Today’s guest article is by Osmond Arnesto and deals with a different type of roleplaying when you are geographically distant from your group – play by post – Postal Gnome John.
One of my first games wasn’t played on a forgotten kitchen table in the basement, or even on a sticky table at Denny’s. That, I am ashamed to admit, came much later when I should have known better. Instead, I was sitting on my dorm room bed at college, typing on a laptop. The game was for Dungeons & Dragons v3.5, and I was playing through DnD Online Games (though nowadays, they’re known as RPG Crossing). But, that game, like so many other of its ilk, died. The gap between player posts kept growing. The Game Master stopped asking where everyone was. The steam: lost.
Play-by-post games come with a couple of advantages over in-person games.
- You don’t have to schedule a game night around Frank’s inconsistent restaurant work schedule, or Janet’s last-minute social plans, or Brad’s kid’s heavily censored elementary school production of Rent.
- You can game on the cheap. Besides the rules of the game (unless the game is free), you don’t have to invest in dice, travel expenses, or food for a group. Sometimes, all you really want to save on is time.
- Your pool of players isn’t limited to how far you are willing to commute anymore. For some players, like those who live in small towns or those who lack a way of getting around, gaming online is the only option.
So why do play-by-post games have the tendency to peter out?
Having a Game Plan
The easiest way for you or your players to lose interest in your game is if there are no ground rules before you start playing. Being in the mind-set that you can post any old time you feel like is the same as saying you’ll start going to the gym tomorrow. It won’t happen unless you set a solid time frame for it. Maybe you decide you and your players will post twice a week: Monday, when everybody is ready for work, and Wednesday, when everybody wants to stop going to work. You can also decide that if a player misses a certain number of posts, then the Game Master will act for them.
After frequency, post quality should be taken into consideration. Often, a player will post their character’s action and wait for the Game Master’s outcome for their roll. This is fine, but the game can move at a glacial pace when posts are only made once a week. Reserve forum posts for place descriptions or extended character actions. When the game calls for more of a back-and-forth, like conversation, combat, or dungeon exploration, consider doing it through an instant messaging app like Kakao Talk. Then, as the Game Master, you can post a summary of what happened in chat.
Sharing Contact Info
Another useful strategy is to have a way to contact each other outside of the game. I’m not saying that you should hand out more information than you need to, because you need to keep in mind that sometimes you really are just gaming with strangers that you ran into on the internet. It pays to be safe. But it is very easy to ignore the game and the other players in favor of your other obligations if you are merely brushing off Ophelia the Dwarven Cleric (as opposed to Rocky, the Hobbit fan who lives on a farm in the middle of Kansas and doesn’t have a gaming group).
This is even easier if you downloaded an instant messaging app like the one I mentioned above. You can send friendly reminders to your players to post in the game and get to know each other outside of your character personas at the same time. You don’t even have to use your real name the entire time. The game I am a player in right now has us all connected through Facebook, and if you have a more personal connection to your online group (maybe the only thing separating you is distance), then that is an option, too.
Starting In Media Res
Patrick Regan wrote this article for Gnome Stew about starting a role-playing game in the middle of the action, without set-up or context. The Game Master doesn’t bother with wrangling the adventurers to head to the same place, or giving them rumors about the untold treasures in the cave outside of town. The players just start by ducking behind a pile of golden statues to avoid the stream of fire. It’s an awesome tool for changing up the pace for any game, but it is essential for play-by-post games.
During an in-person game, you have the luxury of hanging out in the tavern or having a drinking contest with the surly halfling in the corner, but this will only serve to bore everyone involved with the game. Especially seasoned role-players who have done this kind of introduction dozens of times over. You don’t want players to have to wait for a threat or dramatic tension. An added benefit of this strategy is you and your players are able to flash back to the events that led to where the game started.
Keeping Players Invested
I’ve found that two of the best ways to keep a game in the minds and hearts of your players is by letting them make contributions to the game world and having stories to look back on. You can kill those birds with one resource by setting up a wiki for your game that your players can contribute to. There are several online services built for this purpose, like Obsidian Portal and TiddlySpace, but if you don’t want to deal with a whole new platform and you already have a Google account, you have the option of sharing Google Drive documents with whoever you want.
You can offer in-game incentives like experience if your players create content for the wiki. This includes places that the party has explored, in-character journal entries, rumors about a locale that the party hasn’t heard about, or non-player character profiles. Even if you are the Game Master, you don’t have to be the only one pouring any sort of work into the game. You might have to relinquish some of your control over the game world, but I believe it is worth it to make a game that matters to every player.
You have a wealth of resources available to you as an online gamer. Play-by-post games might have a life expectancy comparable to someone wearing a red shirt in a space opera, but they don’t have to be that way in the age of the internet.
How have your play-by-post games turned out? Do you have any other ways to keep the game going I didn’t cover?
Osmond Arnesto is a freelance writer and fiction author who has a lot to say about role-playing games and his time spent traveling around Asia. You can read more about him at osmondarnesto.com, or read his upcoming blog at lumberingelephant.com.
