Online campaigns

[lalallaalal]

I'm looking to play more Pathfinder and with a lack of face to face games in the area I'm thinking about trying to play online. I've seen references to play by posting and other ways to play online.

What I'd like to know is how these games are handled. Are play by posts played like a message board, where people post their moves when they can? Does everyone get online at the same time to post?

What are other ways are there that people play online? I'm completely new to playing this online so I have no idea how it works.

[Laithoron]

This is a pretty common question so the good news is that there's a lot of good information that will help bring you up to speed.

For an overview of how PbP works, check out the following thread. If you have any more questions after that, we can certainly help. :)
Play by Post: How does it work?

[Terquem]

Please come visit

http://paizo.com/campaigns/PalaceOfTheVampireQueen

my first shot at a play by post campaign, Titled, Palace of the Vampire Queen

[lalallaalal]

Terquem wrote:

Please come visit

http://paizo.com/campaigns/PalaceOfTheVampireQueen

my first shot at a play by post campaign, Titled, Palace of the Vampire Queen

That looks like it could be fun. How do I go about joining the campaign? Do some players have more than one character?

[Terquem]

right now their are five players each plaing one character, and two of the players are sort of responsible for one npc each. I don't know that now is a good time to join my campaign, but i thought you could at least see what a beginner's play by post effort looked like. There are dozens of games being started all the time, just check the recruitment thread, just above this thread a little way

[lalallaalal]

Thanks for the help so far guys. I started an alias and wrote up a back story. I'm looking at other people's aliases and they seem to be able to post much more information than I'm seeing. Do most people list all their hit points, gear, etc. in the about me section?

[Laithoron]

Because of the way that the pre-defined fields mess up the flow of text on a character profile, I've asked my players to use ONLY the About Me section.

Here are some examples of the character profile I've created and asked my players to use along with a download link for the blank template:
.
.
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[ Templates | Character Template | List of Hyperlinked Feats ]

[ Examples | Bard/Monk | Cleric/Rogue | Fighter/Rogue | Summoner/Wizard | Oracle/Paladin | Ranger ]

As far as tracking HP, spells, etc, we typically track such changes on an external website where it's a bit easier to quickly modify such items without clunky BBCode getting in the way. A wiki, a Google Docs site, or even using a Paizo wishlist would all be great ways of doing this without mucking up your character sheet.

ALSO this is helpful for a more sinister reason: We've had many occasions where the forums glitch and end up reverting our character profiles to another point in time!

For this reason, I highly recommend saving a text version of your character profile to your local hard drive and not modifying it continuously for every little nick and scratch or cast spell.

If you would like to see how my group deals with tracking issues (we're approaching 9000 posts in our main thread and have about 4000 posts of backstory before that), then just try some of the big bold links at the top of the character profiles. Likewise, I keep a sort of quick-link bar in the short description field for my game (Rumble in the Jungle). This way, from any page in the game they can access our Table of Contents list, a 'matrix' showing a comparison of all characters' languages/skills/items, and a link to the campaign's main page on my wiki. It's been working well so far.

[DMFTodd]

The other way to play is with Virtual Tabletop software (VTTs). This is software that does a map, tokens, and die-rolling. Frequently done with voice chat of some sort. Popular VTTs are Maptools, OpenRPG, d20 Pro, TTop, Fantasy Grounds, etc. These work pretty much like a face to face game.

You can find Pathfinder Society games being run this way here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/pathfinder-society-onlin e-collective

[lalallaalal]

Thanks for the link to that Pathfinder Society group. Virtual Tabletop is more along the lines of what I'm looking for. Although after looking at some PbPs I'm still going to try to get into one. I'm not the best role-players and I think a PbP could help with that.

[lalallaalal]

Does that google group take a while to post new threads? I posted a new threat early this morning and it still hasn't popped up yet.

[DMFTodd]

>> Does that google group take a while to post new threads?

Yes. New members posts won't go through until the admin OKs them. That might take a day.

[Benoc]

couple more online play sites

Tangled Web

RP Tools

Mayhem Gaming

the 1st two are the ones that I visit the most, only recently found Mayhem so I dont know how good that site is. the Tangled Web offers PFS via maptools as well as many other gaming systems. RP tools is the forums for Maptools itself and there are people looking for groups all the time there.

also if you want to find a local game give this a look PNP Games it has a google map search for people LFG locally.

[lalallaalal]

Thanks for the additional website options Benoc. Are most people looking to do PFS or modules? How often are people looking to start up and adventure path or campaign?

[Benoc]

On tangled web it varies, there was a strong pfs presence there for awhile. Unfortunatley the gms got burned out or busy, so it kinda died out for a time. Pbp seems to be on the rise but im thinking very hard about staring kingmaker maptools game real soon. There are plenty of vtt games, just none that fit my scheldule.

[lalallaalal]

I would love to play in a kingmaker game if the schedules worked out.