Play-by-Post and the Systems Who Love Them

I’m entering my 10th year of a play-by-post (PbP) campaign, I decided to talk about PbP in general, and my PbP in particular. Thanks to Andre for the article suggestion.

We’ll begin with what PbP is. See, back in the olden times, people would regularly run board games literally by post. You would write out your turn based on the current game state, then mail it to the next person, who would then take their turn before mailing it along. Diplomacy was especially ideal for this. However, it takes FOREVER. With the advent of the internet, email and message boards have allowed for PbP at a much faster speed. RPGs could be played now in a play by post format (though I imagine there had to be SOMEBODY at some point who ran an RPG via letters). Now, they’re played in a variety of forms across lots of mediums, but in general, you’re playing in a forum-based format.

So why play an RPG PbP?

Because you can take the time to write out exactly what you’re doing.

1. It’s a great writing exercise.
2. You can post whenever and wherever you are.
3. Your group can go weeks without anyone writing anything, and you won’t forget what’s going on.
4. If, for example, you want to have a character speak a different language, you can just use a translator and type it up, without any kind of slow-down to the game. I’ve had characters regularly speak Huttese to the heroes, and it feels natural because I’m not stumbling through a dictionary at the table.

Now, when I first looked at getting my Star Wars campaign back up and going, I had already been looking around at other play-by-post sites, but settled on RPOL.net. Why? Because it’s a message board you can set the level of secrecy on. Every GM gets their own game board, where they can post up new chapters, create all kinds of characters, and make the whole thing hidden away for no one but the players to see, or they can make it public so anyone can watch what’s going on. When you make a new character, when you write up a post, you can mark that this post is going up by this particular character, to ensure everyone knows exactly who’s acting. It has dice rolling as well as an option, and you can share your character sheets.

One great thing is that in my Star Wars campaign, me and one of the other players actually share GMing duties. We communicate as to the direction of the story, and either one of us can move things along. There’s been whole months where I couldn’t post, so she stepped in and ran it, and the players were none the wiser. The posts simply showed up as GM.

I’ve seen players run games over on RPGGeek, but anyone else can watch, and they can also comment, interrupting your group’s flow. An advantage is that you can easily find players, because everyone on that site is there because they love RPGs. You can’t post as characters, so it’s best to regularly remind everyone your character’s name. There’s no easy way to click over to get more info about their character as needed.

Same with Facebook. I’ve run games on private Facebook groups, but you still have to navigate around in those groups to easily get to character sheets. The advantage to Facebook, is everyone is on it, so you can easily duck over to post in the game without needing to go out to a different site to track it down. With my ADHD, I will sometimes go weeks completely forgetting to check RPOL, so having it already on one of my frequented sites helps.

Twitter is also an option. By using hashtags, you can keep your game separated from your normal feed. You should keep any of your posts short, and everyone’s gonna see the game. If you are worried about spamming your feed with game posts, you can move the game to DMs, or suggest your followers mute the hashtag if they don’t want to see what’s going on. One cool thing is that you can run polls, so I’ve seen people conduct polls to find out what they should do.

So, what systems work best for PbP games?

In our Star Wars campaign, we tried to do D20, but we found that once you move into combat, initiative can be tricky, waiting for a certain player to act. You could definitely use the Marvel Heroic method of deciding who goes next, which might make things smoother. D20 is familiar to everyone, but if you want to keep the game mechanics light to keep things moving smoothly, Microlite D20 would probably be good for that.

Risus is also a really good option. It keeps things very loose, and lets the players define themselves with only a few small keywords. I’ve had a lot of success there.

I recommend staying away from any rules-heavy systems, or anything that uses any fancy dice. FFG’s Star Wars system just wouldn’t work here, unless you were using some sort of PbP system that allowed for dice like that.

What does my table use? After about a week of trying Star Wars D20 on RPOL, we instead switched to freeform. We actually don’t make any rolls, or have any character sheets. At this point, we’re basically playing a group-based storytelling game. I really enjoy it, but we’re also a group of players who really trusts one another not to go god-mode and make unrealistic demands. Our characters regularly fail, and try to recover. I really enjoy it, but if it was with a group I hadn’t been playing with since I was 15, I wouldn’t recommend it.

So there you go! Get out there, and get your Play By Post gaming on. Are you in a PbP campaign? Let me know about it.