Gaming with Wave or Why I Hate Play-By-Posts

After gushing lovingly about the Savage Mushroom Kingdom, Theron “SlasherEpoch” Seckington of These Dice Look Funny, invited me to partake in a game over Google Wave. Not being one to pass up an opportunity to play the game with the designer himself, and looking for other ways to branch into online play, I began excitedly communicating with him about character ideas. After we began play however I’ve grown a bit of disdain towards Wave as a gaming platform. Theron has been great at corralling all of us together and providing an interesting story so far I can’t but feel a bit far removed from my normal role playing experience. Granted, we’ve only just begun and I do need to give it more time to really sink in, but I couldn’t help but thinking about my experience thus far.

Lack of OOC interaction

What I miss the most is the ability to interact with the other players. While I can have side conversations and engage them out-of-character, it lacks the social aspects of why I love gaming. Even though I do have a great common point with all of them (we all love gaming) I find myself at a loss on how to start a side conversation. The addition of any type of voice chat would definitely add to the interaction level, and facilitate the conversations. However, getting everyone together would be tough. Granted, if I knew all of them in person and had a chance to play with them before I’m sure this wouldn’t be as big of a deal.

Slow Response Times

One of my biggest complaints with play-by-post games in general is the length it takes for people to respond. I’ve gotten so used to having an immediate response I find myself impatient for things to happen. The reasons of course are simple time, distance, and when we’re on make for slow response times. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the beast and unless we coordinated a time for all of us to be on (which I doubt could be done) there isn’t a way around it. So I stare longingly at my GWave notifier waiting for an update.

Organizational Mess

The Dice of Life has a great post on Gaming with Google Wave which gave some great organizational tips for running your game, like having a table of contents. The platform however, is still a bit of a mess. What I need are rules of social etiquette.

When should I do an inline reply or when should we start a new wave?

Is it ever OK to edit someone else’s wavelet, or comment in the middle of it?

Most of the etiquette would need to be handled on a per group basis but some guidelines would be appreciated. While so far the game so far has been readable I can easily see it getting out of control. While I look forward to continuing the Savage Mushroom Kingdom game I don’t think I could ever switch to Wave for all of my gaming.

Have you played any games on Wave? Any luck with Savage Worlds or did you find other games worked better?

Theron

Yeah, agreed on many points. I think I may be steering the game more towards being story and character driven with smaller, less frequent, tougher fights. Wave seems more built to handle that.

That being said, early-game combat gives me a chance to get to know the players quickly.

I'm still happy to be playing anything at all.
http://www.apathygames.com Tyson J. Hayes

I am absolutly happy to be playing the game, but do agree that less frequent tougher fights might be the way to go if only go give us a chance to flex our RP muscles.

When I had a minute I was planning on throwing up a “table of contents” for us so we could quickly find everything instead of having a bunch of waves in our inboxes when trying to reference character sheets to try to remember each others names.
Skells

I'm playing in two Game by Wave games at present, but none using Savage Worlds (I'm running that in my face to face gaming group now, and supplementing with Wave for some side games). It's really the only legit use for Wave that I have and I find Wave an interesting place to try games I have bought but will never likely play with anyone face to face. In that vein, I am playing a Hollow Earth Expedition game and a Pathfinder game at present and the big thing to get used to is speed of play. We try to have everyone act once a day, but it can't always happen.

The bottom line is that Wave is a step above PBEM or PBP forum games, due to the collaborative nature and collaboration tools Wave has available. It can act as a replacement for a face to face game, but there are definite limitations.

I'm thinking about running a Savage Wave campaign for some of my old high school and college gaming buddies. If I do, I will keep you posted on how it runs.
http://www.apathygames.com Tyson J. Hayes

Please let us know how it goes.

As for Google Wave, I think it would be great for suplimental sections to games. Like if playing in a modern/future game using it as an in game message board. For example if yuor running a shadowrun game and wanted to have jackpoint or something like it available to your players then it could be done to a greater or lesser extent.

Of course having each poster show up as a different user would be difficult but I think it would still be enjoyable.

However, using it as the only platform of your game is a bit tough. I would recommend trying it but keep skype as an available option to do some communication amongst the players.
http://www.apathygames.com Tyson J. Hayes

Please let us know how it goes.

As for Google Wave, I think it would be great for suplimental sections to games. Like if playing in a modern/future game using it as an in game message board. For example if yuor running a shadowrun game and wanted to have jackpoint or something like it available to your players then it could be done to a greater or lesser extent.

Of course having each poster show up as a different user would be difficult but I think it would still be enjoyable.

However, using it as the only platform of your game is a bit tough. I would recommend trying it but keep skype as an available option to do some communication amongst the players.