RPG over IM

Posted on by Paul Beakley

RPG over IM

Does anyone know of any RPGs, published or hacked or whatever, that are explicitly designed to be run over an IM service? GChat is nice but, you know, whatever. Looking for leads and ideas.

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

0 thoughts on “RPG over IM”

  4. This is something I’ve looked into a bit, and never found anything suitable. There are a variety of things crafted for play-by-post style, but they don’t explicitly use IM style features.

    Still, I’ve done a handful of impromptu free-form sessions in the style of Doomed Pilgrim, as Steve Hickey​ mentioned – one character and everyone else plays “the world”.

  5. I feel like Doomed Pilgrim works with an audience and varying participation in a Public space. I’m thinking a more private and direct channel, probably played asymmetrically, probably with a set player or players.

    External document reference and some kind of shared randomizer would be fine, possibly not necessary.

    I feel like it’s a pretty practical space to pick up and play for a while, then drop it as necessary. Continuity seems fraught. I’m thinking about Storium stories folks have told me, where the challenge isn’t running the game but keeping it going.

  6. Unaris is basically a heartbreaker, but the setting is kind of amazing, actually, and it has word-hacking-based magic. So, like, the GM posts: “That glances off his head and he laughs.” And then I spend 2 word-altering resource points (forget what they’re called) and change it to “That takes off his head and he dies.”

  10. If you haven’t found one in a week, message me.

    Also: on Story Games a year or two back someone playtested an interesting exquisite corpse style game where you took turns sharing small snippets of a story. (I can’t remember many search-friendly specifics of the story we told: maybe one character was a detective, maybe there was a twin, maybe one of them turned into a fly?)

  11. Also, for what it’s worth, I did a lot of PBeM and Play-by-forum games back in the day and keeping them going was the biggest challenge. If it’s just 1 or 2 people posting regularly, the game basically dies.

  12. Also, I ran a DW play-by-G+ game last year and the same thing happened. People slowed down in posting, then I (the GM) stopped posting as regularly, and then everything screeched to a halt. The first parts were super fun, though.

  19. I played a completely freeform rpg over an AOL chatroom back in the day.

    I’d imagine most rules light games would work fairly well over Hangouts IM as you can roll dice in the chat box.

    I do feel like part of the success of the AOL chat game I played is that we scheduled time to all sit at our computers and play. I imagine you’ll still have posting rate problems in IM unless there are some posting speed ground rules.

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