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While reading through some PBP games to learn how PBP is played, I came across some Starship combat. It seems both players and GMs have a very mixed opinion on if it's fun or not in general. The starship combat I was read through in the PBP seemed like a lot of fun, which got me thinking are there things game-wise that TTRPG vs VTT vs PBP are better at?
Different mediums definitely have different strengths. PBP starship combat sounds like a very very mixed bag though.
You have the Pro of more time to put in flavourful description for your action. But the Con of turn based combat in PbP being infamously slow.
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I think enjoying (or not enjoying) Starship combat has more to do with the people than the medium. I've had good, and bad, starship combats across all three mediums.
I will say, though, that VTT is my 'preferred' method: everyone sharing the same top-down view heightens the "you're all sharing one starship bridge" feel, especially when you can show hypothetical ship movements: like, your pilot can 'plot a course' showing hex movements, and then the rest of the party can say "oh instead try this" or whatever. Plus, having something to automate the dice rolls is a real nice-to-have, when you get to higher tier starship weapons that deal like, 10d10 or 7d12 damage. Not even the most enraged of barbarian aficionados has that many d12s in their dice bag :D
But, again, I would take engaged, interested, tablemates who enjoy starship combat over any medium's idiosyncrasies, any day of the week.
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... You don't have 7 d12?
Though I will admit I don't have a dice bag, its actually a chest
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I think you saw this come up in the SFS rant on starship combat. The advocates for starship combat tended to play by post.
PBP Are really good for in depth role play. In person, or worse, online, there's a limited amount of spotlight you can hog. In PBP you can type out a whole novella in the middle of combat for the whole party to read (or scroll past...) at their leisure
For starship combat that makes more room for characters to make their own fun
The displaced rules are less of a problem because you have more time to look for/consult/ask how the heck this works.
The characters switching positions ala geek suduko for a slightly increased effect is more viable in pbp than a half hour discussion for +2 to a skill and +1 to hit that it would get you. In meatspace you might have smartguy go from Scanning on round 1 to not scanning and thats it.
The pilot isn't taking up 5 minutes of "up down left right quarter tur..no wait.. up down left right left right pirouette...." while the mechanic goes "rolled a 3, ding, we have shields"
You still have the problem of not contributing all that much unless you're the gunner but one problem is a LOT less than four or five.
For virtual table tops (which people can and do combine with play by posts, with google slides if nothing else) Its easier to track shields and facing and the dice are rolled automatically. While my dice bag DOES have 7 d 12s in it, i'll have to take my socks off for the math. (The dice bag is the weapon for the barbarian!!!)
I can also entertain myself in another window as the engineer till my turn comes up.
So for starship combat I'd put it at PBP> VTT > Meatspace
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It's equally bad in all three formats (or equally good if you're a glass half full kinda person), because the needless complexity and uneven distribution of fun gameplay affects all three formats, even if those problems manifest in slightly different ways.
In F2F games, the bloated rules with lists of actions and DCs and tables to reference all slow down the action. One Starship Combat per adventure path book or one every few Society scenarios is infrequent enough that many people have to refresh themselves on the rules each time.
In VTT games, you have the same issue at the F2F games, but you at least can automate some stuff. In exchange, you get a little less of the "bridge roleplay" that comes a bit more naturally when people are sitting around the same table in meatspace.
In PbP games, you have plenty of time to run the rules right and consider your actions, and you can write out roleplay freely, but PbP is almost always forced to crunch down some of the tactical complexity in order to speed combat up. Generally PbP tries to do Engineering/Helm/Gunnery all at once so a single round doesn't end up taking half a week or more to resolve.
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Besides Starship combat what else might PBP be good at or not?
Downtime or other situations where the party is split up come to mind. But I haven't seen any examples of a party split in a PBP yet.
How to get too many d12 Every time you go to your local game store and they don't have what you're looking for getting a set of dice so you don't go home empty-handed over the years this has added up... Is there such a thing as having too many dice?
My glass is nether 1/2 full or 1/2 empty, it's 1/10 full
PBP is also good for characters that have really deep backgrounds and motivations, things that are in a players head but won't make the shift to being seen by the rest of the able in most adventures, especially society ones.
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I completely agree that ssc is dependent upon the people at the table. Two main things influence the fun (as I see it); individual proficiency with the mechanics of ssc and each player's personal feeling need to be/feel important.
Without everyone at the table being proficient with ssc, the process gets slowed down. Because it gets slowed down, there tends to be less of a focus on the action story being flavorfully fun in lieu of just being done with it.
Some players get detached from what is happening in the game if their actions aren't supremely pivotal to the success of the combat, or at least when they don't seem to be pivotal. In essence, they can't just have fun. Their fun depends on the mechanics.
My suggestion is to find folks who are proficient and have a desire to just enjoy the game.