On 6 Jun 01, at 19:45, a & g wrote:

> quite some time. What most of the other responses to this posting say
> is true, online play doesn't really effect the way the rules of a game
> work. That's probably why there isn't one out there that was designed
> specifically for it (at least that I know of), lack of necessity.

More, I think, a lack of looking at things from the right point of 
view.  Experienced gamers are looking at the games from the 
viewpoint of translating a face-to-face game, with all of its 
wargaming baggage, to the online medium. And in some cases, 
that works.

But there is a whole crowd of people, who may outnumber the 
conventional roleplayers online, who've come at it from the 
opposite direction.  They aren't roleplayers.  They're Buffy fans, or 
Trek fans, or (God help us) Days of Our Lives fans.  And they've 
invented roleplaying more-or-less independently, and named it 
"simming." If you told them what they were doing was just like 
D&D, only in a different genre, they'd react approximately as if 
you'd suggested that their parents were siblings.

The "rules" they need are completely different from what you find 
in conventional games, except for a few diceless, troupe-style, 
and/or artsy-fartsy games.  You'll find some of them in improv 
theatre manuals, and some of them in fiction-writing manuals, but 
most of them are unwritten, unverbalized social-contract rules.

Mostly it works, having them unwritten, but it very much depends 
on the personality of the person/people who drive the game/sim.
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