TBRPG wrap-up
Over the weekend, Aron finished up running a text-based role-playing game. (Which we’ve started calling TBRPGs. We used to call them eRPGs, but that acronym is being used in a variety of other places. So we had to develop something else.) And it was a blast!
This was Aron’s first time running a TBRPG. He’s done live-action role-playing (LARP) and tons of table-top (TTRPG), and we even did some RP on our old World of Warcraft server, back in the day.
But the first time we tried an actual text-based game, I was running it. It was a Rifts game, but I had bitten off more than I could chew as far as the NPC cast. It was a solo game — just me Storytelling for Aron — so I had created an entire team of non-player characters to help him out and fill in some of the skills required by the plot. (In the form of bonuses on skill checks — I never roll for NPCs, only have them assist the player characters.)
But it was too much. Aron excels at portraying NPCs and even in large numbers, they don’t overwhelm him. More than two characters in a room and I’m drowning. The crew that I assigned to Aron’s character was too much and I almost cancelled the whole game.
As a last-ditch effort to salvage the campaign, I asked Aron if I could just write out the scenes. I am, after all, a writer. If I could just handle it more like a book, then I figured that I could juggle all of the NPCs.
And it worked! I finished out the whole game campaign by email. Aron had a copy of his character sheet and a dice-rolling app. I sent him the rolls to make, and he sent back the results. Together, we passed emails full of prose back and forth to describe the action. Dialog scenes took more work, more emails as we each wrote just one or two lines. But it worked, and Aron said that he enjoyed the campaign very much!
Then it was my turn! We’re all locked up in covid quarantine right now, but I unfortunately discovered that I can’t do video or audio online. Something about the sound gives me migraines after a few minutes of listening. That meant that I had to drop out of all our suddenly-online games, and I was very, very cranky about my sudden lack of role-playing.
So Aron offered to dust off a game that he had made years ago, update it to use the latest incarnation of our Snake Eyes rules, and run the campaign via text. It was his first time running in a TBRPG, and my first time playing. Neither of us were sure how that would go, but it went off spectacularly!
I’m an introvert and an author, so text is a perfect medium for me to interact with. The non-real-time nature of a TBRPG meant that I had time to think and edit what I had to say… Which proved extra important as I decided to play a poet. I’m a novelist, not a poet. I can’t even tell long stories aloud, much less make up poems on the fly. The luxury of taking my time and writing out several drafts before sending each one to Aron was perfect for me!
I loved it. Every minute, every page. I didn’t think that anything could ever beat out table-top gaming for my #1 past-time, but text-based just took the gold.
It doesn’t help you folks for me to just gush onto my keyboard, though, so let’s talk about some of the logistics of running a TBRPG like we did.
Tools & details
All told, we played most days from mid-April to mid-June, and wrote about 200,000 words in the time. That’s longer than any of our novels! We used Google Docs as the actual document. We could both have the page open and see real-time changes as Aron and I typed. We had to break it up into a few different documents, since GDocs can’t handle hundreds of thousands of words well.
We used Google Hangouts to tag each other in when it was time for a roll or to go read up on the latest in-game events.
My character sheet was just a table at the bottom of the page so that Aron and I could both reference it whenever we needed to. I used a dice roller on my phone (Dice Ex Machina, or just Dice Ex), but this required some trust on my Storyteller’s part — the skill checks that you see above weren’t rolled anywhere that Aron could see unless I took screenshots every time. That seemed a little tedious, and he trusted me, so we just went on faith.
System-wise, there was some adjustment to do. Namely, combat. A major part of Snake Eyes — and an entire chapter of the manual — is about a character’s special attacks in combat. Attacks that push enemies, take advantage of terrain, set targets on fire, etc.
But without a map and with more abstracted combat, there wasn’t really a place for those kinds of attacks. Aron designed my fight scenes to be much more like crises, with complications and victory conditions based on skills, not attack abilities. The above screenshots are checks from fights, in fact. I had never played through a combat like that, though, so it took some adaptation. My skills were of paramount importance, while some of my combat traits — like the fighting style that gave me a square of reach — didn’t end up mattering much.
There are also Snake Eyes traits that allowed me to re-roll checks when I failed them, or just didn’t get a good enough result for what I was trying to do. They’re meant to be used once per level per session, but TBRPG moves at a much slower pace than table-top. It took about three or four days of back-and-forth to go through the same material that we would have covered in a single real-time game session.
But because Aron restored those expended levels of my re-roll traits every day, it sometimes felt like I was stuck with almost none of my bad rolls. For the next TBRPG, we might need to modify either how many of those traits we make available, or how often they refresh.
Other than that, though, no critiques or criticism! It was one of the most fun role-playing games that I’ve ever played. The next time Aron wants to run a TBRPG, I’ll be knocking down the door to roll up a character.
