First thing: get your filthy minds out of the gutter! Skeevy net pervs!

I’m talking about play by post (PbP). Role-playing games played on message board forums where the Storyteller and players interact in and out of narrative one post at a time. It is to tabletop role-playing with a group of friends, what a microwaved cantaloupe with a whole cut in it is to Salma. (Note: This metaphor made without empirical comparison).

The similarity is mainly do to the level of satisfaction, I’d sickly imagine. The verbal exchange of creative ideas is preserved, but slowed down by a factor of 1,440 – what takes a minute at the table takes a day in messaging. The usual gaming props of maps, character counters, and dice are still present, but the communication barriers of distance and time in PbP make supplemental questions of clarity slow things even more.

“Is that thing next to me a beetle?”
… 2 hours …
“Nope. It’s an Umber hulk. I‘ll post when I get back from work“… 10 hours later …
“Fuck! – I wouldn’t have walked up to that bastard! Can I redo my action?”
… 10 hours later …
“Nope. It’s attacking you. I‘ll email you the roll from the dice server and post if you‘re dead tomorrow. Just to save time, everyone email me the items you want to take from his corpse.”
“Shit! Where’s the Melon setting on my microwave?”

Unfun storytelling isn’t unique to this medium of gaming by far, but the waiting magnifies it. If this happens to you at the table you could flip it over, throw your dice in his face and cram the rolled up game master screen up his ass in a couple of minutes – police response time: 20 minutes, roughly. Even “quick” posting is a crippled earthworm crawl next to regular speech. This makes you the asshole left in suspense.

I’ve been the asshole as a player and as storyteller, waiting for numb nuts in the Pacific Time zone to tell me if he’s going into the door – and making the monster behind that door more terrible every minute. The best way I know to combat this in PbP is to make every single post you make a cliffhanger that begs a question “What the FUCK is happening?!”

I do admire in this in the board messages I read that have finished a story. When you don’t have to wait or check for updates, its pretty good fiction to read – or, makes you feel better about your writing/storytelling. It’s also good solution for conflicting schedules that allows folks to fit gaming back into their lives. Is it better than not playing at all: yes – but if you can voice chat over Skype or even text chat games are a better alternative.

Does anyone prefer PbP to live games?

More importantly, have you fucked a warm cantaloupe … I mean, Salma Hayek?

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