IRC Roleplaying?

[Ghost Bear]

I am not experienced at all with tabletop RPGs, so this might be a silly suggestion... But here goes:

I have played a Star Trek 'free form' RPG over IRC for the last six years or so. Basically, these are just stories controlled by the GM (Commanding Officer, since it's Star Trek) and told via roleplaying in an IRC channel. There are no stats or dice or character sheets.

Would it be viable to run the Lone Wolf RPG in this manner? Of course, with the dice rolling and game mechanics added in. IRC allows mutiple chat rooms (or 'channels'), which could be utilised, with players using one for the actual game and one for OOC stuff.

I think this could be useful for those of us who don't have anyone in their area to play with.

To learn more about IRC, you might look at www.mirc.co.uk. There are a number of free-to-use IRC servers around, so getting a place to play wouldn't be a problem.

Can I get some thoughts from you guys (especially those familiar with the GM side of roleplaying) on the viability of this, and would anyone be interested?

 

[mthomason]

As has been mentioned on another board recently, OpenRPG (http://www.openrpg.com) is a great alternative to IRC for this as it includes a shared map/whiteboard area and dice rollers (plus character sheets and other GM tools).

There's also dice roller "bots" available for IRC (they work along the lines of one player whispers "1d6" to the bot, and it says "Fred rolled 1d6=5" to the room, so you can be sure people aren't fudging their rolls, or have to have the GM do everything)

 

[Anonymous]

Ghost, you can use www.rpol.net to run a game via a play-by-post method.