Online Paper & Pencil RPG's

[Robert F]

Hey all,

Newb here, I lurk a plenty and have been listening to the music for many years.

Had a question concerning online RPG's that I can't find the answer to, and this site seems to be filled with people who can help out with this sort of thing.

Anyone know a good way to find and join an online game?

I found several sites, but it's not really easy to connect with players especially with my limited schedule. I'm actually looking to play once a week on a weeknight starting at 11pm central or later.

I found wizard.com and a few others, but it seems like this has gotten harder then it used to be years ago.

Also, I remember some fancy website was being created for online d&d games (it had a snazzy interface to create your character and chat rooms etc.) but it was still in progress. I think it was a pretty high profile, professional deal, but I lost track of it.

Anyways, any suggestions to point me in the right direction would be great. I have done about 2 hours of Google searching and apparently am not smart/resourceful enough to find the answer.

[Sinewav]

http://www.obsidianportal.com/ is really great for recording and keeping track of pretty much any and all info about your campaigns, though it's not D&D specific.

As far as online role-playing goes, the best I know of is http://www.rpg.net and their "Play-by-Post" forum. It's easy enough to connect with people and get a game going, however, in my experience with it, it's really tough to find players who will stay committed once a game gets going.

I'm not terribly into D&D, but it would be fun to get an OCR game going maybe in Off-Topic or an IRC channel.

[BardicKnowledge]

I'd love to play an OCR D&D (3.5 preferably as I don't have the 4th Ed books) game via IRC sometime. If anyone organizes it someday, be sure to let me know.

[cobaltstarfire]

Yeah same here, as long as it's 3.5, I have some expansion books too if anyone wants to make use of them. (monsters of faerun 3.0, dragonimicon, and the class book for divine magic users). I don't have them on hand except for MoF cause it's on my computer, but after school is done I can make sure to grab the books from home if anyone wants to use them.

I've tried dming one before, but for some reason lost track of it I'm not really sure why/how, kind of like those dreams you have where you signed up for a class but never actually went to it all semester cause you forgot about it.

[Archaon]

I've tried dming one before, but for some reason lost track of it I'm not really sure why/how, kind of like those dreams you have where you signed up for a class but never actually went to it all semester cause you forgot about it.

And then there's an exam.

[Matney X]

embrace.darkbb.com is an oldschool Vampire: the Masquerade game, kinda free form, using tabletop rules. It's play-by-post, and it's kinda made for people that can play at their day jobs (the most activity is 9am-5pm Mountain Time), with the weekends as "daytime."

In any case, it's a good game, but occasionally slow. (If you do play, let me know, so I can get the XP bonus for bringing new players.)

[Robert F]

The play by post concept confuses me a little bit...

That would be like playing in a forum like this right? Wouldn't that move along pretty slowly? And if someone was mia for a while couldn't it bring things to a screeching halt?

Maybe it would be fun, but the IRC (that would be a chat room right?) sounds like a much more efficient way to go to me. I had quite a bit of fun back in the day doing that.

I think it would be awesome to get a game going sometime, of course I may be too difficult to work in because of my time schedule (midnight eastern time like I mentioned in post #1)

Anyways if some people want to get a late night game going let me know that's exactly what I've been looking for, but if not then it's cool too. I guess we'd need someone to DM (I use to do a bit of that but I just don't have the time or skill to put together a decent campaign)

As far as rules etc. I don't even own any books anymore. I don't really care about the rules and the #'s, I would just want a good DM to take care of that for me, and let me just play my character as realistically as I can. I'd let the DM do all the calculations and let me know my limits or whatever.

[Sinewav]

embrace.darkbb.com is an oldschool Vampire: the Masquerade game, kinda free form, using tabletop rules. It's play-by-post, and it's kinda made for people that can play at their day jobs (the most activity is 9am-5pm Mountain Time), with the weekends as "daytime."

In any case, it's a good game, but occasionally slow. (If you do play, let me know, so I can get the XP bonus for bringing new players.)

Heck yeah. World of Darkness is where the party's at, man.

[Matney X]

Heck yeah. World of Darkness is where the party's at, man.

I honestly prefer the new world, but I've played the old WoD for so long that I often get them both confused.

[Robert F]

Ok, well I see that at least Sinewave, Bardic, & Cobalt and myself of some interest in getting an OC DnD thing going, possibly a late weeknight?

4 is not a bad start, a couple more and a DM and it could work, although I don't want to be in charge of organizing anything, I'm not too good at it. I can try and get the ball rolling though, and see if it takes. I s'pose if we started by posting our availability (if interested) then we could see where to go from there?

If we got some gamers from here we could check some of the other websites and see if anyone would want to jump in.

I'll start;

I would be available (eastern time)

11:30pm (probably more like 11:45) Mon-Thursday & Sunday

also I could be around on Wed/Fri between 11am and 4pm

and also on Tuesday/Thursday between 1:30pm and 4pm

(yeah my work schedule is goofy...)

[Sinewav]

I honestly prefer the new world, but I've played the old WoD for so long that I often get them both confused.

Personally, I like 'em both, and I really have a tough time comparing the two. They're really two completely different settings, and two totally different purposes in mind. The only real major similarities I see are that the nWoD borrows a few names and some terminology from the oWoD.

[cobaltstarfire]

4 is not a bad start

If you want to make things easy for a DM 4-5 is optimal, more or less means that they have to do extra tweaking to the difficulty level of an encounter so that it's not too hard or easy.

While I am interested, I'm not sure how well I can commit at the moment right at this very moment, because school is nearing it's end, which means a million research and big art projects.

I've only ever played D&D in custom built worlds too so I can't really comment on any existing campaign material.

[Matney X]

Personally, I like 'em both, and I really have a tough time comparing the two. They're really two completely different settings, and two totally different purposes in mind. The only real major similarities I see are that the nWoD borrows a few names and some terminology from the oWoD.

Agreed. I ran a cross-genre oWoD LARP for a long time, and it was REALLY hard to get things evened out. The new world, though, is made for that kind of interaction.