Simon Smith wrote:
>
[re: online gaming fora]
> Would anyone who has played in them (or, like me, considered and
> rejected playing in them) care to share their views on what they're
> like? What do they do well, and what do they do badly? I believe
> someone (Mary?) may even have posted links to a couple of them, but I
> can't even remember enough details for a search to find that post
> again.
I've been playing in a Cthulhu-based forum
(http://www.callofcthulhu.org.uk/)
for about a year or so now. The
biggest lessons I've learned from this are;
- the pace of advancement is very slow. Most participants make only
about 3-4 posts per week, and the need to wait to hear how other
people or the GM are responding to your actions means that it takes
considerably longer to get anywhere. In the one campaign I'm still
active in, we've spent more than 1000 posts and about one full
year real-time playing out the events of a *single* day (a hectic
one, granted). And that day isn't done yet, and probably will not
be for several more months real-time.
In a face-to-face campaign, these events would have filled two,
*maybe* three 4-hour sessions. Thus you are looking at taking
about a month (real-time) to accomplish what you could in a single
hour or so of a face-to-face campaign. (Thus I feel that people
running the equivalent of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign
online, frex, are nuts.)
(It is possible that this can be sped up if all participants are
willing to give up some authorial privileges to allow the GM or
other players to extrapolate ones responses or the responses of
NPCs to ones actions, but I haven't really seen any successful
implementation of this in any of the hosted campaigns.)
- you've got to be *very* careful about who you allow into a campaign
(or from a player's perspective, which campaigns you join). The
fora equivalent of a newsgroup troll or immature player can really
ruin things for everyone. (And to give an example of the
opposite point of view, the first campaign I joined crashed-and-
burned after it became clear that the GM was trying to recreate
a Gamera movie, and couldn't deal with variations from what the
characters in the film attempted.)
- there's nothing like watching the campaign grind to a halt for a
week or so because of the unexpected vacation plans of a particular
player, or because someone got too busy to post for a few days.
Maintaining plot momentum is very difficult.
- perhaps for all of the above reasons, participation is *extremely*
flaky. I've seen two campaigns die because the GM disappeared
without a word, and the turnover rate is atrocious. Players
disappear constantly without notice. GMs are thus forced to deal
with either continually slotting in-and-out new characters, or
trying to find replacement players for existing characters and then
worrying about radical changes in tone. It must be very tempting
to have key NPCs remain under GM control, but that in itself is
prone to abuse (railroading) in my experience.
(Aside from online fora, I've also dabbled with chat-based online
games and PBeM ones, but never had a successful experience in either
because of similar issues. As none of my trials really ever got off the
ground, however, it is quite possible my experiences with these media
are idiosyncratic.)
On the other hand, it *is* possible to have a reasonably-decent time,
provided (as with a face-to-face game) you've got the right combination
of players and GM. Even so, the slow pace means that I cannot imagine
even the best of online campaigns rivalling a decent face-to-face one.
Would a wiki-based one be any different? I don't know.
If you do go ahead, I wish you all the best and can provide only one
other bit of advice. If you are looking for an online random number
generator, I'd recommend the Invisible Castle
(http://www.invisiblecastle.com/).
It is a robust generator that keeps
track of rolls made for a particular character, so you can watch for
signs of cheating if such concerns you.
Cheers,
Biff
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"All around me darkness gathers, fading is the sun that shone,
we must speak of other matters, you can be me when I'm gone..."
- SANDMAN #67, Neil Gaiman
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