The Realm of Aurii
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How a Play by Post Works
I have experience (around 6 months of) with a play by post game via forum. That group fizzled out and I’m hoping to use lessons learned during that game to avoid the same fate for this group.
- Play by post has a very slow game “tempo”. What I mean by that is you might be very excited to see a reply to your action in a post, but you won’t get said reply for two days or some other period of time. The trick is to keep finding your enthusiasm each time it’s your time to post.
- Responding with a one word sentence (or a singular word -_- ) is a no no in Play by Post. The entire game takes the form of replies to an initial post by the GM, and if you only respond with the word “K” no one will have anything to reply to. Help your fellow players out giving them details to interact with. If I want to say “K” and dismiss another character talking to my own, I can instead go:
Roger says “K” without looking up from his phone. After refreshing his Instagram feed, he presses the lock button and tries to see if Tobias is still standing behind him in the dark screen’s reflection.
- DO. NOT. Take the above as me saying you have to be an excellent writer or something to enjoy playing. You do not, my mastery of the English language is downright disappointing as a native speaker. Simply do your best to describe not just your character’s attacks and speech, but everything else as well.
- It is hard to have a natural flowing conversation when you can send one line every few days. Nor do you want to spend a month asking the bartender where the bathroom is. Something I’ve read about as a solution that problem goes like this. Imagine in a video game rpg when you go up and talk to named npc A. You’re given a list of options to ‘say’ as your character, such as
> Why are you here? > What's your favorite color? > Shouldn't you be dead?You’ll then button mash through all that dialogue until you get the quest reward. The proposed solution is instead of the NPC having dialogue options, when you start a conversation with an NPC you provide multiple things to be answered and the GM fills in the small talk between them as required. In the case of those questions, rather than take three whole replies to answer them the GM would reply
“Well, I got lost on a hike last week and you’re the first person I’ve seen since. I’d hoped you were with a rescue party. Right now I’ll take any color but green, these woods are starting to get to me. And well… I’d appreciate if you weren’t so candid about it. I’ve been out of rations for three days.”
Rule Systems
Rule systems are, in a bare bones sense, a way of resolving conflicts. Character A stabs Character B, can Character B dodge in time. Character C tries to fool Character B, is Character C charismatic enough, etc. Dungeons and Dragons is the most well known gaming rule system out there. There are however, far more than just D&D which cover different genres, different play styles, and have varying complexities. Some examples that come to mind:
- Dungeons & Dragons (High fantasy genre)
- Big Eyes Small Mouth (Anime flavored, any genre)
- Fate (Roleplaying focused, any genre)
- Wushu (Lightweight, fast design)
- Ruleless
You might wonder what ruleless is about. Simply put, there’s no rolling, there’s no character sheet beyond name and backstory. Decisions are made (conflicts are resolved, to continue with the terminology) by either the GM or players as whole in the best way to enhance the story. That doesn’t mean you’ll always succeed, because characters without flaws/failures are boring. It’s a bit of a confusing concept and might be suited to those more familiar with gaming, but it does eliminate the need to roll dice while posting.
Storyline Drive
Not every story is told the same way. This applies in normal role playing games and in PbP as well. What drives the storyline and the length/complexity of the storyline are different in every tv show, movie, video game, and rpg.
To reference Will Ferrell’s best movie Stranger than Fiction,
“some plots by external events and crisises, others are moved forward by the characters themselves. If I go through that door, the story continues. The story of me going through the door. If I stay here, the plot can’t move forward and the story ends. …Don’t do anything tomorrow. Don’t do anything that could advance the plot forward. Instead, let’s see if the plot finds you.”
To de-quotify, a plot driven story will happen with or without the characters. A character driven story puts it on the character to make their own story, on that often gives them character development. Traditionally, plot driven stories make for great epic campaigns (Defeat the empire in Star Wars) and character driven plots make for great B plots (pretty much any romantic subplot ever is driven by the characters themselves). Also of note is a character arc can be happening at the same time as a plot arc.
