It recently occurred to me that I have about a decade of experience with Play-by-Post (PbP) games. This seems kind of absurd to me: I'm young enough that I don't usually think of myself as having decades of experience in anything, aside from all the life-support stuff like eating and sleeping and reading.
Anyway, this realization was prompted by @cole1312 on a certain OSR discord server, who requested resources on running PbP games. Such resources exist, but I hadn't yet written one. This is what I'll point to if I see a similar request in the future.
If you're new to PbP games, the essentials are all in the first four sections - Setup, The Gameplay Loop, Momentum, and Things You Should Know.
The Advanced Topics are just a couple of weird things that I've done in the past, or that my groups occasionally do. You can think of them as a sort of human interest piece. Though if you try them, or if you've ever done something similar, I definitely want to hear about it.
Setup:
The simplest possible setup is a discord channel, forum thread, or email chain where players post actions or dialogue and the GM posts turns. Unless you're running your game on a forum and expect only a token amount of discussion, you'll also want an Out-Of-Character (OOC) backchannel.
Each platform has different advantages and disadvantages. A forum thread is easy to keep track of and makes a great archive, but discussion will be slow. In Discord communication is very fast and you can create as many channels as you want, but old material rapidly gets buried.
The Gameplay Loop:
Gameplay in PbP games works a lot like gameplay in person, but for practical reasons it needs to be a little more structured. Additionally, the GM customarily rolls all dice. This speeds the game up a bit and eliminates awkward situations where you need to worry about honesty.
The basic loop is:
1. The players all post actions.
2. The GM rolls dice, writes up the results of each action, and posts them. This is a turn.
3. Return to step 1.
Sometimes the GM may respond to individual actions outside of the turn structure, if the action in question is something very minor that shouldn't take a full round. This is most frequently applicable to conversations, since waiting an entire turn between each line of dialogue would be far too slow.
Momentum:
It's very easy for a PbP game to slow down, and when that happens, it becomes increasingly likely that the game will grind to a halt and die. So, the most important part of running a PbP game is to keep the momentum going.
The root of the problem is that, by default, PbP games have very little time pressure. There's no expectation that anyone will do anything at any particular time, so it's easy for players to put off writing an action or for the GM to put off writing a turn.
My solution to this is to create a schedule. Choose when to post turns: every day after 9:00 EST, or on certain days of the week, every other Saturday, et cetera. Whatever works for your group. Then skip players who haven't posted by that time.
Skipping players doesn't feel great, but if you aren't willing to do it, your game WILL be held up by one person who never gets around to posting an action.
Lost momentum is difficult to recover. If your daily schedule slips and you begin posting turns every three days, players adjust to having the extra time. You'll have a hard time getting them to submit daily actions again, and in practice you may have trouble getting yourself to write turns more frequently. If there are long enough gaps between turns, people will also forget what's going on and may have trouble reengaging.
Things You Should Know:
PbP games are very slow. In person, it takes a few seconds to go through one iteration of the gameplay loop. In a PbP game it will generally take at least a day, and often much longer. An adventure that could be run in one or two sessions might take months to finish asynchronously.
Because an entire turn's worth of actions are processed simultaneously, PbP doesn't play well with systems where a single action or round of combat requires multiple branching decisions. The wizard can't decide to cast a counterspell mid-round if an enemy is about to throw a fireball, because "mid-round decisions" don't exist. The best you can do, in this case, is to let players make parts of their actions conditional. "I climb the ladder - and if I see the enemy wizard casting an offensive spell, I pause to counter it."
As the GM, you're probably doing a lot of rolling and bookkeeping that the players would normally keep track of themselves. Choose a system which won't make that unnecessarily difficult. One modifier per roll is manageable. Juggling two or three per character per turn gets old fast.
PbP games are, in my opinion, an underexplored medium, and you can use them to do a lot of really neat stuff. To list just a few possibilities, specifically ones exemplified by games that I've more recently played or run:
- PvP games that make heavy use of private channels and hidden information.
- Games where the "party" is somewhat nebulous and each player is free to pursue their own agenda
- Games with elaborate setting mechanics that reward a lot of thought and planning.
Advanced Techniques:
Inventory Management:
If your game has extensive bookkeeping needs, you may want to use Google Sheets. This allows you to create spreadsheets that anyone with access to the link can view and edit, which means you can fob a lot of that bookkeeping off on your players.
This sounds a lot scarier than it actually is. Your spreadsheet basically needs three fields: Name, Description, and Additional Notes. If you're tracking items you may want another field or two for quantity or monetary value or what-have-you.
Here is one of mine, from a game I've spoken about before.
Turn Anarchy:
Don't wait to do a full turn. Respond to actions as quickly as players post them.
This is a very intense experience. If you have enough players, and if your game is moving fast enough, chances are that at least one of them will be around at any given time. You can, in theory, have unlimited TTRPG. As much TTRPG as you want. Be very careful.
If you ever decide to do this:
- You will probably want to use a text-based chat program in which you can create many different channels. Practically speaking I mean Discord, but if you have a suitable alternative then go for it.
- Each player gets their own IC channel. This is important, because the game will move at different rates for everyone, and it will move very fast. Trying to use a single channel is mentally taxing, makes you lose track of actions, and is overwhelming for your players.
- There won't really be a "party," as such. Sometimes players might work together.
- Use a very simple system. Mine is "roll 1dX to resolve uncertainty, higher is better."
Lastly, most seriously: Set boundaries with your players and with yourself. Continue to do stuff other than your game. Make sure you're getting enough sleep. This was incredibly fun for me, on the few occasions I've been in a position to do it, but you really, really do not want it to get away from you.
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