Face to Face play is clearly the superior method for playing RPGs. It is the only mode of play which provides one of the central, and perhaps the most important, benefits of the hobby, which is that it is social and involves getting together physically with friends. You get to play a fun game and you also get to meet friends, which is important for the soul.
It is also by far and away the most convenient way to play. You get to scribble things on bits of paper to show each other; arrange items on a table to show spatial relationships between in-game objects; crowd together around the rulebook to jointly figure out what a certain passage means, and so on.
Finally, it is thoroughly enjoyable to roll dice when other people are physically present and watching and care about the result. Casinos figured this out a long time ago.
Online visual play is the next best thing, because of course it gets closest to resembling face-to-face play, but it has obvious deficiencies which make it in most respects inferior. Interacting behind a screen is just not as good as interacting in the flesh. (We're all of us now experts in this respect, perhaps unless you're lucky enough to be reading this from Sweden.) Online dice rolling lacks the tension-and-climax of the real thing. Connections drop, or lag, which can get in the way of both the practicalities of running the game and its social lubrication (comic timing, banter, etc.).
Play by chat (meaning playing through text in an IIRC channel or whatever) is close behind, and almost level with, online visual. Play by chat offers, in my experience, a very different feeling to other modes of play. It tends to be very stripped down and focused on what is actually happening and what the PCs are saying and thinking; it is very intense. It feels much less like a group of friends getting together to play a game, and more like a group of gamers who have gotten together to do what they love. There isn't a great deal in the way of joking and extraneous chatter; because it isn't quite taking place in real time, those elements of the social glue get shorn away, leaving just The Game. The fact that all the players are alone and can't see or hear each other also serves to make it highly immersive. I like it.
Play by email (which would also include playing through Messenger, Twitter, Whatsapp or whatever) and play by post (for instance on a forum, blog or whatever) are of course similar. Neither of them are great ways to play RPGs. There is something about being able to make moves or take turns at any time which, perversely, results in less engagement: the discipline of having a regular time slot in which to play makes a big difference in giving a campaign momentum. Interaction of any kind is painfully, glacially slow - whether asking a question of the DM, engaging in in-character dialogue, or just saying what a PC does and getting a response. Combat is painful. If anybody is slow to post, things immediately get bogged down, like being stuck in traffic. With all of that said, play-by-email is far superior to play-by-post. The virtue of play-by-email is that at least everybody passively receives messages in their inbox and can reply to them conveniently. Play-by-post requires them to actually visit a website, which is absolutely fatal to engagement. I have been involved in PBEM campaigns that have lasted years - one of them is still going, and must be 15 years old by now - and I ran one myself which lasted for over two years, with multiple daily posts. PBP, on the other hand, I have never managed to have any success with.
I doubt that my ranking will be controversial, but hey, it beats reading yet another news item about coronavirus.
I strongly dislike face to face, because "taking 5 seconds to improvise, as a GM" feels very different (for me, at least) in real-time vs chat (where typing introduces a very tiny delay, enough that I don't feel like I'm slowing things down if I take a moment to spin the gears).
ReplyDeleteChat also lets me use the bathroom or grab a cup of water or something while other people are doing their thing, without any risk of losing track of the goings-on.
I tend to live far away from the people I game with, though, because I move around a lot, so really I'm just comparing online visual and play by chat, not face to face and play by chat.
(None of this is say that your ranking is bad. I just imagine that this'll be a more interesting comment than some generic "Yes. Indeed. Quite so.")
No, it's fair enough. It's interesting to get different perspectives. I enjoy play by chat a lot.
DeleteThere are certain factors that you don't take into account that would make your ranking not as straightforward for some. Although I got into PbEM during a time when I didn't have a group, I actually prefer it now that I've tried. The asynchronous nature makes it a lot easier to plan around your schedule. Add to that the inherent self-documentation of the medium, the exercise in writing, and the time to truly explore deeper subjects on a more thoughtful level rather than the pressure to respond of the live alternatives, and it's more fit to how I want to experience the game.
