Text-based simming -- thoughts & comments?

Discussion in 'Trek Gaming' started by LapsedTrekkie, Jun 19, 2010.

  1. LapsedTrekkie

    LapsedTrekkie Ensign Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Mar 20, 2009
    I've been participating in online Trek-based simulations for almost two decades now, and I wondered just how many people out there have as well. The point of this thread isn't to recruit people for games, or anything else ... merely to share thoughts on simulations as a whole, what works about them, what doesn't.

    To those of you who have participated: do you still? If you don't, why'd you stop? It seems to me like the number of participants grows smaller and smaller as the years go on ...

    To those of you who've never tried it ... well, hopefully you know what it is, though I suppose I can explain if it becomes necessary, but is there a reason why you never bothered?
     
  2. nx1701g

    nx1701g Admiral Admiral

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    I've been playing in the same group for over 10 years and we're still going strong. I've found it to be a good stress release and I've been rather lucky with my games because they've remained constantly strong.
     
  3. Arix

    Arix Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    I did a little bit of simming (I call it roleplaying, I assume the two are more or less the same?) for about 6 months on the STO forums (about a year before its release) - I stopped because real life got in the way, which I find is generally the case with any sort of gaming I do.

    What I enjoyed - making friends both IC and OOC with my fellow crew; feeling like I was part of the Trek universe; and creating interesting characters who I'm still fond of.

    What I didn't enjoy - the lengthy plots, which are both a pro and a con for me, its a bit... annoying sometimes that it takes months for anything to happen; my inability to use treknobabble, I'm fine with reading it, but hopeless at writing it; also, when your GM leaves or disappears without any explanation, that ruins the whole game; but the thing that turned me off completely were two players who weren't very good at writing, who I ended up teaching and trying to help improve for a few months, but I eventually stopped when I realised I was spending so much time and energy every day and not having fun anymore.

    I haven't gotten back into it because I find the whole format of Trek SIMs really... inaccessible. Even glancing over the RPG recruitement thread here, I found myself wondering - but how do I know which of these is actually any good? How can I tell which has great players, or how welcoming they are, or what is expected if I join? How can I find out which has the best story?

    So even though I probably would enjoy it, I find it too difficult to get into them.
     
  4. elliot beckett

    elliot beckett Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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  5. nx1701g

    nx1701g Admiral Admiral

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    ^ I wish you a lot of luck; however, I wanted to let you know that text based RPGs don't do well on this board. We did have a fleet almost ten years ago on here, but it's long since died (except the flagship which is still active on Yahoo Groups now).

    I do wish you luck though.
     
  6. elliot beckett

    elliot beckett Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

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  7. FALCONX0N

    FALCONX0N Captain Captain

    Joined:
    Mar 25, 2003
    Location:
    Behind you!
    I gotta say, I've been involved in a text-base simming multi-franchise crossover RPG for going on something crazy like 13 years, now, though the current 'storyverse' has only been around since '04 (we did a continuity reboot after things got a little too muddled and over the top). Being a scifi/fantasy/whatever crossover we get a lot of different players, styles, and it's always a (fun) struggle to try and balance them, in addition to all the wonky personalities that you find on the internet. There's a link in my profile if anyone's interested.

    We've been doing this for years, and still going...well I don't know if we're going strong, but we're definately still going. It's funny how quickly people grow up and head off; we recently had people come back after we hadn't
    seen them in nearly ten years!

    It's strange the different trends you end up noticing as you get older. In the past, summer time was always the busiest season with the most people online-- nowadays everyone has jobs or internships so there really isn't much of a difference, and if there is a difference it's that there's less people now! Then there's a cycle and everything gets going again, and then there's the die-hards who are in every night, and then there's the guys who pop in every day but don't actually do much simming unless it's on the weekends (yours truly would be one of the latter). Of course, it's different when it's based out of a message board-- those are a lot slower pased, more time to think about, plot your next move. I've always done it out of chatrooms, which has far more of an 'improv/real time' strength to it (even though obviously a 6 hour battle might consist of, it were acted out in person, a 2 minute fight--if that). When we're talking Message Board play-by-posts, that two minute battle might take six months to play out. I started when I was a wee youngin', around 11 or 12, and I just didn't have that kind of patience.

    Unfortunately, chat-based simming also more time consuming--it can be like writing out a screenplay on a nightly basis. It's also fun to see how people get accustomed to a specific style, which unfortunately can sometimes cause headaches. Like Arix mentioned, you get the people who have a very minimalist, don't-write very much people up against the people who like to throw out paragraphs and suddenly everyone's all angry and intimidated. Or the excellent-writers disdain on the people who enjoy it, but are terrible at it. And the terrible people never want help... Accessability is another problem--too often there's just a few people on and newcomers are too intimidated to just barge in (we've been encountering this issue in increasing frequency), even when they're encouraged to just start off in-medias-res.

