you either embrace it or you get bored and walk away. And walking away is fine! Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody. And PBP is a weird format. It’s perfectly understandable that it doesn’t work for you. The surprising thing is that it works for other people!
(Also, why is going fast and ending soon a good thing?)
There’s three reasons why Across the Endless Sea works well in this medium and I think they give some broad insight into what the medium’s limitations are.
First, it has a very strict structure. The game is clear about who speaks and when. In my experience, especially in PBP over Discord, you don’t know if you should post or wait for somebody else. It’s an awkward, messy problem. Especially in a GMless game. Unlike in a real conversation, you can’t tell if something is a pause or lull in the conversation. Or just the other player being busy for a day or two. With Endless Sea, we always knew whose turn it was to speak. That was great.
Second, no dice-based negotiation. There are certain games that have a lot of conversational back-and-forth around the dice. Think Blades in the Dark. Or even d20 games with variable target numbers. This means that every roll can take days. A combat scene could take weeks. Games that have roll under stat or PbtA style moves are great because the player can do the “fiction —> roll —> fiction” loop by themselves. Endless Sea doesn’t even have dice. The person who imagined the encounter just decides. I am not a huge fan of “just deciding” because I feel like I just end up being boring. But in a storytelling game, “resolution” isn’t a very important part of play, really.
Third, Endless Sea offers you a very clear sense of progress. With the long drawn-out time scale of a PBP game, it’s easy to lose momentum. If all of play is mashed up into one large blob of a ‘scene’, it can feel a bit like you’re going nowhere. Endless Sea is built around a series of encounters and you know how many there are before you reach your destination. People don’t talk enough about how a clear “ending mechanic” helps with pacing.
We’ll probably have to decide on what GM-less game we want to play next. (GM-less games are this group’s shtick.) We’ve tried Kingdom before this and that didn’t click. I’m also very sick of the sea right now. Does anybody have any suggestions for a GM-less game that has some of the features listed above and definitely has nothing to do with the sea?
Aside: I moderate the r/pbp subreddit and the associated discord. It’s essentially a Looking for Game (or LFG) community for those who want to play games in this medium. It’s mostly 5e but hey, there’s no online LFG community that isn’t. One of the thing we need to do is to get the sub’s sidebar/wiki sorted out with an introduction on how to get into PBP and best practices. It’ll get done at some point. At some point! You can quote me on that!
II. Listen of the Week
There’s a neat interview podcast on the One Shot Network called Modifier which was on semi-hiatus and hadn’t updated in six months. But now it’s back. There was a fun conversation yesterday with Jason Pitre, designer of Sig: City of Blades and After the War. It was such a cheerful chat with a lot of enthusiasm for games and that warmed the cockles of my heart.
III. Links of the Week
“Rather than blow-by-blow whaddaydo whaddayado play, each session is a vignette. There’s a clear opening with an explicit situation, a nice little arc with miss-generated complications, and closure at the end of the session.” Paul Beakley shares his experience playing Shattered City on the Indie Game Reading Club.
A review of Alice is Missing, “a roleplaying game that is played entirely by text message.”
Not TTRPG-related but I saw this video and I finally understood this whole Blaseball phenomenon. There’s a full recap of the chaos here.
There’s a new itch.io jam starting for mini-zines with a template for one of those one-page but fold them eight times style pamphlet things.
IV. Small Ads
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As usual, this newsletter was written by me, @chaibypost. I’m a person.
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