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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Matt" data-source="post: 666990" data-attributes="member: 1213">Thx for the encouragement.  Its looking like this one might last a bit.As far as what I've learned:1.  (least useful to others) I found that I needed to tweak my style a bit and move more towards tactical as-if-there-were-miniatures combat methods.  More holistic and non-specific methods do not work in games where the DM and players do not know eachother well and thus little trust has been built up beforehand.  Unfortunately, I learned to PBP DM from a guy who took a preexisting game online due to sceduling conflicts, where it fourished.  It took me a bit to move away from that.The map use in the new players thread was a success.  I used Photoshop (in many ways vector apps would be better, but ps is what I know best) to make a background, and I put all the characters/NPCs as text on their own layers, color-coded by what side they are on.  I activated the grid and labled it.  As combat progressed, I was able to just drag the figures around.  When I wanted to take an image and post it, I used a screen grab app that grabs only selections and saves to JPEG, allowing me to only grab the Photoshop window and keeping the grid visible.  This had the very useful side effect of allowing players to be very specific in their movements.  i.e. they could add in parentheses, (partial charge to G11, attack vampire X5 on G10) etc. This fixed my problems with tactical combat in my PBP game, which is what got Reaper so mad in the past.2.  The main problem for the game was that people who initially joined were lost from the board altogether.  Those who are still posting in general are still in my game.  Frankly, I am now wary of acccepting people with reletively low post-counts or who havent been around that long, unless of course they are some of the hyperposting newbies like Timothy.If anytihng, the fact that the IC forum is part of a much larger board is highkly advantagous at keeping players active.3.  DM consistancy matters.   A lot.  A DM does not need to be overall apathetic to deal serious damage to his game.  All that is required is taking a few days off posting to cause serious damage.</blockquote>

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