Using real-time text chat for RPGs
Back in the 2000s and 2010s, I played in some tabletop RPGs online, with geographically disparate players. We didn’t use Roll20 or any sort of video chat. We played on IRC, then later XMPP, using real time, text-only, chat rooms.
I think more people should try it, and I might run some games that way again. I’m hoping the success of Alice is Missing will mean that more people are open to the idea.
This post is basically a set of notes for anyone (including me) wanting to give it a try. They’re presented in no particular order.
With dedicated rooms for IC & OOC chat, there’s no confusion about what is in or out of character. It’s also easy to have private conversations, IC or OOC.
What can cause confusion, though, is the lack of facial cues or tone of voice. To combat that, we came up with formatting rules to indicate things. Internal monologue is important in Dune, so we decided that text surrounded by “…” was internal monologue:
…I wish Varisha were here. She’d snap her fingers and have more of a plan than ‘play it by ear’. Still, I know this place…
Sarcasm was indicated by backslashes:
\Why not tell her everything there is to know about us, Shamal? Tell her of our water, of Umma’s plans to transform this planet. Maybe even tell her of the water of life, why not? She’s only a fucking off-worlder!\
For dice rolls, you can either let people roll dice and tell you the results, or find a dice bot. We had a dice bot on IRC that would post the results, including whether the roll had succeeded, in the OOC channel.
If the software makes it easy to create new rooms, then if the party splits, a new room can be used for the characters that split off, keeping things separated.
When I was GMing, I had multiple logins. Major NPCs each had their own login, plus I had some generic ones named NPC1, NPC2, etc. If they got more than one or two lines, I’d temporarily rename the generic NPCs. That made it easy for my players (and me) to keep track of which NPC said or did what.
Alice is Missing tells players to change their names in the chat to that of their characters, to help immersion. When we were playing, we set our names to a combination of IC and OOC name. Both approaches have advantages, so go with whatever works for your game and players. When playing Dune, the characters were Fremen, so had two IC names - a sietch name and a common name. We settled on a format of SietchName|CommonName|OOCName for those games.
Sometimes as a GM, I’d have text snippets saved that an NPC might say at an opportune moment. I found this particularly useful when I had NPCs that had a tendency to quote IC books or say something deep (like reverend mothers when I was running Dune), or when running events like funerals that had very specific things to be said at certain times.
If your software logs the chat, you can easily check what happened in a previous session. I used to upload my logs to a private website for my players so that we all had access to them.
Playing in real time means that scheduling rears its ugly head, and playing by text chat tends to be slower than playing face to face.
It helps if you’re able to type at least reasonably quickly. I didn’t think of this before, but now I’d probably check during session zero if anyone is a slow typist, and try to allow for that during the game.
Obviously, everyone needs to be able to access the chat room. I always had a web-based IRC/XMPP client available, so people could use that if they had software issues.
I’d encourage anyone to try playing RPGs this way. It’s a very different experience from play by post games on forums or sites like Role Gate, where players post at different times.