Forums » RP Discussion » Fast-paced adventure chat-RP session-based games

I've spent a while searching for a very specific kind of roleplaying community. Long enough to get me thinking about just doing it myself, because I don't see others doing it the way I think is best. There are a lot of little things that I see roleplaying communities do which don't seem to be conscious decisions. A lot of ancient history there getting in the way of different methods.


What I want is a time-continuous active-paced session-based roleplaying community based in Discord. The characters are involved with a developing town in a dangerous environment within a magical world, quests take the form of a gamemaster who plays the world and NPCs, and the players who signed up their characters to participate in the adventure. Casual roleplay is carried out by invite or drop-in RP. The scale should ideally be medium sized, about 15-20 active players with many GMs.


So dig the following:

Based in Discord
Generic channels (RP1, RP2)
Based in a single town that characters live in and begin their adventures from. This has many implications for the play that are overlooked with big worlds
Continuous time to keep the game moving forward and all characters on the same track
Anyone can GM anything so long as toes aren't stepped on and the town doesn't get blown up
Preference towards shorter posts, about a paragraph or less, to better keep a fast pace
Entirely active RP, no passive. Have to reply in a timely manner or pause the RP for later
Session-based, as suggested above
While adventures are always mainstay, you can also casually roleplay around town or do self-posts, usually talking about adventures
Simple dice-based RPG system
Tending towards an open and mature community
Creative laissez faire approach to what players can do to play or build the world or town

It's certainly not a unique idea, but never do I find games that sidestep common and easy trappings, like communities that allow both passive and active RP, yet in practice that always results in only passive RP because that's easier. Or location-specific channels, that promote the same idea with really slow RPs and channel lockdowns and restrictive creativity with locations, no flowing from scene to scene. It never feels like the game makers intended for these things to happen, it only feels like it resulted from a lack of understanding.
The point is that RP communities always tend towards a certain style of play that I just don't find compelling. Something like a day to a week between replies, novella/multipara or single lines, hundreds of channels, gigantic empty worlds, restricted GM clique, and player actions not resulting in canon. And there are so, so, SO many games like this, when they just don't have to be, there are many ways to handle it. Location-specific channels bother me the most. It's a minor thing, but they truly do have massive implications that no one ever thinks about.

Please give me your thoughts on this. I hate being an admin and I don't particularly enjoy GMing, but I'm willing to make this because I want it. Would you be willing to play this?

I think the culture has simply changed and stayed changed for too long, I know I'll never get that oldschool comfy chatroom feel back - I know Discord is another realtime IM but something about it just doesn't feel the same and I find it incredibly insular in many ways (the actual client, not the users).
I never really liked these, even on forums, all it seems to do is spread players around too thin and make past continuity hard to follow (nobody ever seems to link to or from each location???). I've seen it work but only when there's a massive number of players to make it feel like a real hub of people dipping in and out of a place that could physically exist like some kind of MUD.

Good luck with this endeavour, I can't say I'll be joining if only because I dislike using Discord and idk about dice. How would you solve the problem of massively different time zones and/or individuals having to go on hiatus? For instance, as a UK player I've always had problems keeping up with RPs from American hosts; school and work barely gave a tiny window of time we could use just to say "hey, how's your day?" to each other.

There are no ways around this with realtime RP. Communities will tend towards certain time zones naturally, and those in outlier time zones will always have it rough. Australians get it the worst of all, for instance, and you basically never see them in American communities. In American-centric communities you'll find that a few hardcore Euroes will be able to slot into American time zones, but the rest will largely participate only in the American late-night sessions during Euro early hours. Some American GMs are kind enough to run sessions during Euro hours. Most Euros will stay up until 3-4 AM their time to participate during comfortable hours for American GMs. It literally isn't rare for Euros to fall asleep at the keyboard, at least in my last group. There, GMs would tend to pause the session once the Euro players get too tired.
Of course, you could just have a bunch of Euros who are able to do their own thing. And all this is assuming a community that is mostly American.

When it comes to breaks or hiatuses, it radically changes from GM to GM. In this kind of game, a hiatus would generally result in the player getting dropped from the quest. The fast pace creates an accepting atmosphere - it results in an understanding that, sometimes, people need to bail, and that's fine even if it's a bummer. When it comes to casual RP or 1 on 1, it's not a problem at all to simply pause and pick up later.
If it's a long quest (multiple sessions) and a player needs to bail mid session, that player will go "NPC," which is a term meaning they're in the background and no longer actively participating. The other players essentially ignore this. The GM or a trusted friend will generally play that PC's stats in combat. Out of combat the PC is assumed to be along for the ride. The player will return next session.
I've seen this as well. It was an anime group RP server that, strangely enough, came closest to representing this style of RP aside from one other. It had hundreds of players and well over 50 RPing at any one time. There was a point when someone walked through an RP a few friends of mine were doing.
While the method will be different, the same effect can happen with generic channels. Characters can happen upon RPs taking place in generic channels, it's used as a narrative setup. It's part of the spontaneous nature of fast-paced semi-paragraph or paragraph RP. The only possibility lost in this version of spontaneous RP are the meaningless descriptions of movement into and out of a scene. You don't do that with generic channels.
This method of RP was very common in my last group. Many players would join an ongoing open scene as their characters waltzed into the scene. They asked if they could hop in, and in almost every case it was allowed. Sometimes a special thing is going on that you don't want to interrupt, because not every character can add to every scene. This created the effect of watching a show unfold before you for spectators.