What does this mean for a game? A plot driven story is a more a story the GM provides. It what’s happening around your characters, and your characters react and become involved. A character driven story will be the world (IE, what the GM plays) reacting to your character’s actions. A character driven story arc is more responsibiity on you as a player, because no one knows what your character wants to do but you. That said, the GM will help you along to tell the story you want to tell.
Type of Story telling
If you think about games and tv shows there are a few primary ways stories are told. You also may have noticed this pattern already, but PbP can reflect all of these ways.
- Open ended “Sandbox” games such as Grand Theft Auto or those old spider man games are characters roaming around doing whatever it is that makes them happy. Much like character driven story arcs (see above) it requires you as a player to know what your character wants to do and to direct them in doing it.
- “Episodic” adventures are much like tv shows. Something happens each episode, but the status quo returns mostly to normal when the episode is over. ‘Everyone comes home, drinks at the tavern, and they’ll go on another mission in the morning.’
- Epic Campaigns are your Lord of the Rings and Star Wars stories, where the story is the long journey to one main goal.
You may say ‘I’ve seen TV shows which have an epic story and episodic adventures!’ and you’d be right. You can mix any of these together in practice and there’s nothing wrong with doing so.
Keep in mind the scope that sounds interesting to you as well. What I mean by that is you can be an everyday hero who saves cats from trees and dogs or you can save the world by closing a portal to hell. There are epic campaigns to save the neighborhood just as much as the world. If you’d rather not save the world in game or vice versa, be sure to note that.
The sliding scale of Role Playing versus Game
It’s been alluded to before that different RPGs play differently. My favorite way of describing that is to picture it on a sliding scale from RP (role playing) to G (game).
On the very end of the role playing side you have what basically is just acting. The enjoyment comes from being able to ‘be’ that character while playing and bring them to life, have them interact with the world the GM provides.
On the other end (the game side), who you’re playing doesn’t matter to you so much as what they can do. A twofold example is Fallout 4, in that
- You can customize your look all you want, but you’re still married and looking for your lost child at the start of the game. The character customization is less important than the Stat assignment.
- Fallout 4 is a video game. Video games are forced onto the game side of the scale because they don’t have an actual person role playing on the other side of the tv.
Play by post games do well with specific turns, like in “gamey” systems, but lots of rules can bog down the tempo of the game which is the appeal of more rp style systems. Both have their perks and flaws, what matters is what kind of game sounds more fun to you.
Medium of play
The first play by post game was Chess via the postal service. I don’t think anyone’s tried rpg’s over snail mail but I’ll admit I haven’t looked very hard.
Most of this game play is asynchronous which is a fancy term to say not at the same time. The GM posts, then within a period of time anyone whose character will do/say something in response replies. The GM figures out the results of what the players do and say after the period of time is over, and responds with what happens next.
This works as expected in a forum or email situation, everyone either replies to the first email or post in a thread. This can also happen the same way in a chat client with a history, such as Discord. Setting up Discord is not an issue, nor is an email chain (assuming everyone still has email). A forum would requires more time and effort to setup than I have right now so we would have to piggy back on another forum.
Depending on the medium of play, there is also a chance for synchronous communication. Like above, this is a fancy term and it’s meaning is the opposite, communicating at the same time. This is NOT playing a live session. Chat clients would play a supporting role to the main posting system.
Frequency of play
The most important aspect of playing a Play by Post is knowing just how much you’ll be playing. It’s hard to keep interested in a game when you only get to make one post for it every week, or worse, less frequently than that. You’d be surprised how easy it is to forget your post when you’re juggling other things. The one thing I know I can take away from my prior experiences with Play by Post is there has to be some form of plan for posting.
These are the practical options for how much posting can be done in a week. Remember that a turn is started by the next post from the GM, so in the case of every two days the GM posting on Monday morning means that as a player you have til Wednesday morning to make a reply.
