Quote from: Daddy Warpig;612851It's called "simming".

(Not my cup of tea, but there you are.)

There was a period of my life where I wasn't doing any face to face gaming so I spent a lot of time doing PBEM.

I discovered this weird subculture of free form roleplayers writing reams and reams of (to me) utterly incomprehensible drivel. One group, of about a dozen people, were writing literally hundreds of posts a day between them - some sort of shared urban fantasy world. It was mental. But you'd never know they existed unless you happened to stumble across the yahoo group they used. Even now I can't remember what it was called.

Some of these communities are pretty large, too. The eye-opening moment came when I realised a PbP RPG site a player in my former group was involved in had hundreds of users, held regular summer camps, and had its own newsletter.

Quote from: jeff37923;612835You know, that is how a lot of us grognards did it in the beginning, we use the rules in the books to cover things like combat and spellcasting and skill usage. Things that may be argued in a free-form role-playing scenario.

"Bang! I shot you! You're dead!"
"Nuh-uh! I dodged and you missed!"
"I did not!"
"Did so!"
"Boys, boys, here are some dice. Now roll them to see if Bobby shot Jimmy and hit him. Then roll to see how much damage he took if you did hit him."

Yeah, they're not interested in doing that.  It's not that those arguments don't crop up, because they do, but the ideal manner in which they're handled in most freeform environments is to either roll with the conflict in the "Yes, and" style of improvisation, or by pre-planning the results of the encounter in which the conflict occurs.

Sure, some of them don't know about tabletop gaming and rules, but in the main, if you explained it to them, they wouldn't be interested.  They're engaged in a freeform collaborative literary exercise, in which there is shared authorial control over setting and NPCs to a lesser or greater degree depending on the game.  It's telling that the term such players use to describe the hobby is RP rather than RPG.

While there might be some people involved in freeform fanfic/chatroom style roleplaying that could be interested in tabletop rpgs with rules, I don't think that these two demographics are necessarily going to have huge overlap.

I'm pretty sure that for a lot of these people, the notion of adding rules and mechanics to the equation would be seen as totally unnecessary for what they want to achieve.

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