I am highly amused that this is titled “delaying the eventual death” as opposed to “preventing the death”. The latter sounds impossible, to hear other GMs talk, and at least in my experience. And speaking of my experience, you asked, so….
Pure play-by-post games: Tried this for about a year. Doomed. Nobody was consistent enough about posting at the agreed-upon rate, people forgot things that happened mere IC minutes ago (because so much real-life time was passing), that reduces engagement, and so on. I found myself cutting huge swaths of content and fights just to get closer to a semi-natural end for the campaign. I considered replacing some players, but they were people I had known for a long time…. In the end I shut it down because I was too frustrated, wrote in an epilogue, that was it.
Hybrid games: Wherein we do a live session on a schedule and then some RP or other IC actions in play-by-post. This has gone pretty well, actually. It’s not every player’s cup of tea, particularly since the flow of a conversation can get awkwardly multi-threaded… so we mostly keep combat to the live games (along with however much RP) and then those who are into it can RP in the PBP. Still, they have made actual game progress in the PBP between live games. Killed an ancient red dragon in PBP recently, egads!
Hey, thanks for reading!
Playing with people you know is its own double-edged sword. On one hand, they’re not faceless usernames from the internet who can drop out without so much of a warning. On the other hand, “hey, we’re all friends here, Pixel isn’t going to mind if I skip a few posts.” There’s nothing wrong with that, because we’re all here to have fun anyway, but it does take a certain kind of person to be into play-by-post at all.
While I am lucky enough to have a local gaming group, I also do play-by-post to get gaming fixes I couldn’t get otherwise (different systems or game concepts I wouldn’t have time for in real life). Mostly games die because of various real-life things; vacations, family emergencies, players moving, sudden heavy school or work load, I’ve even had people suddenly been deployed in the service. I’ve also had games die because of inter-player conflict. People had wildly differing ideas of how to go about playing the game, to the point where certain player refused to interact with each other. Rather than run six different game threads, I had to end that game.
But when things are going otherwise all right, other than occasional brief absences, I’ve found that keeping the game going mostly involves keeping the posting going, even if it’s slow. Due to pulling from a pool of players in multiple time zones and countries, a chat program for combat is sadly not in the charts. I make sure the players know to put as much information as possible into their posts, pre-rolling if necessary to speed combat as much as possible. Between that and putting in posts of greater description and detail, I try to make up for a slower posting speed with as much care as possible.
Being consistent enough that the game becomes part of the weekly routine. That’s something I forgot to mention in the article, thanks for bringing it up. The biggest fight is the getting there, though. But players refusing to interact with other players is wild. It’s a game, not a novel!
Yeah, I joined several play by posts over the years on a gaming website/forum I’ve since departed from; and they all died; usually right around the time the GM just up and walked away without even so much as a “I’ll be back in a week” or anything just poofed in the middle of an intense scene or other interesting point in the campaign.
The real irritating part was the GM did this in every single forum game they ran without fail despite constant promises of “It’ll be different this time.”
The best solution for forum gaming I’ve found is the K.I.S.S approach, in that you keep the rules minimal so play is quicker, and you keep the adventure a short and simple one shot, (assault the villains lair, stop the evil doomsday device, etc.) Something basic enough you can reasonably accomplish it inside of 2-3 months of real time. (Something about the complexity level of a single episode of your favorite tv series is a good depth/length to aim for.)
Having a specific time table in mind and a clear end in sight helps keep everyone motivated, and prevents it from petering out due to lack of interest or players/GM finding something else to take up their free time.
Very true! The few PbP games I’ve either run or participated in that managed to make it to some sort of end all had fairly simple storylines and very definite goals. There’s one I’m running now that had some very basic D&D plots (players pick from advertisements of woe, go to chosen troubled spot, apply steel, magic, trickery, or words as the situation applies, collect reward. Wash, rinse repeat), and it’s still going strong. Even with having to replace players a few times, I’ve managed to maintain a minimum party level even during very slow spots. Oddly enough, having a larger party (and an active NPC, not glory-hogging, just active) helps keep things going because SOMEBODY in the party of seven is always going to be replying.
Here are some lessons I’ve learned over the years:
1. PbP is its own thing. Probably the first lesson learned I will pass on is to remember PbP is an entirely different medium than face-to-face and it would be a mistake to try to recreate a face-to-face gaming experience in a PbP game. Too often I have seen well intentioned GMs try to replicate tabletop play via forums and it usually results in a game crashing and burning before it ever gets off the ground. Play by Post is an excellent medium to get your roleplay fix, but it works best when you treat it as its own thing.
2. Tear down the GM Screen with regards to combat resolution. Most PbP GMs approach combat in one of two ways: 1) players roll their attacks/damage/etc. and then wait for the GM to adjudicate after the fact or 2) players describe their actions and GM rolls for everyone at the end of the round, adjudicating in isolation and then describing results.
