Freeform rp

can someone explain how that shit is supposed to work?

Rape the other player's characters

Instead of being autistic about needing a rules set to 'win' at an RPG you just, you know, roleplay.

It doesn't.

You and every other player simultaneously either accept that your characters aren't omnipotent and have flaws and weaknesses and can actually be outplayed or beaten in a verbal argument, or you see who can invent the best everything-proof shield/everything-proof shieldbreaker loop first.

I have a friend who does it. He says he does it because he likes the challenge of it. From the way he describes it, freeform DOES have rules, but they're rules of conduct rather than actual gameplay protocol. Your character should have weaknesses and limits, as arbitrated by the GM. You can't control other characters (e.g. "You are all amazed at my prowess") nor can you, without the approval of the GM, control the world around you ("I destroy the demons with one vicious swipe!") Dice may be used for conflict revolution, there's just no codified way to use them, except as defined by the GM.

Obviously, you need good players and a good GM to make it work.

It's collaborative novel writing. Either everyone involved accepts that the goal is working together to create a good story, or it flies apart in an instant.

>does it. He says he does it because he likes the challenge of it. From the way he describes it, freeform DOES have rules, but they're rules of conduct rather than actual gameplay protocol. Your character should have weaknesses and limits, as arbitrated by the GM. You can't control other characters (e.g. "You are all amazed at my prowess") nor can you, without the approval of the GM, control the world around you ("I destroy the demons with one vicious swipe!") Dice may be used for conflict revolution, there's just no codified way to use them, except as defined by the GM.
>Obviously, you need good players and a good GM to make it work.
This.
I did GMed a game like this for a month lengh of RP (mean 10 sessions during summer) we went pretty far it was nice. Also we were playing in a setting with Nen in Not!Japan with samuraï and yokai. It was pretty nice to see them actually THINK to defeat monster, instead of throwing X Fireball lvl 10 at the enemy. Even the "fighter" was inventive as fuck.

Great for first sessions, play freeform until significant challenges appear, then start statting the characters on the fly from the point-buy pool.

Sounds pretty gay desu I’ll stick to D&D with rules, dice, minis, and grids.

I know it's been in place for like two years now but I still love the new word filter desu senpai

I unironically call people fampai because of it.

Effectively a tool for session zero. Use freeform to discuss and set up how the party comes together or similar then transition into actual gameplay when the story begins. This can allow players to better define characters and their past actions.

I know what 'chu mean, fampai has turned into famurai around my circle.

No rules, the only mechanic is GM's fiat, What's required for character creation is also defined by the GM.

That sounds autistic, why play a role-playing game if there's no risk, chance of failure, or rules on what your character can and can't do? It's more like free form improv than an actual game.

That's because that is what it is

>more like free form improv
Yep. That's why it says "Freeform RP" in the title, not "Freeform RPG."

Nothing wrong with being a gamist, that's why I play RPGs, but nothing wrong with just collaborative storytelling either.

See .

You just teleport behind everyone to win fights

>I teleport behind you and fuck you in the butt!
>no, I teleport behind YOU and fuck you in the butt!
>no, I was already behind you to fuck you in the butt!

In the early days of the internet, you could make a character whose whole gimmick was having an iron turtle shell that made him invulnerable to attacks from behind, and people would STILL attempt to teleport behind him.

Some things never change.

There was a manga that did your gif intentionally, repeatedly teleporting behind until the protagonist got the other guy out of a populated area, then they fought more legitimately

>There was a manga
several actually. that's why it's a shitty trope.

>Was that guy
>actually became good because I learnt from shit characters
>Trying to make a villain similar to that [and making him good] and deconstructing it for the lulz and to see if it can be done.

Mind you this is in a game with rules.

Played a one-off of Dread the other week, the RP is freeform but there's rules for the tower and doing actions and stuff. So super rules-light

Pretty cool, but the "Cant dramatically harm/kill another player character" rule is pretty important.

No user, not needing rules and structure is literally the opposite of autistic.

>Can someone explain how that shit is supposed to work?

It's the same as a regular RPG, except you don't actually have stats or mechanics. Everyone does whatever they want, and everyone is equally "strong". Any obstacles their characters face are there because the players wanted their characters to face said obstacles. The goal is to more to make an interesting story than to overcome any defined challenge.

It's the kind of game for people who like to get super immersed and don't want to have to deal with math problems and rulebooks interrupting the flow of play, and potentially having their narrative broken because you failed a CON save or some shit.

