How Does an Asynchronous Role-Playing Game Help With Scheduling?

The problem: You have a group for your favourite role-playing game, but you struggle to play regularly. For whatever reason, life gets in the way.

Maybe you've tried:

• Always playing on the same day every month. (But people do get sick.)
• Pushing on with whoever can make it on the day. (Even if your GM is absent?)
• Running 2ⁿ different games in parallel, so that no matter who turns up on the day, you have a game ready for that exact combination of people. (Um.... okay...)
• Introducing punishments for absenteeism. (Sounds like fun!)

Thankfully, there's another way. It's called asynchronous role-playing, and it's actually been around for quite some time. For basically as long as there have been role-playing games, there have been “play by post” role-playing games. Players would literally mail their turns to the GM, who would then mail back the new state of the world. These games were asynchronous because people took their turns at different times, and no one needed to be in the same place at the same time.

While play-by-post still has some devoted followers, it's probably not what you have in mind when you think of fun role-playing games in the 21^st century.

But wax-sealed envelopes are not the only way to play role-playing games in an asynchronous manner.

Taleblank, for instance, is a modern, web-based role-playing game that was designed from the ground up to embrace the asynchronous experience.

You still get the escapist fun of role-playing games, but you don't all need to be available for the same block of time. If Alice can spare ten minutes on her morning commute, and Bob can spare 10 minutes in his lunch break, the game advances.

Because Taleblank was specifically designed to be asynchronous, it has a set of rules that maximise your individual agency when the GM is not around. You won't find yourself asking the GM a dozen questions about the specific location of objects in the environment, or spending twenty turns dealing with a surprise encounter from some irate spiders.

For that reason, it errs more towards “narrative” than “crunch”. If those terms aren't familiar to you, it basically means that the game focuses more on exciting storytelling and less on the maths of how many dice to roll and what number to add to which result in order to look up the outcome on a table in page 217 of the rulebook. When you're playing asynchronously, you do need to move things along a little quicker than in most RPGs.

If you're struggling to get your RPG fix with other games, why not give Taleblank a spin? It's free to try, so you can get a feel for what it's like and whether it's right for you and your group. You can also read a sample play-through to see how it looks, and check out the manifesto to see what the Taleblank team are prioritising (and just as importantly – what they're not!)