Inside a 1,200 Player RPG

A closer look at Over/Under, the massive play-by-post game

background photo by Adrian Swancar; graphics by Abby Hepworth

This week Brian spoke to Sam Sorenson, the designer behind the massive play-by-post event Over/Under that is a major part of Mothership Month, a month-long joint crowdfunding campaign on BackerKit and general celebration of the horror sci-fi game.

In this interview Sam discusses the origins of Over/Under, how play-by-post games work, and how running a 1,200 person roleplaying game can—and did—get out of hand.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian: All right, Sam, to start us off, give us a quick overview. What is Over/Under?

Sam: So this is a more complicated question than it sounds. Over/Under is a large-scale, sort of hybrid war game, role-playing game, mega game, with some other stuff thrown in there, played over Discord. And it’s played in real time. So everybody’s just on a big Discord server, there are about 1,200 players right now, and they’re divided into various factions, and factions have bosses.

And bosses play this higher scale war game with more role-playing elements, or rather more open-ended sort of “simulated tactics” elements. And then underneath them are what we call denizens. And denizens join factions and denizens can send each other money and currencies and they can talk in the Discord and they can role-play, but they have less access to that war game, but things trickle down and they interact when denizens vote in their faction elections. And so if they hate their boss, then they can vote them out, and certain actions the bosses want to take require referendums, and so on. I know that’s a long answer, but it’s a big complicated game that we struggle to describe.

Brian: No, no, I love that answer! This is probably going to be a difficult question to answer as well, but in the broadest terms, what is the main storyline of Over/Under?

Sam: The main storyline is that there are six factions who are: the Mob, the Dock Workers Union, the Church, the Hackers, the Mercenaries, and the Evil Megacorporation. When the Evil Megacorporation arrived, there was a week of turmoil. Everybody teamed up and killed the Evil Megacorporation—or mostly killed the Evil Megacorporation. Then everybody thought there was a plague. Then for half a second it looked like the end of history. And now we’re at the brink of war again between the remaining five.

Brian: And all of this is happening on a massive space station named Prospero’s Dream.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, it’s a big circle, it’s 40 kilometers. The map is 800 Excel spreadsheet cells divided into a 40 by 20 grid that soldiers and things move between.

Brian: This is so fucking cool.

Sam: It’s very exciting, but it is a lot. It’s like, I’ve been too close to it for too long, and so it’s hard for me to sometimes step back and be like, yeah, this is the thing. Because oftentimes I’m more worried about something like, my god, the permissions in my announcements channel are fucked.

Brian: For someone wheo’s never done a play-by-post, an asynchronous game, what does that look like moment to moment for a new player? Like how often are most people making posts? How active is this Discord? How often are elections and referendums and things?

Sam: The short answer is: very active. This is one of the things we did not expect with this game. I thought it was gonna be sort of like, you know, people posting sometimes, but actually, no, people are online 24/7. Those 1,200 players are very active. We’ve had to tell people multiple times, like, hey, if yo’’re clocking 12 hours a day in this game, please take some time off, go outside, go touch grass, like, take care of yourself.

Brian: Ha ha ha.

Sam: So the bosses take actions certainly multiple times a day. Those elections and so on, like there’s probably one faction having an election every single day, but there are six factions. And so if you join one, it’s not guaranteed you’ll be doing that every day. But certainly, kind of in the public channels and kind of the more like role-playing spaces of the server, the server has become very spatialized. You know, you can really feel like you’re going from place to place as you move from channel to channel or thread to thread. But in the more role-playing spaces, people are chattering all the time. It never stops.

Brian: This game was originally based on your 14th century war game, Cataphract. How did you take that base of a game and then bring it from the 13th, 14th century medieval times to space and Mothership and specifically the Prosperous Dream setting?

Sam: Yeah, so basically the wargame that the bosses are playing is pretty close to Cataphracts. In the ruleset Cataphract, you have armies and you have supply and have territories and yada yada yada, and some of that made it into the wargaming ruleset but not all of it. But the basics of that war game are similar.

