I like games, and I like stories. Having grown up in the 1980s, I spent many a night playing text-based adventure video games like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and pouring hundreds of hours into navigating my way through Choose Your Own Adventure books. For me, it was a decade of adventure that fueled a love for roleplaying games.
These story-based games gave me a chance to become part of the narrative: choosing paths and making decisions that could win the day or thrust myself into deadly situations. I have, on a few occasions, tried to translate these experiences into roleplaying games (RPGs) as a Game Master (GM), but my social anxiety makes it tough to be the focus of attention. I’d run a session, have a minor breakdown, and vow never to run again while also mourning my inability to share these kinds of stories with my friends. I had all but given up on running a game until I found Twitter’s treasure trove of Interactive fiction (IntFic).
The Wide World of TweetPGs
Twitter RPGs (which I like to call TweetPGs) resemble a Choose Your Own Adventure more than a classic Dungeons and Dragons game, but the basics are there. The Game Master will write up situations that the players will make choices about, and then the GM will need to react to those choices. Unlike a book, the results of those choices may not be plotted out in advance, and the GM can leave room for suggestions that can lead the plot in a whole new direction.
Currently, there are many different accounts running text-based games on Twitter. This includes a few that reached viral glory such as “Beyoncé’s Assistant for a Day,” which amused many fans last year and landed the author a job with the chat fiction app Yarn. Of the IntFic creators I spoke with, almost all credit their stories as being a way to bring more fun to the app and are rooted in roleplaying games.
The thought came about when I was working third shift listening to d&d podcasts and chatting with my DM on break. We have a lot of thinking time at work.
@Hannah_Mayh3m
I’ve wanted Twitter to have more fun and games on it for years . . . In 2019 when I was visiting a hospital every day to help a sick relative, I decided that it was time to start running an RPG on Twitter, as something interesting and positive to occupy my mind.
@JoeSondow
@GoblinsNeverDie came from my love of goblins: I love their lust for life! They’re never the toughest or bravest or smartest or hardest-working (in fact, they’re usually near the bottom rung of just about everything), but they don’t let that dampen their enthusiasm for trying new things or rushing headlong to their doom.
@GoblinsNeverDie
The format of a Twitter RPG made for a low-stress, minimal commitment way to run a game that appealed to me. While for many creators these account might be their first time running their own game, you can also find published authors stretching their writerly muscles by experimenting with IntFic as is the case with Gerry McEvoy.
I write role playing game scenarios regularly, I won the Irish National Game Writer Award last year so I guess I’m okay at it. When Twitter expanded the character limit to 240. I joked about it being enough to run a text adventure and created a simple you’re at a cross roads, which way do you go? poll. It got a lot of responses so I followed it with another, then another soon I was building a new fantasy world and posting daily.
@Legendgerry
So How Does it All Work?
The kinds of tales these writers tell vary wildly from the serious, where your choices might be a matter of life and death, to the humorous, where you might just need to name a rambunctious raccoon . . .
No matter what kind of story is being told, Twitter’s format imposes some interesting challenges to a GM. How do you allow for choice? What kind of story can you pack into 240 characters? Can a narrative that is broken up into tweets stay cohesive? I’ve seen a variety of answers to these problems such as linking tweets together to form a branching path of choices or announcing the results of a dice roll and asking fans what they think happened based on the number. Many of the writers I follow use the poll system which gives players an easy way to vote on a choice.
The Twitter polls allow my players to guide the main story line with their decisions, even with the laughable answers it makes the story fun to write. Their reactions to the initial daily tweet make me happy to have regular players (who have an affection for their pet rock)
@Hannah_Mayh3m
Running Your Own Game
In my experience, everything starts with that first tweet. I wasn’t exactly sure where to start, so with nothing more than two sentences and a few generic choices, I let my followers help in shaping the story I would tell.
After years of working on the farm and studying magic, Hark is finally ready to set out on her first adventure. What does she seek?— Hark the Adventurer (@Harkventure) October 26, 2017
If you are interested in starting your own TweetPG, don’t be intimidated. There are plenty of people out there willing to help you. Seven months into running my own game, Rollin Kunz, the mastermind behind @GoblinsNeverDie and @PIKACHOOSE_YOA , invited me to a group that shares each other’s tweets as a way to promote and encourage each other. The community is invaluable for answering questions and testing out ideas. Most of the GMs I talked to recommended keeping it simple to start.
As Joe Sondow says: Don’t plan too much. Just keep steering the story towards interesting turning points, where you yourself have no idea what will happen, but you’re content to follow through on whichever of the options wins the poll. If you really want to direct the next moment, write the big decision yourself and then offer a poll for a smaller decision. People are often very excited about decisions you might think are small, such as what to say or eat, or what facial expression to make, or what someone’s name is.
@JoeSondow
Rollin Kunz suggests keeping everything clear and obvious.
People scrolling Twitter don’t stick around to puzzle things out. Seeing options on that poll is a way to telegraph what your game is, as well as its tone. Don’t get wacky with the mechanics, for the same reason. It’s really hard to communicate those things to people. Assume that a new user will only read that single poll, and go from there.
@GoblinsNeverDie
Hannah Mayhem recommends staying organized and not getting too bogged down in where you believe the story should head.
Thread the story, write down names and retweet your fellow writers, keep your players informed and have fun with it, sometimes the worst answer really is the best answer
@Hannah_Mayh3m
Whether you want to play a TweetPG or run one, the community is there to help. You can find many of the accounts currently running games through the hashtag #IntFic on Twitter and, if you are looking for advice on starting your own game, please feel free to reach out to me on @Harkventure.
Image Credits: My Abandonware, @GoblinsNeverDie, @JoeSondow, Paxson Woelber, @Hannah_Mayh3m
Comments are closed.