Possibly another attempt at G+ or IRC gaming

I mentioned in the comments to my last post that for some reason, I can’t quite psych myself up to do real-time G+ Hangout gaming.  I don’t really have social anxiety in other contexts (social antipathy is another story).  I used to spend every working day of my life in court, I’ve been on the shitty local news stations, I’ve played Magic on camera with no problems, and I exhibit the superficial charm of the classic borderline personality, but the idea of sort of face-to-face gaming with online folks is something I haven’t built up to yet.  Weird.  Perhaps secretly, my head is encased in HPV warts and there’s a foamy hissing sore where my nose should be.  For whatever reason, that’s where I’m at with that – not happening yet.

But I’ve run several fairly successful PBP and IRC games, success being defined as “people, including me, seeming to have fun.”  Longevity has been the issue – for instance, even successful PBP games have to be continuously prodded because any significant lull = imminent death.  Just the nature of the beast.  It doesn’t help that I flake out with some regularity, where “with some regularity” means “it’s happening sooner or later, fuckin bank it.”  Nature of that beast, too.

I recently tried running an AD&D PBP-ish game on G+ with a variety of cool folks.  It was dry-gulched by a combination of the interface being frustrating, the archival potential being less than robust, and me being kind of wackadoodle at the time.

I also explored the option of a forum-based game, which was my preferred venue in the past, but the current iteration of phpBB is so godawful as to be effectively unusable for my purposes.  (I like administering my own forum, am seriously not into the idea of running a game on any of the “community” forums.)

The other day, Aaron Funk told me about the new G+ Community function, which sounds like exactly what I’ve been looking for – a forum where one can post threads, media, and so on.  I’ve started another G+ account and am looking into that option, but I know fuck-all about it right now.

IRC or other real-time text chat conferencing is also an option – the last relatively successful game I ran used the Adium client on my end and what the hell else everyone was using on their ends.  One of the perspicacious players ginned up a practical dice script and it went pretty smoothly.

Anyway, I’ve kind of got the urge to run a game again soon – nothing weighty or nuanced, just beer-and-pretzelsy stuff, as I’m a vapid flibbertigibbet who values fun.  (I’ve noticed that beer and pretzels games sometimes evolve into serious campaigns, and po-faced serious campaigns are often piss-taken to death.)  It’d be almost exclusively a dungeon delve game, at least initially.

G+ Community is the most likely venue – in other words, play-by-post instead of face-to-face.  There’s always the possibility (probability) that the game will die off sooner than one would like it to.  Real life intercedes sometimes, and I could be charitably described as “erratic.”  BUT I would still like to give it a try.  Fairly small number of players, four to six.  The consensus seems to be that I’m a pretty laid-back and pleasant referee, for what that’s worth.

If, with those caveats in mind, you’re still interested in the possibility, let me know and we’ll talk about it.  It’d be probably a few weeks before I’d start, and I haven’t decided on the ruleset – right now I’m leaning to AD&D again with several subsystems smoothed out for playability.  I’m on G+ but I think I may have it set to where I can’t be searched up, so if you want, let me know in the comments who I should look for and I’ll put you in my circles.  (I don’t really post there right now.)

That’s a lot of words to say “if you want in on a PBP, holler,” but I have some spare time tonight and I’m about to have to sit through the bubbling feculence that is American Horror Story, and it’s my blog, so I’m bloviating.

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