They have soldiers that move around and they have other resources that move around and there are various numbers that move up and down and when they get into combat they fight over each other and they take territory and so that war game is like it’s a different setting and they have different tech levels and different special abilities and all the specifics are different but at its bones it’s still a map game where yo’’re tracking distance and time and trying to make sure that you know where your guys are going to be where they need to be. But then underneath that, the whole role-playing, election voting server side of things is extremely different. And that basically grew from conversations with Sean McCoy, the creator of Mothership and A Pound of Flesh (which Prospero’s Dream is the setting of).

When he and I were talking about this in August or September, he said he really likes Cataphracts and he was playing in my game and he was sort of aware of a lot of the development of it. And he was like, “I really love this, and we’d love an event for Mothership Month. But Cataphracts plausibly caps at around 50 players for one GM and you could have multiple GMs but then you’re having to coordinate and begin to divide it more.” Even then, you would need to start expanding your map and it would be more like multiple games that bump into each other less like one united game, and so when when we were working on this the solution that we landed on was this sort of tiered system of having the main commander players—in Cataphracts we call them commanders, in Over/Under we call them bosses—and then underneath them are these denizens, and denizens have significantly less power.

And this has been a point of some contention. Generally, denizens can’t just do anything. They can talk and whatever they can say in chat and they can send each other resources. We have a little Discord bot that manages currencies and credits and everything. But I’ve had players come to me and say, “Hey, Sam, we would really love to do a street racing league. What are the rules for that?” And I have to say, “I’m sorry. That’s just out of scope. I can’t be running individual RPG sessions for 1,200 players in this server.” You are unfortunately limited to basically whatever you can do on the server and then whatever you can convince your boss to do.

Now, if a boss wanted to start a street racing league, I would maybe talk to them about that. But they’re busy running the war game and so don’t know the time or resources for these kinds of player endeavors they want to go gallivanting off on.

Brian: Expanding on that idea of the original game was limited to 50 and you’re now at 1,200. How the hell do you manage a game with 1,200 people? Just from a logistics perspective, how much of this stuff are you actually reading and how active do you have to be as a game master for something this big?

Sam: Um... It’s a lot, is the short way I would put it. We had a... the biggest and probably kind of like most disastrous thing that’s happened. I mean if you’re on BlueSky and following the game at all, you’ve seen people chattering about this. If you’re on the server you can get hundreds of different accounts of this story.

But basically last Friday [October 24th] there were multiple player-run conspiracies and puzzles and ARGs (alternate reality games) and prophecies and other sorts of various occurrences that players were running that all sort of converged on this one point on Friday night, completely coincidentally. And so the player bases, both the denizens and the bosses, were getting very concerned that I, Sam, had some secret story event that I was running that was going to start on Friday night that I wasn’t telling them about. And so I kept getting these messages from my bosses who were like, “Hey, Sam, I’d like to spend 100,000 credits to run an intelligence operation to send spies to go figure out if any of our people are infected with the Caliban virus?” And I would say, no.

Because, you know, for me, of course they weren’t. Or they would say, like, “Hey, Sam, we want to get a read on who is Patient ID 16725 Alpha. And I would say, “Do you have a Discord ID for this person so I can tell you about them?” And they would say, no.

And so I just thought they were just asking me questions. I thought they were getting fooled by somebody. But they thought I had some secret hidden ARG scheme. And this escalated and escalated and escalated. And they’re moving soldiers around. And they’re issuing evacuation orders. And it’s really heating up on the server. And then eventually, one of these sort of players who’s in this sort of like accidental quasi-GM role, I think—and this is not totally clear to even me—starts sending other players messages saying like, “Hey, you’ve been infected with the virus,” or like, “Hey, you’re now a scary monster.” And then players go into the server who’ve been getting this message and say like, “Woo, I’m a scary monster!” you know, like I’ve been infected. And this starts a mass panic event on the server. People are barricading themselves into their Discord threads. There are players walking around kind of role playing as like people shooting the infected on the streets.

