This content is protected against AI scraping.
In episode 45 of On the Shoulders of Dwarves, I mentioned my online, chat-based gaming group. A listener sent us an email asking for more details, and my answer got long enough that it made more sense to turn it into a post others could use.
Steve asks:
Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of play-by-post games, and I wondered if you have any tips for text-only roleplaying. What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages? Are there any systems you recommend for text-only games? And specifically for Aviv, do you still schedule sessions where everyone plays together? Or do you play by post? And what do your Discord channels look like? Do you have separate channels for in-character and out-of-character posts? Are there any resources you recommend?
I’ll start from the end: yes, we still plan regular sessions. I have a long history with play-by-post games on discussion boards, and my experience is that it’s hard to keep a game running without a fixed schedule. If you read Hebrew, you can even come watch us play – the channel is open to everyone on the server.
About three years ago, Eran and I first tried running a chat game. We used Google Hangouts after discovering it has /roll commands. That game didn’t last long, but a couple of months later I started a full group playing Dungeon World in Hangouts, with Eran as a player. We played an entire campaign for 14 months, after which some players left and I recruited new ones.
We continued into a second campaign that lasted just as long, and eventually transitioned from Dungeon World to Masks. Somewhere during the second campaign, the group moved from Hangouts to Discord because we wanted the option of separate channels for different conversations.
We use a Discord bot called Sidekick for dice rolling. Our main “sessions” channel is where most of the game happens – we treat it like a regular table, mixing in-character and out-of-character discussion, rules talk, and the usual off-topic tangents. The second channel is for when players want to continue a scene between themselves while the rest of the group keeps going in the main channel. In the last campaign, two characters started a romantic relationship that way – the first time that’s happened in any tabletop game I’ve run.
A few things to keep in mind, even in a regularly scheduled text game: it’s still slower than face-to-face or voice. We play for three hours each week and sometimes only cover a few minutes of in-game time, because typing actions takes longer than saying them. We set the expectation from the start that the game is casual – people participate while doing other things. I used to GM from the office for a long time. Longer response times are fine. One thing I miss about Hangouts is being able to see who’s read the last message, so you know who’s paying attention. But you get used to working without it.
The other thing to be aware of: a chat session is linear. Everything goes on the same screen, and as the GM you have to track who said what and when. I use Discord’s tagging function constantly – @mentioning players helps me keep track of which message belongs to which character, and makes sure they notice it.
That’s also why a separate scene channel is useful: it’s hard to run more than one conversation at once in the main session. And split-party situations are best avoided wherever possible – it gets boring quickly for whoever isn’t in the scene.