- Weekly
- Every three days (two turns in a week)
- Every two days (three turns in a week)
Daily (This is a bad idea)
This is mostly a sanity thing. if you cycle every 2 days around a week you’ll end up with sun, tues, thurs, sat; then mon, wed, fri and so on. Rather than that, which gives you an extra post every other week and a harder to remember schedule, doing every mon, wed, fri and ignoring the extra day makes more sense. Spacing of GM postings:
- Every X days
- Certain days in the week
Avoiding weekends, at least in my experience, is also a great idea since that’s when you’ll be making plans to be away from computer/phone/etc.
Missing your Turn
There are a bunch of ways missing players are handled in traditional tabletop gaming and most of them map pretty well to PbP. There are pros and cons to each worth noting, which is exactly what I shall do.
- They stand still exactly what it says on the tin. The character in question doesn’t do anything.
- The GM plays them The GM decides on an action that makes sense for the character and has them do it. (A believable action for them to do, not for them to suddenly commit suicide or something. GMs are not out to kill players, believe it or not.)
- Left behind This is more relevant to extended absences, and has the character in question rent a room in the inn and stay there for awhile. They effectively leave the party but are available to return at a later date.
Number of Players
So there’s around 15 players interested as of time of writing. That’s a lot. It will be a little different. Depending on the game we play I may take steps to make that number ‘effectively’ smaller, which means you might not actively be playing with all 14 other people. One group might be in the dungeon, and the other in the tower. Just keep that in mind.
Conclusion
That’s a lot of info. I know. Soak it in, think about what you’ve read, then come back around to it. If you have any ideas to either add to or improve on something you’ve read above, tell me. I’m no expert and will listen to all input.
Once you’ve read taken a breath and rested your eyes, below are some questions I’d like to have answered from you. They’ll make planning the game itself much smoother and this isn’t my game, it’s OUR game. Imagine how sucky it would be if I think everyone wants to, say, play via snail mail and I set that up only to find out you all really don’t want to do that. There will be more discussion down the pipeline (more discussion, less wall of text) as I find out what people’s preferences are to genres and rules, but for now answer those questions and I’ll have plenty to work with.
Questions:
How complex of rule set are you comfortable with?
Scale of 1 to 10: 10 being reading rulebooks is fun to you and 1 being chutes and ladders is far too complicated a game for you.
If you have a preference, what genre would you like to play in?
Literally anything is a valid choice. I have a rulebook designed for games with teenage detectives solving mysteries, no matter what kind of character and scenario you want to play in there’s a way to do that. Feel free to say a series as a genre as well, such as “Harry Potter” or “RWBY”.
What kind of character do you want to play?
You can be aaaaaaaanything you want. Princess of a war torn country, a Wizard for Hire, a goblin trying to make a name for himself as a chef, a sarcastic game master, anything except Batman. It’s okay if you don’t have any idea, inspiration often comes from knowing the world/genre you’ll be playing in.
Are you interested in a particular drive to the story?
Or rephrased, are character arcs of interest to you specifically or are you more interested in the group interest storyline?
What type of storytelling interests you to play?
*Remember, a mix of epic stories and a sandbox is also valid. You can compare to other media as well if that helps, ‘a story like Lord of the Rings’, etc.
Where are you on the “Sliding Scale of RP versus G?
Again 1 to 10 works, 1 is an improv show and 10 is Fallout 4 with paper.
What kind of mood to you want/expect from the game?
From Soap Opera to slapstick comedy, Game of Thrones to The D&D Movie (Pick one, they’re all as B movie as it gets).
Medium of Play?
Not snail mail. Was a joke. Seriously.
Frequency of Play?
Don’t forget you can add your own ideas here, this is very important to the success of the game so if you have any thoughts at all please speak up.
What to do with missing players?
If you don’t have an opinion here that’s fine, it’s a more technical question here than the rest and matters less.