PBP Habits that don’t translate to live sessions

If you participate in live gaming sessions, have you ever unintentionally carried over habits from PbP gaming that don't work as effectively in live sessions? What habits don't work well?

I joined a friend's D&D 5e group playing over Zoom this summer. I got into character, speaking dialogue as I write it in PbP. First person stuff. It took everyone by surprise. While no one said anything bad about it, I soon realized that everyone was going with the standard third person approach, so I dropped it. Maybe it was just the group, but I felt silly. :\

That’s not really a PbP thing, per say, but definitely a play style / table culture thing. I’ve run games where one person spoke exclusively in first person, RPing all the time, one always stepped back and used third person, and two of them zoomed in and out — like I do. I was initially worried it would make for a janky experience, but letting everyone do what they were most comfortable with ended up working really well.

I’m finding that with pbp I get so much extra time to think, and I find that I now want to take more time in live play just because I know that I’ll come up with something even better.

Yeah, same here, I forget how much faster I have to think of things in face to face sessions. You can only call so many snack breaks to stall 🤣

Same here! PbP makes me desire to push myself to flesh out ideas and think on my feet in real time a live session as thoroughly as I could in PbP. If it were only possible...

Absolutely. I experienced that way back when my RPG group switched from in-person to email. PbP shares that benefit with email. Comes in handy when players go off-script.

I am surprised how exhausted I am at the end of GMing a live session. In my earlier years, we would play for hours. Now, at the end of a 1.5-2 hour session, I am wiped out, and flagging toward the end.

PbP feels like:



Whereas live gaming feels like:

Those gifs are a pretty good explanation 😄

Those GIFS look exactly how I imagine running a live game would be if I was running it. 😁

Nicely displayed Len.

I feel like I don’t translate very well to live games. Nezzeraj can attest to that fact!

Love it, Len, but let’s not dissuade Windy! You need to run and play live games, Windy, they are HUGE fun!

I think that's because you are too busy GMing your kids in the rpg of life lol.

Totally! When a live game is going well, it feels a jam session with stories instead of music.