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Old 12-08-2012, 12:53 PM   #9
Totem
 
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: The Western Harbour
Default Re: [OCC] Poll : What makes a good PbP game? (will be applied)

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Genre: Fantasy, DF, Science Fiction, Supers, Space Opera and others. Which make you say "I've got to play this", and which do you particularly avoid?
The genre doesn't exactly determine this for me; it's more a case of other stuff (below). I do prefer games where I can get a handle on the backstory fairly easily though.

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Activities Planned: Do you prefer solving puzzles? or is it combat that enthuses you? How important is character development? Is negotiation an enjoyable part of play?
Puzzles are good, provided that everyone is equipped to assist with them. Combat in PbP tends to alternate between very fast or dead-slow-and-stop depending on how often the players post, so as a general rule I'd try to avoid it for the sake of pace. Character development is good, and I like the idea of a world to explore; I tend to world-build a bit myself, and it's nice to explore sometimes. Certainly any GM should be ready for players asking questions about how things work when dealing with the world that they have created.

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Supplement materials: Which sets of rules make or break a PbP game for you? This includes Cinematic vs Realistic, G:Magic, Thuamology, Supers, Psionic Powers, DF, MH, MA, and so forth.
The trick here is making sure that everyone has the resources. Also, ensuring that everyone is working together from the off (see my thoughts right at the end on this).

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Plot: how important is the plot? do you avoid games without it, and only go for ideas that sound cool? do you prefer just wandering around letting characters make their own decisions? And is this question even an issue?
Plot is important for keeping things happen, but if the players want to role play a bit then they should definitely be allowed to do it. The role playing can mess up a plot a bit sometimes, when someone does something unexpected, but there needs to be at least a minimal plot for the GM to fall back on rather than simply resorting to "a man with a gun walks into the room" whenever things start to lag.

Personally, I perfer a plot to work with, provided that it is well explained; some long-term games can take a long time to read through and some kind of centralised plot notes section can be very handy (on which note I could do with assembling one of those myself).

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Power Level: Do you love working with mounds of points? is such a prospect dull to you? does it matter by genre? similarly, (but not the same) do you enjoy being world shakers, or do you want to deal with peers? or is this even an issue?
This is an interesting one. If the situation warrents it then huge amounts of points can be very good, but you need to define where those points will go; normally things like that go into Powers games or the like, where having everyone being able to pick whatever powers they want can seriously mess things up if they put in plot-busting abilities.

On the other hand low point games can be good; having to be careful about the way points are spent can be a lot more interesting than pondering how that final hundred points will be assigned. And it's possible to come up with some very interesting powers for less than 100 points. It's very much a genre thing though, as well as being a style one.

The style in this case refers to things like how long-term the GM allows actions and consequences to be. I have been planning a story (which I keep thinking about turning into a GURPS campaign) where the main character was deliberately a 1000+ points psi compared to everyone else being 100-200 point normal Humans. There was a heavy element of "people with powers don't think like normal people" in the story, which could be interesting to carry over to an RPG. Games where players can do whatever they want and no one will ever question it ("no one" includes civilians, governments, deities of various levels, and non-sentient things like the Force) don't appeal to me.

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House Rules: Are they annoying or wonderful? If depends, what determines this? or are they just all par for the course?
As long as they are stated in advance, or proper allowance is made for people changing their actions when they run into unstated rules and can't do what they thought they should, I think house rules are fine. You do need that though, because otherwise it can start to look like the GM blatantly fiddling things.

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Gaming Group: Different players and GMs cause games to behave differently. when using PbP on this forum, how important is who is already playing in the game, or GMing it?
Not hugely important in terms of players. In terms of characters it can make a difference, because of different character styles (see below), but not much in terms of the players themselves. The GM... If I had run into the GM as a player or GM before and knew that I didn't get on with their style of play then it might make a difference. But not hugely otherwise.

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Originally Posted by Dorin Thorha View Post
To that end, it's important that the party either has a GM-controlled force pushing them around (see for instance Totem's Worlds of Fire game), or has PC's in clear leadership roles (see for instance your Strange Neighbors game
This does help a lot to sort this sort of thing in advance. The thought referenced for my game comes in two forms: the GM controlled Western Harbour who are employing the players and pushing them to solve problems, and (currently) Harry Sheridan who has been assigned as a team leader for the purposes of giving me an in-game means of keeping things moving and providing a legitimate way of giving the players information (he has a couple of skills which mean that he can answer questions that the players might ask when they can't get back in touch with base). Having a character around to ensure that player characters are up to date on events and so forth, and can be nudged to keep moving, is very important sometimes, particularly when players are all waiting for someone else to have an idea, or are assuming that the GM will default them to a Do Nothing action.

PCs in leadership roles need to be clearly stated in advance, and the other players need to be aware of and accept this (even if their characters have some trouble with it, within the limits of keeping things moving). The player taking the leadership role needs to be one who can commit to (in-so-far-as anyone with a Real Life can) regularly posting and actually handling the role, both as a PC and as a player; having a PC who can talk anyone into anything doesn't exactly mean you have a player who is willing to push that hard as well.

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Other issues: what other issues strongly effect how well a pbp game runs?
The major problem I have with PbP games isn't the rules/ guidelines that are laid out at the start, it's the things the GM doesn't set at the start. I've seen a couple of games where, when asked, the GM said "I'll work out the style when I see the character sheets," effectively saying that they don't know whether it'll be a serious game or not until the character sheets turn up. One of the first games I was involved in was a "supers" game; the GM NPCs that turned up were fairly obviously four-colour origins (spandex and so forth), while player characters ranged from knockabout comedy (I think it was Curious/6 that did it) through to dark and gritty because there was nothing initially to say what sub-genre we should aim for.

The same applies to in-game tech, the world in general... As an e.g. (I state in advance that I really liked this game and was disappointed when it shut down) one game that I was part of was set on a starship. Everyone took on a role as part of the crew, but because things weren't stated in advance I bounced through a key member of landing teams (there weren't going to be enough planetfalls to make that worthwhile) to being in charge of the computer systems. Because nothing seemed to have been prestated (that I could find) I was also working on the assumption of regular crew accessing the controls manually, where we actually ended up with a pilot with a Matrix style neural port to access the flight control systems. Such things need to be made clear in advance.

So... Basically my main issue with PbP is the need for a pre-stated world and game style. The Star Wars RPG rules illustrated this quite well with an example involving naming conventions:
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Related to how serious or humorous the game is, hero names should be fairly uniform in style throughout the group. Although any character name is fine, a group with heroes named Bob the Soldier, Prince Mellia Frantizes of Alderaan, and Shorty the Ewok Scout lacks the consistency to be credible.
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Last edited by Totem; 12-08-2012 at 01:10 PM.
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