The Text Adventure: A form of RPG on the go

[Drache64]

I fell in love with D&D when a buddy taught me years ago. I quickly (a year later) became a DM and forced those ignorant to TTRPGs to make a character and play. Just like me, many people were sucked in.
As we got a little older, had a few kids, got big boy jobs, it became more difficult to play as much as we wanted.

So I started what I called "the text adventure". Everyone made up a character and backstory with no dice, no math, pure story.

We formed a group hangout on Google+ and I sent the party a message that served a the story:

"The party finds themselves, blah blah blah"

They chat over text and when combat comes their success or failure is purely plot driven.

Player: "I jump in and start slashing at the goblins"
Me: "you kill three goblins! But one sticks you in the side with a rusty knife!"
Player: "I take a step back and cry out for a heal"
Other player: "I cast a heal and walk into battle with he shield up and mace ready!"
Me: your wound closes up and stops bleeding, you feel a sting of pain left over and favor one side instinctively, but you're ready to fight again.

You get the idea. Anyways, this was so successful and popular we quickly realised you can tell any story you want since there's no "rules" aside from some common courtesy and reminding the players "you say what you want to do, I say what happens".

We then played star wars, zombie survival, fall out, etc. It became a lot of texting, but was too fun to stop.

We also realised that it was easier, and much better to split the party or even run multiple factions. In the zombie survival everyone started separate receiving personal messages. No one knew if a person they ran into was an NPC or a player. Some different groups formed and battled other groups thinking they were a faction of NPCs, it was amazing to see.

[username1]

I love the idea of text adventures. My group is actually planning on starting one very soon, just as a side game. Because as you said, even getting three people together for a few hours is a hard task. Intrigued idea on playing with no rules, probably makes it go quicker. However thisnt probably won't work for a group like mine.

[Lord Raziere]

So basically freeform roleplaying but faster. a lot of the roleplaying I do online is freeform forum stuff, so....the fact that you can do this is no surprise to me.

[kyoryu]

I've actually considered writing a micro-game called "flip". Which is what you've described, but when you're not sure what happens, you figure out what "goes well" and "doesn't go well" look like, and flip a coin.

It's less of a joke than it sounds, it's all about fictional positioning, handling difficulty through setting stakes, etc. As well as an experiment in "how little rules can you get away with?" But mostly "what if we minimize the rules we usually have, and focus instead on the areas that we usually don't have rules for?"