The Forum Game Encyclical

In response to Hilander's Analog Online Play Manifesto

  

Parallel Construction
I came to the OSR/GLOG honestly, but by a weird route. It went something like, freeform roleplaying on Scratch -> Text Based Games forum -> Bay12 Roll to Dodge -> Discord -> link to Goblin Punch.

I've played 5e a couple times, but have never been into any edition of D&D. I might try GLOG at some point and I expect that would probably be neat.

(Yes, this means I wrote a ?glog class? without any real experience of glog. Let it be known that I am a liar and a fake).

Anyway, I have some peculiar ideas about TTRPGs that are shaped by my having known them as "forum games" for most of my time with the hobby. In that frame, online games aren't a poor substitute for in-person play, they're a different and independent thing.

How to
I've already written about how to PbP, but you don't have to read that, because I'm going to one-up Whisperling from February 2024 and summarize it in three bullets:

1. Follow a turn structure: Each player submits an action -> GM rolls dice, responds to all actions simultaneously as a batch -> Repeat. The exception is talking with NPCs, you can respond to that unbatched and as frequently as you like.
   
   
2. Consider what counts as a reasonable timeframe in which to post and skip players who are too slow. Be a bit ruthless, because momentum is everything. PbP games die super easily and they do not speed up after they slow down.
   
   
3. Keep the system simple. It should fit in the first post of your forum thread (or in a #rules channel on discord). Absolutely nothing that requires multiple rounds of back-and-forth between player and GM per turn.

If you want to see how it looks in practice you could skim threads from the Bay12 Roll to Dodge Hall of Fame, which is ancient but should provide decent examples. Discord works the same, just make separate channels for IC / OOC / reference documents.

Why to
You're thirteen and you've stumbled upon places where there are interesting things happening, where people are doing stuff like Perplexicon or Our Salvation or Roll to Magic (beloved, long-gone). Some is silly fun; lots of it is unique and compelling and inventive. There's an entire life to be lived here and you want in on it.

The thing I love about forum games is really, just, how unmoored they are as an artistic tradition. Sure, there's cross-pollination with D&D, but the roots aren't the same. There are different premises, different worlds, totally unlimited by questions like "is there a system published for this?" or "would people meet in real life to play it out?"

Here are some more examples, if you don't believe me. They're doing wildly varied stuff and doing it with aplomb, just by using very basic dice systems and hewing closely to the GM's view of the world.

The Warrens of Oric the Awesome - Dungeon crawler with deep lore and a class/soul star system that's... sort of reminiscient of homestuck? if I had to draw a comparison?

Roll to Create a Supersoldier - Extremely well-run scientific marvels and horrors, nominally in pursuit of superhuman combat potential.

RTD Horrors - You are one of several eldritch horrors competing with one another to complete a summoning ritual and conquer the earth.

Various things by Weirdsound - Gnolls, wizards who do magic by expending their memories, an academy for young gods.

You are a Monster RTD - Players are monsters that grow stronger by overcoming adversity and absorbing the life force of other creatures.

Necromechanic - Necromantic crafting epic, still lives as a long series of games on discord.

Titans of Creation - Deities expend all their power and eventually die in the process of creating a world.

I like the OSR blogging scene, but sometimes its rigidity makes me weep. Lots of treading the same ground of classes and spell lists and encumbrance rules when there's so much else out there to be explored.

So what does this have to do with running games in text specifically?
You don't have to run these kinds of games on a forum. It's theoretically possible to meet up in person or over voice to play them. But you probably won't.

Without the pressure of having dedicated sessions to play this specific game, it's easier to pitch weird premises that don't have much system to support them. Plus, there's a forum's worth of people who might be interested.

As demonstrated by Necromechanic or Roll to Create a Supersoldier, you can also play with more complicated ideas than you otherwise might, because everyone has more time to think and occasionally to draw pictures. 

Voice in the Void
I also just have a personal fondness for text. I like reading. I like being the person behind your phone screen, without any attached characteristics. I like being named Whisper and dipping in and out of conversations and finding communities that are monomaniacally focused on the stuff I'm interested in. I've met most of my favorite people this way.

The Discordance
There's an elephant in the room, which is that Discord has done enormous violence to the forum ecosystem.

Discord is great in its own way; there's a lot you can do with real-time chat that's much harder at the speed of forum discussion. For one, making friends, real-time chat is great for that.

But it also means finding new people is harder. These days I mostly recruit from a stable of players I know, and I can't see what games are on offer just by looking at the front page of a subforum. I guess my old haunts are still out there, albeit quieter, and SB and SV do, uh, exist. But something has definitely been lost.

Whisperling's Arbitrary Forum Game Principles
~ Use a bespoke setting. It doesn't have to be worldbuilt, you can use a two-sentence elevator pitch, just have fun with it. Try radically different premises.

~ Play worlds not rules! I was really hyped when I found out about the FKR, but they turned out to be kinda boring. This is a good principle though. Bespoke system, keep it simple, pick a die size and maybe some stats.

~ Forum games die a lot, don't feel too bad about that.

~ I read this post which advocates limiting turns to the size of a bluesky post, and honestly that might be a good idea. Smaller and more freely-flowing turns tend to be better than the opposite, even if writing a big chunk of text can be tempting sometimes.

~ Run something weird and complicated at least once. Minimalism can get weird and complicated if it continues for long enough.

~ Don't pay money for RPGs? It really isn't necessary.

~ Things to try: Organize a conspiracy over DMs. Participate in a PvP deathmatch. Start an elaborate feud. Try a minimalist game like Roll to Spend Points. Come up with multi-paragraph conditional plans. GM for people who've run games for you.