    But man o man, the stories I could tell. Any of you other Simmers/RPers have any good ones?
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2010
  8. Penta

    Penta Commander Red Shirt

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    I think a distinction really needs to be made here.

    How you play in a sim, and how everything goes, really depends on the medium used.

    Play-by-email simming works differently from play-by-post (forum) simming, and both of which work extremely differently compared to IRC simming, which in my humble opinion shares more with MUSHes and MOOs than with either PBEM or PBP simming.

    From my own experience, PBEM and PBP are not equivalent. PBP lends itself more to short posts and a much higher pace than PBEM; in PBEM, most sims I've played on use a mix of solo posts and joint posts, versus the tag structure of PBP simming. PBEM posts tend to be longer, besides.

    Play by chat, on the other yhand, is way more like MUSHes and MOOs. I've not done play by chat in years, but I still am an active player on MUSHes and MOOs. Biggest hurdle I've found? Those require a time commitment. Because they work in real-time, you can't get by with just a few minutes a day reading posts plus some more time over a week doing your posts, like you can on a PBEM game.

    On the other hand, MUSHes and MOOs, if you *can* find the time, have the most impactful roleplay I've ever had. Whether it be a 12-year-old character (on an Ender's Game MOO) discovering girls, or other (older) characters (in other settings) in diplomatic negotiations, or even in combat...It's real-time, so you get a lot more into it. RP in a real-time format is, not to put too fine a point on it, like baring your psyche to the other person, IMHO. No matter how good you are at keeping in character separate from out of character, you will feel it if both parties are any good. This leads to OOC trust being kinda key when you play in real-time in my opinion. People you RP with will likely very quickly become OOC friends, even if they play enemies...and sometimes, even if you try to build barriers. I even found my first serious RL relationship because we both played on a MOO, and very quickly got to know each other. We've never met IRL, sadly, but we knew each other to a very deep level, and what we learned through MOOing has helped us stay friends even years after she broke up with me.

    Play by post and PBEM, on the other hand...You have to be a good writer in any of these formats to get the most out of it, but for PBP and PBEM you have to be good at longer forms of writing than chat or MUSH/MOO RP. These longer forms can be just as impactful (I have, as a GM, made players in a Shadowrun PBP game nearly vomit IRL, because my description of something was so gory and realistic), but you have to wield written language very well to get the same level of impact. On the other hand, you tend to get much deeper characters and settings from even newbie players with PBEM in particular (play by chat doesn't lend itself as readily to depth; MUSHes and MOOs can do depth to astounding degrees, but only with an investment of time most players aren't willing to make, I've found.). Don't be surprised if you find you know people OOCly a lot less through PBEM/PBP than more real-time mediums though - that's part of the appeal at times, that you bare a lot less of yourself.

    A lot of times, my favorite format varies with the setting - each setting for a game melds with different advantages and disadvantages of the medium. For Shadowrun, for example, because it's a pen and paper RPG we're playing online, I like PBP the best. You get a lot of story and characters, and the pace can vary such that, with adaptations, you can get through an adventure in a good time. For the same reasons, though, I shy away from play-by-chat. (There used to be Shadowrun MUSHes, and I loved them, but they all have largely folded over the years.) I prefer PBP over PBEM for Shadowrun because you can more easily separate OOC chatter, dice rolls, etc, from actual In Character RP without as much confusion. For Star Trek in particular though? I've done MUSHes. My "native RP habitat" is a MUSH or MOO, I joke with friends. (The difference between a MUSH and a MOO is code, nothing a player usually worries about, so I use them both here.) The coding of things like a space system, an economy system, etc. that you'll see on many Trek MUSHes can be fun, but I found I didn't have the speed to keep up, despite loving the RP that resulted.

    I've also done play by chat - very briefly. It's a taste thing, but I didn't like IRC or similar for roleplay, not in Trek. Dozens of people in the same space got confusing.

    PBP (forum-based RP) can work - I haven't done this format with Trek in years, though.

    PBEM, to me, is ideal for Trek where you have (as most sims do) everybody set on the same ship. You can get very in-depth with characters. Plots take time, but a good sim keeps everybody accountable for being active, and goes through "episodic" plots at a fairly good pace.

