11.5 Playing Over the Internet

I used to roleplay over the internet for around 10 years. It’s not my preferred medium anymore, but if you’re interested in playing Anima Prime over the internet, I’ve got some thoughts on the matter that might help you out.

Interface

There are two kinds of ways in which one can roleplay over the internet. The first one is basically done over any chat interface where all players play together at the same time. The second one is done over any interface where players make their contributions at various times throughout the day or week, such as on message boards. In jargon terms, these are called synchronous and asynchronous play, but I’ll just call them chat-based and post-based for the purposes of this essay.

First the bad news: Anima Prime is not suited for post-based play. Character scenes work just fine this way, especially when you’ve got several scenes going on at the same time, but conflicts don’t. There are too many parts of the game that rely on potential input from other players, from chiming in with a die in a fellow player’s maneuver to establishing goals in mid-conflict. These kinds of things can be handled within seconds at the gaming table, but over a message board where people wait for each other to come back and reply, they can turn a conflict into a months-long affair.

Therefore, if you’re thinking about using Anima Prime in a post-based game, I would think there are better options for you out there. You can try it, but you might want to impose time limits on die contributions, have off-board communications via email about goals and other issues, and so on. If you can’t post back and forth a couple of times a day at least, it’s going to take frustratingly long.

Now the good news: Anima Prime works just fine in a chat-based game. Like all chat-based games, this will be about 20%-25% the speed of table-based play, but you should be able to handle an average conflict within a session. Players can easily make sends to indicate their die contributions, for example. You could set up a list of keywords that make this even faster. For example, just sending “+1” after another player’s maneuver can indicate that you’re giving them a die to their maneuver.

Dice

In either type of interface you’re going to have to make a basic decision: are the dice going to be handled by each player on their end, by the GM all the time, or via a die-rolling program?
If all players handle their own dice, you’re going to need a certain amount of trust among the players. Otherwise you’re always going to wonder if the other player (or the GM) didn’t just fudge their roll. This is often much less of an issue than most people think, but it can be a deal breaker for some players.

If the GM handles all dice, obviously the players need to trust the GM as the independent facilitator. The GM needs to make sure that she’s not too invested in any particular outcome, because otherwise the temptation to fudge dice arises.

If you have access to a dice-rolling program, you can alleviate the trust issues. Those are sometimes integrated into chat programs, but there are also stand-alone solutions out there on the internet, if you search a little bit (I’m hesitant to mention specific links due to the fickle nature of the internet).

Overall, I think that the best Anima Prime experience will take place when you gather your friends locally, but hopefully this has been of some use for you in setting up your online game.