For various reasons, our group is about to start a Shadowrun4 campaign over IRC. We all have varying knowledge of Shadowrun and IRC. So I ask the DumpShock community this, what do I need to know to GM a Shadowrun game over IRC?

Does the network you are have a dice rolling bot? Does your IRC client keep legible logs? Will you be using any test conventions for stuff like table talk, action descriptions, and actual spoken stuff?

Our group uses MagicStar for it's IRC Shadowrun game. It has a die-rolling bot, and we all use mIRC so the logs are readable and editable(via word processor).

We also use two channels, one for IC conversation and rping of the action, and then one for OOC rules jabber and dierolling.

IRC as my favorite SR experience ever. I did it faithfully every week of my life for a number of years. I enjoyed the fact I could watch a movie, eat dinner, and sip beer while playing SR, and roll into bed and sleep right after the game was done. Also, since people type more slowly than they speak, I felt it gave me more time to think about how my character would react in different situations, and it was easier to "act" since rather than having to do convincing things with my voice I just had to write evocative descriptions of what my character would do.

I also appreciated being able to upload 1 megabyte large area maps straight from MS Paint to various hosting services and make everyone download them.

Oddly enough, I just began this same kind of thing with a story writing group. The biggest difference being we're just writing, not gaming. All the rules are gone, and we just take the story where it goes. We keep all the story and background, though, and actions and results have to be believable, like the decker and the otaku getting trashed by black IC this last run. We didn't hose our rolls, we just up and wrote it like that. Anyway, the point is it's all on IRC, with results posted to a MB for later reference, just like some of the Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Star Wars sims on places like the SLAsims.com.

Point being, IRC=cool, chummer.

I'm lucky enough to have my own IRC server hosting IC and OOC channels for Meat World, Matrix, and Astral activities. We also have a dicebot that can handle Hits, Glitches and Critical Glitches.

Indeed, some of my most memorable RPG sessions have been throu a online media.. I find that you give better narrative descriptions of what you are doing when you are actually typing it instead of just saying this and that,.. typing gives you these extra seconds of thought to give a nice narrative description. It takes ALOT longer to play online tho, but I dont mind that since I get a whole diffrent experiance playing online..

Actually I think that I have more confidence role playing over IRC than in person. It's so very easy to write and describe things. To speak with silly voices and correct emotion for abstract firefights is substantially harder.