>No user, not needing rules and structure is literally the opposite of autistic.
Remember that on modern Veeky Forums, "autistic" means "kek u spent time and effort making things, what a fag"

>why play a role-playing game if there's no risk, chance of failure, or rules on what your character can and can't do?

There's still chance of failure if the other players get sick of your shit and kick you out.

There's still a risk of failure and consequence for your action it's just the group or games master that decides what happens.

Which is how RPGs work anyway. For example 5E is designed for your character to hit things 70% of the time, literally what is the difference between you rolling a dice or the GM saying about 70% of the time you hit.

Likewise rules can always get in the way of interesting things.

For example my D&D party wanted to try to stage a coup within a city but because they felt they needed to be constrained to some rules framework to do so that didn't exist they didn't bother with the plan.

*teleports behind u*
Pssh nothin personnel kid.

fool... that was only an afterimage...

An intrinsic advantage is that it weeds out the sort of munchkins who think RPGs are supposed to be like competitive multiplayer videogames and talk at lengths about "muh builds" and so on.
And consequently it allows players to make their characters the way that feels right and appropriate without worrying if their "build" is "viable" or whether the aforementioned assholes will complain loudly about their design choices.

Sounds like Busou Renkin, and it was a good gag.

Isn't it basically just storytelling with a gentleman's agreement to not be dicks to each other ?

Freeform requiers certain type of players to work well. Mainly, people that want to play for fun and enjoyment, not for the win.

Dice and other rngs can still be used, even extensively, but there is much more liberty in determining outcomes with them. For example, rather than stats like:
>STR: 20
>AGI: 10
>INT:13

You get things like that:
>Your character is a ,echanic, so all actions that involve mechanical stuff are easier

What does it change? For example, when you make an action, instead of counting your score ponts, you ask GM:
>"Can I do X?"
>"Sure, but it is hard stuff to you need to roll 14+ on d20"
>"But it's my speciality"
>"Ok, then you need 9+"


As for gameplay itself, I think it is better in a sense that it promotes creativity. Like said with fireballs etc. Since you have no clear view on health, dmg, players are susually more wary, at least if they know that GM is ready to fuck them for acting stupid.

see >freeform DOES have rules, but they're rules of conduct
Because any social interaction has rules, even if they're unwritten.

Serious freeform RP groups - protip: we're not the shitters you see in public forums - will have rules, usually unwritten rules. *teleports behind you* type shit is just understood to be in poor taste and not allowable and so it isn't seriously tried.

So in that sense, there are indeed "rules on what your character can or can't do," you're just expected to intuit them - or maybe they are written, some groups roll that way, though not all. And some freeform RPs even have GMs that arbitrate, adjudicate conflicts, and do all the other GM shit. And some freeform RPs I've seen even do use RNGs to adjudicate conflict, even if it's as simple as "heads you win, tails they win" or shit like that.

also has a good point - to actually work well it requires everyone involved to be on the same page with regards to telling a narrative rather than "winning."

It really requires players who understand that failure can be constructive. A good freeform game plans failures as well as successes, because indeed, it would be boring in the party always wins all the time. They should occasionally fail both on the macro scale and the micro scale, and good RP players want to.

In my game, the story is so emphasized that we occasionally have whole sessions with either token rolls or no rolls at all, just pure freeform. We only break out the mechanics cor adjudicating combat encounters and occasionally settling actions where the outcome is unsure.

Free form roleplaying is shared storytelling. Rather then trying to 'win' the object is to entertain yourself and the people you are playing with. The basic rules are simple. Don't negate anyone else, don't go to extremes that people can't handle and don't be a dick.

Sort of. Some freeform groups do have GMs and just mutually agree to abide by what the GM decides happens when characters conflict with the world or one another. If anything, it requires more, not less, ability on the GM's part because the GM doesn't have a rulebook to fall back on when he decides something happens. A GM in a TTRPG has rules that he simply practices, and the rules are impartial. The GM in a freeform game has to actively work to be impartial and to be trusted by the players; a GM in a freeform RP has to delicately balance allowing the story to progress in a desired way and not absolutely ensuring it goes in a desired way, because he might not have any uncertainty factor that he doesn't introduce himself.

I've been a player in a freeform RP game for about a year that just concluded a week or two ago. The main reason that freeform was this group's go-to for so long is because we all met eachother in similar shit like SotDRP/Cortex (WC3 and SC2 respectively) and that's just how we knew eachother as roleplayers.