ReplyDeleteI can totally believe that where there is a high level of buy-in from the players. And I have been involved in long-running PBEM campaigns. But ultimately for me it's not as satisfying as a real-time game.
DeleteIndeed. I think you’re fairly spot-on.
ReplyDeleteAre there another ways of play? That’s an interesting line of exploration. When I was a kid, we did PbM...”play by (snail) mail.” One of our crew would be away on vacation (with the relatives or at camp or whatever), and we would mail our moves (or campaign happenings) via regular mail (back in the days before the internet). I would still rate it higher than PbP, and it was absolutely essential when the missing player was our current DM.
Another thing we used back in the day was PbT: play by telephone. We used to spend hours (as teens) playing over the home landline, eventually forcing our parents to get “call waiting” (which could also enable three-way phone calls.
These days, my kids have been playing D&D while walking the dogs. This is reminiscent of how my friends and I would play in the school yard (when we couldn’t bring dice to school), My son carries a small notebook/pencil for making notes; dice-rolling happens by one person thinking of numbers silently until another person says “basta” (Spanish for “enough”). Not sure what you’d call this style. It’s still role-playing but looser.
I’m sure other folks are inventing other ways to play.
; )
Great comment. Playing while walking the dog (PWWD?) is very much an extension of make believe and what kids naturally do anyway, right? I spent most of this morning at the park pretending with my 3 year old daughter that a church tower was Rapunzel's tower and we had to get medicine to heal the prince's eyes. That's kind of playing D&D really.
DeleteI miss regular face-to-face games a lot. Even up to a few years ago we used to play every other week, but then it became harder and harder to synchronise our schedules. It certainly won't change this year either, sadly.
ReplyDeleteOn the tech side of things, I go back and forth on whether I prefer the face to face theatre of the mind supplemented by chalk/whiteboard sketches or the convenience of Virtual Tabletops. One one hand, things like fog-of-war and raycasted shadows look really neat and allow for immersive and suspenseful revealing of information. On the other hand I enjoy it when the players have to map for themselves and use their heads to maintain accuracy/orient themselves/find secrets/etc., and having the whole map just laid out already to reveal piece-by-piece eliminates that aspect almost entirely.
ReplyDeleteOn the whole I do prefer 'theatre of the mind' but even in face to face games I tend to draw a lot of diagrams and maps on scrap paper to show where everybody is.
DeleteI think it bears mentioning that online (of any form) does have advantages over F2F. The most obvious is the self-documenting that Callmesalticidae and Chunk Dee mentioned (particularly for the text-based modes, assuming we're talking about actually playing vs. Actual Play), and the expansion of your playing group beyond geographical limitations. It also either bypasses, simplifies, or distributes many other logistical hurdles of getting people to gather together (traffic/transportation, allocating space, food/drink arrangements), enables sharing pictures/music/etc., allows looking between (multiple) windows of information without a physical break in facing, and the asynchronous modes (PBEM/PBP) allow for greater depth and accuracy in crafting responses because you can take the time to think more about what you're going to say.
ReplyDeleteI'd give those up to play in person when possible, but when it's not, better to accentuate on the positives instead of dwelling on what's lost.
Online mediums also have a distinct advantage when it comes to games where access to information varies from player to player-- I'd argue it's the superior way to play Paranoia. Passing physical notes or taking someone aside is too conspicuous, and while could text their phones during an IRL game, it's not really a habit I'd want to encourage in players (and if the agreed upon table etiquette is to prohibit phone use the fact that someone is checking it would then be a giveaway).
DeleteYeah, I think it would also be the best way to do Amber Diceless.
DeleteI'm missing online audio. Which is how I currently play (in combination with chat & stuff like dicemaiden for rolls), and I find it a lot better than with video. No time lag, no drops because of network overload, and it gives your imagination more space than webcams do. Because on a webcam, the visuals tend to be more dominant in your face present than they are in FTF gaming, and chances are your friends and there homes look pretty mundane.
ReplyDeleteInteresting one - haven't really tried things that way.
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