Both of these approaches are problematic. The first slows an already slow medium down even further, as players are forced to wait for days at a time to determine whether they even hit or not. Additionally, this first approach places all the work on the GM to crunch 4-6 players’ rolls, in addition to the rolls of the NPCs, monsters, etc. This is not fun for the GM or the players. The second approach exacerbates the problem even more because the players have lost agency on an enjoyable aspect of RPGs–rolling dice, virtual or physical. Secondly, it still puts the GM in super-computer mode to synthesize everyone’s actions and put together a coherent narrative of what happened. Every round!
My recommendation is to provide the players with enough information to resolve their own actions, without having to wait for the GM to determine whether they hit or not. Players roll their own attacks and damage and can immediately tell whether they hit or miss, and narratively include this information in their posts. To do this, all you need to do is provide AC and hit point information for the different enemies they might face. Sure it takes away some of the “mystery” of not knowing a foe’s strength, but it more than makes up for it in allowing the game to move along at a good pace. For boss-type and unique creatures, etc. you can keep the AC and/or HP a mystery to heighten tension, but for most mooks, this is overkill and adds nothing to the game. Most players have a good idea of a standard creatures AC and/or hit points anyway, because they have access to the same books the GM has and can figure that stuff out on their own. No need to drag a game out just to maintain the illusion of the players’ not knowing a monster’s abilities–they know.
3. Initiative. Another aspect that can kill a game’s inertia is initiative. PbP is not the right medium to have people acting in individual initiative. Too much time can be wasted between initiative counts waiting for players to log-in and post. My recommendation for initiative is to either do group initiative or stage initiative. Group initiative is self-explanatory. Stage initiative is when you have three stages: Before Monsters, Monsters and After Monsters. Everyone still gets to roll initiative, but can post at any time during their stage. This approach can also slow down play though, so as a GM you have to be ready to roll initiative for players to ensure the game moves on without waiting for a single player to roll initiative before you can even begin the round. Whatever you do, keep initiative simple.
4. Advancement. Jettison by-the-book XP awards. PbP takes too long to mess around with an XP pace that assumes people are sitting down in the same room playing at the same time. My recommendation is to award XP as normal, but do not divide it among the group. Everyone earns full share of the total XP. Using this method, it is reasonable for characters to earn two to three levels per year of an active PbP. If you play it by the book, you might spend an entire year gaming without anyone earning a level.
Players like to earn levels and will grow discontent if they’re not seeing character progress. Alternatively you can tie XP to completion of adventures, plot points, etc. and manage level gains this way. In either case, you want to make sure players are earning levels and not stuck with 1st level characters for a year or more. Many are the crash and burned PbPs with a stable of lean, hungry, 1st level characters.
5. Adventures. Many PbP GMs have grand ideas about running entire adventure paths or even single modules. They get this great idea that they are going to run some megadungeon or epic campaign arc spanning multiple modules. I can tell you from experience this is also a recipe for a game to die.
With active players posting every 1 to 2 days, even running a “short” 28-page adventure might take 1 to 2 years to complete…if you’re lucky. My recommendation is to keep your adventures short and episodic. Sprawling dungeon crawls are not meant for PbP. Trust me on this one.
I typically run adventures that feature about 5 to 10 challenges. Tops. This will take anywhere from 6 to 12 months.
If you have your heart set on running a particular published adventure, try to cull those essential parts of the module into a condensed version of itself, separating out the “resource wasting encounters” from the meat of the adventure. Resourse wasting encounters only serve to add unnecessary time to a game and should be eliminated.
6. No Character is pivotal to a story’s completion. Related to the last point, you will lose players due to real life. There are numerous reasons why this will happen, but the bottom line is expect attrition. For this reason, make sure your game does not hinge on any particular character.
Odds are, that player will get ambushed by real life and disappear at any moment. Be ready to move on, either recruiting a new player to take over that role, or phasing out the character altogether.
Suspension of disbelief is huge here. Their character just fades to the background. Most players will want to create their own character anyway, so you may have a hard time finding a replacement for a particular character. New players are easy to find. New players willing to take on an orphaned character…not so much. Don’t build your game around any one character.
7. Keep the Party Together. Splitting up a party at the table is bad enough, but it’s even worse in PbP. At this point, you are forced to then run multiple instances of the game to ensure everyone is engaged. If you have players sidelined with others are off doing their own thing, you run the risk of losing players due to inactivity. Engaged players makes for reliable, consistent posters. Try to keep the party together as much as possible.
8. The Roar of Lull of PbPs. When a new game starts up, everyone is excited and posting nearly every day. It can quickly become overwhelming to a new GM. This usually settles down after a couple of weeks, but expect a tidal wave of posting activity initially, and don’t be afraid to throttle back a little bit to keep things under control.
If you have players who can only post one time a day and they come home after a long day of work and see a wall of text…well, that can be hard to wade through. Not to mention hard for the GM!
On the flip side, expect posting rates to slow down during holidays, summer vacation, when kids go back to school, etc. This is where communication comes into play again.