I can say combat is a pretty boring experience in this kind of game, just because there's pretty much no player investment in passing the encounters. You just say "my character shoots at the bandits" and then the GM just tells you what happens. Basically how fights pan out is either the encounter looks scary but is trivial to pass and the GM just says "your martial party members slaughter everything in sight." ... or the GM woke up on the wrong side of the bed today and feels like party-wiping you, and nothing you do in-character will alter the outcome.
Even when the encounters were somewhat complex it still just boiled down to me saying "well uh, my martial character who is good at shooting is going to maybe move to a certain spot to get a better angle before shooting his gun."

I've also found that failure and success results with high stakes to them seem more acceptable when you roll for them. When you shoot at something in a freeform game and don't hit or wound, it feels a bit like if the DC was too high for you to succeed but the GM let you roll anyway.

After the campaign ended, I started putting together a simple and more "loose" game system, mostly just to fix combat being boring, whilst still allowing us to freeform pretty much everything else that goes on.
I'm about 3/4 of the way to completing it and hopefully I'll run a game with them soon. Mostly just to sell them on the idea that maybe we should've just homebrewed Traveller to accept our setting from the very start.

I remember the first time I roleplayed was on Gaia, and the very first thing that happened to me is another person's character ripped my characters arms off instantly.

I played on Neopets too, but I barely remember

At what point does a game stop being freeform?

Does a game need a system to be an RPG, not just a freeform RP? How simple can that system be? What if it's essentially freeform, but with uncertain actions decided by RNG - without pre-written rules determining odds, just ad-hoc estimations of success. Is that freeform, or an RPG? Either way, where exactly is the line?

I run a freeform RP, and combat is something I usually try to have something else going on simultaneously. While I'll never have an encounter the party absolutely can't win, winning can be more than one kind of thing - winning can just be "escaping successfully," for instance. Other times it would boil down to a series of tactical choices - do you risk X to achieve Y? I try to make sure every PC in an encounter got to make at least one kind of choice like that in addition to tactical choices as to how they proceed.

I think what a lot of Veeky Forums doesn't realize is that a lot of serious freeform players do use rolls or some chat protocols and forums that have a random choice mechanic. This is precisely because uncertainty is more fun in conflicts.

I was also once in a rather large forum game where a poll the forum allowed decided the results of things. It was an anonymous poll, which helped avoid any kind of metagaming, which gets a problem with larger or less-close groups. So after a long or important post was written, it'd have a poll like
>PC should be victorious
>PC should be captured
>PC should fail, but escape
>PC should escape but lose the holy sword of macguffin
and we'd go with whatever got the most votes. If there were a lot of options the forum allowed optional multi-voting. I'd simply work with the poster in question to come up with a series of results they'd be willing to accept, and it never really caused any problems because of that. The fact that every player got to vote on each other's outcomes helped a lot, I think, in getting every player on board with accepting adverse results. It sort of forced the entire proceedings to stay within a vague bound of having things go well but not perfectly and the "you succeed, but..." option won about two-thirds of the time.

>I think what a lot of Veeky Forums doesn't realize is that a lot of serious freeform players do use rolls or some chat protocols and forums that have a random choice mechanic.
We were using discord (I know bots for dice exist, my game will be using one) and our GM is pretty RNGphobic, so we never got the chance to roll for anything.

From my perspective though, if you're going to have an elaborate mechanic for deciding the outcome, you might as well implement an actual RPG system into the game. At least it's like that if you've got a "traditional RPG" player+GM dynamic.

Unless you want to assume all of your players are just and honourable there's no real way to ensure they don't all PM eachother and decide to metagame the poll.

That sounds lousy. How did you last for a year? Were the players good friends and you were in it for the camaraderie?

It doesn't really have to be "elaborate." A poll or a single roll or a /choose mechanic (most dice bots have such a thing) suffices. As for metagaming the poll, if the players are all that united on wanting a specific thing to happen, I really don't get why that would be discouraged.

You play a character and narrate what they say and do, which drives the plot.

Exactly what part of that is complicated?

I'll be honest, I don't know anyone over the age of, like, 14 that does the *teleports behind u* shit unironically.

I don't actually see a lot of munchkins in freeform players because it's just boring. Winning without a system has no meaning and just pisses everyone else off. They're weeded out pretty fast.

We were basically good friends and had an investment in the story because it was meant to bring a lot of smaller stories in the same setting together.

I think by the time we really realised some of the problems with our approach, it was too late to fix a lot of them.

To be fair, an actually autistic person generally needs more consistency and structure to function.