Play-by-post role-playing game

Play-by-post roleplaying has its origins on the large computer networks and bulletin board systems of major universities in the United States in the 1980s.

[citation needed] The introduction of IRC enabled users to engage in real-time chat-based role-playing and resulted in the establishment of open communities.

Alternatively a forum may be diceless and rely on cooperation among players to agree on outcomes of events and thus forgo the use of randomisers.

In many cases, characters are regarded as belonging to the players who created them, and others are not allowed to make drastic changes to them without the creator's prior consent (referred to as god-modding).

Settings may be derived from novels, TV shows or movies (often resulting in collaborative fan-fiction) or may be original and unique to the game.

Play-by-post games are frequently written in the third person perspective due to the fact that multiple players must share each scene, each with his or her character as the focus of attention.

Threads then become an ongoing story in which players periodically advance the plot by reading the latest reply and then responding with what their character does and how the environment changes in response.

[citation needed] Forums may provide features such as online dice rolling, maps, character profiling and game history.

As an asynchronous collaborative editing tool, forums lack safeguards to prevent two writers from posting simultaneously and contradicting each other.

Play-by-post role-playing is generally devoted to advancing a single overarching storyline that all board members participate in, rather than many different non-related stories proceeding in separate threads [the latter being known as "multi-genre"].

They vary in organization, but the primary formation includes a full set of rules governing role-playing, out-of-character conduct, combat between players, threads detailing a set storyline (often contributed to by plot-advancing, staff-organized events, or player role-plays), character approval forums, and a full staff with admin(s) and moderators.

Many message board based games, such as NationStates, establish a hierarchy of moderators to manage plot, pacing and continuity.

Discord has become a major medium for play-by-chat games due to its rapidly-increasing popularity and its user-friendly administrative features that allow users to create private chat rooms (known on the site as "servers") in very little time.

Because players' previous posts are editable and the gamemaster takes responsibility as the overall editor of the story, plot holes can be avoided and writing skills may not be as important for each writer.

Wiki space provides not only a means of communication, but also a permanent archive and a designated off-topic discussion area for each page.

MOD's are also in charge of creating worldly events for game play response for individually plotted characters.

In diceless games where randomisers are not used to determine the outcome of combat, the onus is on players to come to an agreement[citation needed].

Players may write their characters in a way that makes them overly powerful or invulnerable, a practice referred to as "power-gaming", "god-modding", or "superhero syndrome"[citation needed].

In some rulesets, the winner of a contest may be a foregone conclusion agreed upon out-of-character and the battle itself a ceremonial description of each character's prowess.

No matter the case, some sort of player consent to wins and losses is required in this type of role-playing game.

For this reason, text-based role-playing games tend to be focused slightly more on story and player-character interactions, negotiations, and relationships rather than combat.