    Arix, this is where you might find PBEM more to your taste than the STO forums. Generally speaking, GMs stick around. (Players can sometimes be flaky.) If you can accept that most people will post once or twice a week in page-or-so sized posts, then the average plot taking a month to month and a half to run through makes sense. Newbie handling on a PBEM is a lot simpler - It's best to leave them to the GM if you can. While I haven't done Trek PBEM GMing, I've done it for other PBEM setups, and while it's always nice when players help guide the newbies, in the end I always felt (when I was a GM) that it was my responsibility - that, whether or not the players had the time or patience to help, the buck stopped with me on keeping quality up as much as quantity. This was as much a practical thing (because newbie-handling can, just as you experienced, be very draining on a player, where a GM should know to expect it) as philosophical. Sometimes, often actually, doing this meant joining a game had to have more than just "Hi I want to join" as a starting point - most PBEMs have character applications not merely to keep out spammers, but also to make sure everybody (prospective player and GM alike) knows going in what the heck the prospective player is capable of.

    Your point about being able to tell the good sims from the bad is very well taken, though. There isn't a way to tell at a glance; at any given time there are hordes of sims, most don't survive past a few months, and more pop up to replace the ones that die out. Word of mouth is your best bet to find a quality sim. For sims that post to the RPG recruitment thread here, see if you can read their archives (generally you can). You can get a good sense of a sim's RP through previous posts to a PBEM or PBP, or logs of a play-by-chat sim (MUSHes and MOOs...Well, I hate to say it, but because the code can be such a big part of a MUSH/MOO experience for a setting like Trek, logs don't usually tell the whole story. You really have to just dive in to a MUSH).

    Beyond that, defining a "good" sim comes down to taste a lot of times. I'm not opposed to playing in a sim that's part of a fleet, though the sim I advertised here recently is independent (though it was previously part of a fleet); some people, though, hate the experience and stick to independent sims (which also tend to be smaller). I prefer post-NEM Trek RP in the Prime Universe, or at least RP that's willing to say "we only look at canon up to a certain point"; IMHO, you get more freedom that way, because you're generally "post-canon" and don't have to worry about canon saying something is impossible. (I prefer a flexible adherence to canon; some people like to totally ignore it, others to try to stay within its bounds more faithfully.) Other people prefer TNG-based RP, or TOS, or ENT.

    Point is that looking for a sim is uncertain, though, yes. Word of mouth is key. But most key? Spending the time to sit down and actually look into the community of players you intend to join.
     
  9. nx1701g

    nx1701g Admiral Admiral

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    Exactly - that's a perfect summary of what is important to do when looking into any game. There are some games out there that have hundreds of posts a month, but they're all sizzle and no steak. Then you have some that are out there that may not have a high rate of posting, but they have creative and well constructed story.

    I've been very lucky.
     
  10. Nick086

    Nick086 Captain Captain

    Joined:
    Aug 15, 2007
    I use do the text based simming from 1997-2004. I was in SFOL (Space Fleet Online) an AOL Star Trek based sim group for three years. I had to do a lot of ass kissing to make to Ensign. The AOL Hosts running the groups were total pricks if I might add. In the AOL chatrooms created by members had some interesting groups there were quite a few good ones with good people, but most of those sim groups were run by power hungry assholes. For the most part it was fun getting promoted or getting medals. I think what killed it, was poor plotting and coming up with a good story. You have to keep your members entertained while playing a character that a part of the story for an hour.
     
  11. Cicero

    Cicero Admiral Admiral

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    Jan 14, 2002
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    Tanusha
    I wrote for the now-defunct Starbase Arcadia PBEM RPG (set on a starbase orbiting Cardassia shortly after the Dominion War). It was a wonderful experience; we had many clever, thoughtful writers, interesting, original characters, and an excellent editor. The writing was so good at its peak that several of my friends (who weren't Star Trek fans by any stretch) would read the highlights and regularly ask for updates.

    I will always miss Arcadia. Posting there was one of the best experiences I've ever enjoyed.
     
  12. nordmoon

    nordmoon Lieutenant Junior Grade Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Oct 6, 2008
    Which do you prefer, PBEM or SMS/NOVA or forums? I have always trouble determine which format is the best way? Which do you prefer when rping?
     
  13. Penta

    Penta Commander Red Shirt

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    Mar 17, 2008
    Nick: AOL RPGs had a very weird dynamic, from my remembrance. Very toxic. I would recommend trying to find a nice, small independent sim if you're ever interested these days. From my own experience, the BS factor has (even in a good number of fleets) been cut down a good bit - simply because there are hordes of sims out there, and what tend to be lacking are players.

    Nordmoon: My personal preference is PBEM, but I'd hesitate to call any the "best" way. It really is a question of preference.