💾 Archived View for oligopsony.cities.yesterweb.org › essays › pbgl2.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:19:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
People have thought of a lot of ways to play RPGs! Here I'm not concerned at all with system or setting or theme, and with medium only - except insofar as different media enable different
this is a followup to my earlier post musing about roleplaying over Gemini
Probably no one will learn much from this - except I don't know that I've thought about all of these together.
Tabletop is synchronous, analog, unassisted. Its focus is inherently communal: it rewards deep roleplaying through interaction, less through introspection (since introspection would hog time and appear a bit masturbatory.) It rewards systems that are human-mediated, that rely on a minimum of record-keeping and can be calculated by humans, and builds in the possibility (if not the practice) of "rulings not rules." (It's said that no one ever applies more than a dozen pages of any actual rules to a roleplaying game, however many may actually be in the boook; this is truest on tabletop, where time looking up rules is most expensive - aside from LARP, where people generally openly acknowledge that the rules are dropped. Tabletop, by contrast, is full of tables that think they're using all five hundred pages!)
Tabletop is also the medium by which the others are judged. When anybody describes the others, they describe it relative to tabletop, and I'm going to mostly continue that convention.
The boundaries between tabletop and boardgames are relatively thin.
Much of the above contrasts tabletop to computer-assisted media; but LARP is even less mediated. Relative to tabletop, LARP imposes the highest costs on breaking character, and the most continous period of access to it. LARP is as close as you're generally going to get to actually being the thing, enough so that people use "LARP" pejoratively in a non-roleplaying context to mean "pretending to yourself that you're _________" - that contemporary antifascists are LARPing as the Reichsbanner, say.
The boundaries between LARPing and acting are relatively thin. The boundaries between LARPing and ordinary social interaction are also relatively thin.
These media tend to outsource rules to a computer, which allows for the multi in their title - allowing an arbitrary number of players. They are synchronous, but due to scale, allow for easy drop-in and drop-out, allowing for lower coordination costs (always the bane of many other media.)
These are text-based, asynchronous, and relatively non-automated. The "PB" and use of tabletop systems generally sets these out as mimetic of tabletop play.
The boundaries between PBP/PBEM and collaborative fiction are relatively thin.
Like the PBP and PBEM that they resemble, Quests feature a GM/narrator as well as many players - but typically feature mass control of that single character. This allows for ease of character dropping in and out.
Of all media, these may be the least immersive for players, who assume a more passive role; they are, however, a zone of great freedom for the GM. The boundary between quests and solo serial fiction is thin - enough so that some famous webcomics like Homestuck and Kill Six Billion Demons started out this way.
sufficient velocity's quests forum
IF is solo, text-based, and highly automated. It takes the equivalent of GM - author, really - as the artistic master and locus of agency, and gives them fine-grained control over the systems that are automated. A curious mix but it works!
The boundaries between IF and reading a novel may be relatively thin - this is another thing where the name is a giveaway. They're also obviously close to MOOs and to CRPGs.
the Interactive Fiction Database
Solo RPGs are, alongside quests, the area where there's been the most innovation in the last few years. While Quests are a low-coordination way to GM and to put your writing before an audience (indeed, Quests are one of the few art forms that empower a single artist but cannot be done privately), Solo RPGs are a low-coordination way to privately be a player.
Solo RPGs, like tabletop, require that everything be mediated through a human mind. They attempt to allow for being surprised through Oracle systems, often through lots and lots of random tables (which also aligns well with the random table love of the OSR scene.) The phrase "GM emulator" for such systems gets well at the intended purpose, but relative to tabletop, the opportunities for introspective roleplay are much greater.
As noted in my last post, Gemini is great for wikis and for MUD/IF-like individually transversable environments, terrible for synchronous play, and lends itself to non-automated systems (which places an upper limit on formal system complexity but also enables informal, GM-led or FKR-style "playing the world.")
Alex Schroeder has made me aware of at least one MUD-like environment hosted on Gemini:
Ijirait, where everybody plays shapeshifters
Ijirait is indeed quite wonderful and I advise you to check it out!
I wonder if a natural fit between this and the community-of-diaries style of environment that's emerged on here is to play solo RPGs in each other's wikis - perhaps wikis that are manipulable like Ijirait (so that you have continuity.) Thus you could have a sort of West Marches-style setup that people play Solo RPGs in, with diary feeds providing updates on what's happened.
A potentially fun thing that I don't know if I've seen anywhere else? Players could go freeform OR use the rules system of their choice, provided they all make sense in the same setting and can be usefully adopted to solo play. So you could have a standard fantasy hexcrawl that players traverse, and they can mediate their own adventures freeform, or with 5e, or OSE, or Pathfinder 2, or FATE, or whatever.