Text Based RPG

>>Extremely slow. One small scene can talk half an hour to an hour, combat even moreso. If you're playing a combat heavy game, instate a rule where you perform all the mechanical stuff before you write out your character's actions, otherwise turns can take upwards of five minutes.
Unless I have a very simplistic combat system that is like "Explain what you do, then roll to see if you do it".
Can't do much for people's attention spam, tho... But I guess I would end up in that situation even if we used mics, since we would all be in front of our computers.

Text based role playing isn't slow if you aren't play with people who have low attention spans.
Someone of hard average intelligence that is capable of thinking and focusing can very easily type out a hundred words every minute or so.
Play with people who are quick and enjoy writing and it isn't a problem.

This can be helped by structuring things well so things moving along at a good pace.

Bump

Of course. Depending on the system you might have to use Roll20 instead of it requires a battle map but only text is absolutely doable. Just make sure you don't invite players who want to write up the perfect description of their actions, because that'll slow down the game, a lot.

text-only games do exist and arguably make up a fair share of all online tabletop RPG campaigns

>Thirty years of forum RP can indeed be wrong and I can prove it by simply disputing the claim.

They're talking about IM text though, not forums.

>Would it be possible to have a strictly text based DnD/RPG-of-your-choice session?
>Like playing on a program like Discord, but only through written messages and photos.

??? Yes? Obviously? Duh?

Like, what the fuck is even supposed to be the problem here? I don't get what you're getting at. Your question amounts to "do you think it would be possible to play a game of soccer using nothing but a ball and some markers for goals". Like, what the fuck else would you possibly need?

Somewhat related, I'm currently making a single player text adventure pc game using d20 rules (a modified Mutants and Masterminds). Having a lot of fun programming it, you can get as crunchy as you want if the GM isn't human.

>Would it be possible to have a strictly text based DnD/RPG-of-your-choice session?
Yes. People have run 4e like that. Look for roleplaying MUSHes, MUDs, etc.

Not only is it doable, its actually my preferred way to play now.

Did a couple games of AdEva by IRC back int he day. As long as you enforce a reasonable amount of proper punctuation, it makes for a slower game but much more immersive RP. Its a lot easier to get a feel for the world when the GM has the chance to post actual descriptions of things without feeling like he is droning on and on, and players can better RP as characters they could never pull off in person. You are never going to really buy your friend Dave RPing as the cute half-elf girl his character is, but in text it works much better.

It also offers some nice unique options. For example, you can use multiple channels. Separate IC and OOC channels are a must, so you can have the game be free of the usual friendly chatter and its easy to pick up right where you left off. You roll dice and ask rules questions and everything in OOC, and the IC is purely what happens in game. OOC can be voicechat too, but IC should be text.

But you can also do stuff like making a separate channel for when someone gets split off from the party, and run their scene concurrently with the rest of the party doing their own thing as long as you can bounce back and forth. Lets you keep secrets too, with PMs. I'm generally a fan of PMing the results of knowledge rolls and perception checks and whatnot to the player, and then letting the player decide how much of that information to share with the rest of the party and how.

That's intriguing as hell. Given, you'd have to clear with players that you're going to be doing secrets and the like. Some people can't stand that kind of stuff.

>Would it be possible to have a strictly text based DnD/RPG-of-your-choice session?

You mean like IRC, which people have been using to play D&D for decades?

I started playing on suptg in 2007.

Like I said, ti was AdEva. Conspiracy and secrets was the norm there.

One of my favorite sessions I have ever GMed just involved all of the players sitting in their living room and one of them deciding it was time to spill the beans, which prompted someone else to spill their beans, which caused another kid to flip their shit because they realized it meant everything they had been told by someone they else trusted was a lie, but THAT meant...

Just an hour and a half straight of people arguing in character and trying to pit these puzzle pieces together and realizing things about the greater picture they never could have figured out on their own. And then followed by "Well, fuk. What do we do about all this?"

I barely even did anything that session. I just sat and watched the whole thing unfold as the players bounced off each other.

Granted, that was a special occasion. But I can't see the same thing ever happening in an IRL game.

There can I join online text only D&D sessions?

Look at the gamefinder thread, roll20 and sup/tg/

The biggest advantage of text games, IMO, is logs.

I've been playing text RPG's regularly, a couple of times a week, for over a decade. And I have the full logs of every session, every discussion with the GM and every chat with the other players about the game. If I've forgotten a detail I can look it up, if I miss a session it's easy to catch me up, and even years after a game ends I can go back through the logs and reminisce.

The other thing I like about online RPG's is the freedom to do stuff outside of session time. In games I play it's pretty standard to do mini sessions, or 'minis', outside of usual session time. Most of the time it'll be the GM and a player, but sometimes two players will just decide they want to have their characters do something together, character building and dialog focused stuff mostly. Having those opportunities for pure RP or solo focused stuff on a particular PC lets me keep the main session purely focused on things for the whole group, making the game overall work better.