There are people with theories, you know, they’re posting everything is full of propaganda in this game and misinformation is everywhere And so anytime there’s an event, there’s always posters for it. And so posters are showing up saying like,” Don’t ping anyone on Discord! Don’t enter a thread with someone you think might be infected! The whole station could be online the bots tracking us!” Everyone was incredibly paranoid.

And then on Saturday morning, when I woke up, I had dozens of messages being like, “Sam, one, what the hell is going on? And two, like Sam, people are freaking out, we need more safety tools. Three, Sam, like, what the hell, what were you planning?!” To which my response was, I didn’t know about any of this. I saw my bosses moving soldiers around and asking weird questions, and I did not realize that buried deep in a private thread, one of, literally…we’ve hit our thousand thread limit on Discord every day. And so buried somewhere in one of these thousand threads is a mass ARG going on with 200 players loaded into this thread and I had no idea about it because nobody pinged me in there and I just didn’t realize. So that Friday night choke-spawn incident was a very stressful weekend for me and Sean McCoy. But we’ve since brought in more moderators basically just to help run things on a social level of explaining this is what bleed is, and telling people to be aware that your character emotions can be big, and if you’ve been clocking 12 hours a day in this game remember to make some distance, and all this. So we’ve had more moderators now which is really helpful and it means that I can focus more on running the game. But basically I’m online most of the day and I’m processing orders from my bosses most of the day. There are only 20 bosses or so but they they’re quite active

Which faction would you want to join in Over/Under?

And oftentimes I have to notify them of things like, oh, a shipment has come in, or your soldiers have gotten here, or whatever. And then a lot of the rest of the time I’m answering rules questions, or sort of keeping an eye on things, or otherwise engaging. But I would say on an average day I’m online easily six hours, if not eight, sometimes more, just sort of checking in and out throughout the day as I try to do other stuff. It’s a lot.

Brian: Wow. It is truly a crazy undertaking. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a game evolving so completely past its creator. Do you know what mean? Like, it truly turned on you for a minute there. Was that experience exciting for you to see? Something you made taking on a life of its own, even though it was something you then had to wrangle back in?

Sam: Yeah, totally! I mean, my sort of whole M.O.—and we’ve argued about this, you and I—my sort of whole M.O. is that the game designer does not have a role in the game, right? Like, I think when we’re playing a tabletop RPG, it’s the players who make the game that they’re playing. The designer is the one who makes the book and the book is the thing that sits on the table that you look at sometimes, maybe. And so on a philosophical, you know, like academic level, this is my ultimate vindication.

I made this game and I was running it and I was there and I still lost complete control of it and had no idea what was going on. And obviously, players independently creating and landing on a mass plague hysteria panic event is so cool. I’ve never heard of anything like that happening. World of Warcraft had its plague, but that was built into the code. That was a bug that ran wild. Whereas this was genuinely…at no point did anyone get confirmation from me that this was real. They all just thought they did.

Brian: Yeah, it’s wild.

Sam: And that is so cool and exciting. So while it was very stressful to run, and increasingly the way I’ve had to think about this is, there is the game design side of it and there is the event planning side of it. I like to think of myself as a pretty decent game designer. But I’m a pretty crummy event planner. Again, this is where Sean McCoy has been very helpful and he’s been bringing on more moderators and they’ve been very helpful. So it’s gotten a lot easier in the past week.

But like, having to kind of wrangle those two simultaneously has been challenging. And while the event planning side of me is often very stressed and worried, or at least was, the game design side of me—and certainly the kind of like ethnographic game studies scholar in me—my eyes are sparkling looking at this game.

We already had a few people say, “Hey, I’m writing my game studies midterm on this.” Somebody at the NYU Game Center where I went to school is writing their midterm on this game! Somebody else was like, “Hey, I’m like an anthropology academic of some variety, I’m doing an ethnography, don’t mind me.” So certainly for people who are into studying how games operate and how players play, this is like a bizarre concoction treasure trove. You know, it’s drinking from the fire hose of how players play in a number of ways, which is very exciting.

