Any tips/help on running a Play By post campaign? :)

[Silverblade The Ench]

Well I'm going to run a 4th ed Dark Sun play by post game
Now, I've played D&D for over 20 years, and used ot run an online game using OPENRPG or WEBRPG and a forum to co-ordinate it.

hwoever, never done play by post before, so I was hopign for any tips/help you cou folks could offer?

I plan on using a .jpg with a grid map, like chess, to plot out combat moves
ie "Mul moves to A5, uses Cleave on tembo #'1"
and update the map each as each character moves, as I have my own site but can't let others access my site for uploads for security reasons.
wondering if should make a flickr or osme such account to link images with whole group having access to it for uploads to change as everyone moves per turn, or something else?

ta for any help!

 

[IronWolf]

I've run a couple of reasonably long running Play-by-Post games, though not on EN World. The biggest thing is to be prepared for the slower pace they run at. They can be a lot of fun to play though given the right people playing and a DM that is good at keeping things moving.

One of the early things I do is advise players that I will temporarily NPC their character if they go too long without posting. This is not to punish them, simply a means to keep the game moving. While I NPC a character I do not have their character do anything that would seem out of character. And in some cases, it just means moving the game forward without any action from them. I have not had any issues with this in the games I have run.

Roleplaying encounters can work great in PbP games. People have more time to sink into character and craft an in character response. So working in roleplaying encounters in the game really help highlight one of the pros of PbP gaming.

Now a lot of people will say to avoid combat in a PbP and a lot of this depends on your players. Some folks really like to bash things, even in a PbP game! They key is not letting combat bog down the game pace and to keep things moving. When we go to combat rounds in games I run we probably average one round of combat per 24 to 36 hours of posting time. If after 24-ish hours I've had everyone but one character post actions I will move forward with the round. This helps avoid getting stalled if someone can't post quickly enough.

As for the combat posts themselves, I have the players roll using the dice roler on the boards we use and they describe their actions and such. I let all the players post and then I work out the results of the round working in the critters as needed in initiative.

For mapping I use something similar and post a jpeg or png of a map and dots representing characters and critters. The map gets updated at the end of each round and I embed the map in the post under a spoiler tag. I don't make the players post exact coordinates for movement just describe where they are going and then I move their dot for them. Despite not having the players use exact graph coordinates it seems to work for us with minimal confusion.

 

[GandalfMithrandir]

In my experience (running 2 games and playing in a few more all here on EN World) PbP goes REALLY slowly, my first adventure I ran, I planned up a little starting bit for a mostly sandbox type campaign, which is still running since February, the first encounter and small are a finished and now they are going onto a second area, after a couple fights and roleplay mostly, I don't use maps, really, people just describe where they are and we go from there, but if you are using a more map dependent system like 4E, IronWolfs system works well.

here on En World we use the dice roller at www.invisiblecastle.com for the most part.

Roleplay encounters are your friend more than fights, but then again fights can be fun too it can just take a long time for them to be completed.

 

[Camelot]

If you want to run every combat all the way through, only have 2-3 encounters per level, and make them difficult, memorable, and important to the story.

What I do, though, is let my players skip through combat encounters that don't have much story implication. They can spend healing surges and daily powers to represent their effort spent during the encounter, but they then can roleplay the battle however they want. This method hasn't gotten any playtesting yet, though, so I'm not sure if the numbers are balanced. Right now, I say that spending one healing surge can defeat one standard monster of your level, and spending a daily power defeats two.

This method lets me have as many combats as I would in a normal game, but gives the players the choice of which encounters they want to go through in detail. They are only forced to go through the really important encounters that have huge story implications.

When you do start a combat, let the players know as much as they need to about their opponents. I tell them exactly how many monsters there are, what each of their hit points are, and all their defenses. This way, players can know if they hit, bloody, or kill monsters right away, instead of requiring confirmation from the DM. When the monsters' turns come around, tell everyone how much HP they have remaining, what conditions the monster is suffering, etc., so they don't have to go back through the thread and figure it out for themselves.

Hope this helps, and if you need a player for your game, I'd love to join! I'm getting the Dark Sun Campaign Setting book some time this week!

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

thanks for the tips, folks!
sorry for delay in reply, doh