Brian: As of now, so today is October 31st, when does this game end and can people still join and get the experience of Over/Under?

Sam: Yeah, totally. So the game runs for the length of Mothership Month. Officially this is sort of like an event for Mothership Month, which is a large crowdfunding event and general season of celebration for Mothership. But it started on October 14th and will end on November 11th. So we have about a week and a half. But you can still join the server. Many things have occurred, so you will not be coming in at the beginning of the story, but certainly you can still join and certainly you can still go up and down, many of the factions are still in turmoil, war is on the horizon more or less constantly, and you can join just by joining the Discord.

Brian: Right. And then kind of my last question for you is, are there any plans for future versions of this game or similar types of things? And what lessons have you learned from this game you want to take into those future games?

Sam: I’ve learned a lot of lessons. People have been asking since day two, are we going do this again next year? To which my response and Sean’s response has been, ask us when it’s over.

Brian: Ha ha ha.

Sam: I think the biggest single lesson we’ve learned from this is that you have to do a lot of expectation setting. There’s onboarding in terms of learning how to play the game, but more importantly, there is just the onboarding of saying, this is what you should expect to happen. And you know, on some level I chafe against that as a game designer. Like I said, I’m a big fan of letting the players take what they’re gonna take and run with it. But also, you know, 1,200 people is just too many, and there are too many cultural differences coming in. There’s kind of the “core” of the people—a lot of the original bosses that I brought in and that Sean brought in—sort of anywhere from mainstream D&D players to quite niche, kind of like OSR war gamers. Cataphracts is a very niche, OSR-ish war gaming game, but since then, a lot of these people coming in are LARPers, or forum role players. We’ve had people come in who didn’t know what Mothership was. And so just laying out the expectations—this is what you can do in your role playing, this is what you can’t do in your role playing; this is what to expect from the politics and the war, this is what not to expect; this is the level of activity we’re imagining from you, this is the extent of what you can and can’t do. All these questions are in the “rules” but we did not do enough work culturally onboarding people of how this game is gonna play.

And you know, I’ve run mega games in the past and I’ve run sort of like other large-scale games. In undergrad I ran week-long games of survival tag, zombie tag with 500 players, but there we made you sit through like a two-hour presentation and we ran 10 of them the week before and you had to like sign a bunch of paperwork and like otherwise sort of agree to a bunch of things that at least made you say you understood the rules a lot more than just joining a Discord server. So that’s kind of the single biggest one.

Brian: Sure, yeah.

Sam: As for whether we’ll do this again in the future, certainly I will be running more Cataphracts games and more unusual Cataphracts games. I definitely plan on doing that. But Cataphracts is a lot smaller. My game, I think, is the biggest one I know, but it has 40 players in it or something like that. Are we going to be doing 1,200 person Mega Game LARP Festival Digital Ren Faire Mothership Wargame things? …maybe?

Brian: Well, we’ll just have to keep an eye on the servers and hope when Mothership Month comes back around that we get another version of Over/Under…man, I really wish I’d started in Over/Under when it launched.

Sam: You can still join!

Brian: I probably still will! My problem is it’s one of those things that I know if I get into it, I’m not gonna be a fly by night, just check it for a couple of seconds. It’ll consume me and I have too much shit to do.

Sam: Well, you know, like there are some crazy things happening right now. You know, Kyle Ferrin, the illustrator, the guy who did Root and Arcs and Oath?

Brian: Yeah.

Sam: So Kyle Ferrin is playing. Currently Kyle Ferrin’s real-life commissions are closed. You can’t commission Kyle Ferrin to come draw something for you, but he is taking in-game money to draw portraits for your Discord character, and he’s drawn a hundred of these, and has become one the richest players by drawing portraits. So you can’t commission Kyle Ferrin in real life with real money, but you can commission him on Prospero’s Dream Discord server with fake money.

Brian: That’s so fucking good.

Sam: It’s wild. It’s wild.

Join the Over/Under Discord now to start playing

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