Let's talk about play by post gaming!

[Knight Otu]

Personally, I can live with or without colored speak, not a priority for me. I also usually put thoughts into italics, but I rarely post thoughts. OOC comments I start with OOC:, and usually put them into brackets.

As for Darkbard's idea of a time window, I don't think it is possible to do domething like that regularly, but mentioning the time window in which one is most likely to post can be a good idea, as it could speed up things from time to time.

 

[Endur]

One of the things I've been doing is posting items that not all characters would know.

Doing little snippets of NPC activity, etc.

The idea is to give the players some idea of what is going on OOC.

 

[Manzanita]

I'm curious if I'm unlucky in PbP games. Here's my rough stats:
Months playing: 10
Games started (as player): 18
Games officially dead as of now: 7
Games that progress very slowly (if they're even still alive):4
Total levels my PCs have gained: 3

There's certainly more to DnD than gaining levels, but it's nice to do that once in a while. DMs do need to be somewhat generous w/experience.

In that vein, in the thread I DM, I do give an experience bonus for each post (5 pts), and bonuses for good posts. How do other DMs handle experience.

 

[Erekose13]

Hmm. lets see:
Months playing: almost 5 now
Games started (as player): 9
Games started (as DM): 3
Games officially dead as of now: 2
Games that progress very slowly (if they're even still alive): 0
Games that have finished: 1 <-that I DMed
Total levels my PCs have gained: 0 (including all chars in my games I dm)

I tried first to calculate the xp for encounters and then award story based rewards upto what ever i feel like. really I have only awarded Xp once. To determine how much I did up the encounter stuff and that was less than 1/4 level up. so I pushed it up to 1/2 of what the characters needed for their next level. That was the end of the one game I finished. 3 of the characters in that game have continued on to my next one.

 

[Creamsteak]

I'm not the oldest Play by Poster by far, but I've been around here since well before the forums became as large as they are now. I mean, were not rules or GD, but were next in line now. At one time, we had maybe 12 active threads, and that was including the Industrial Revolution Game. I must say that although everyone says that combat bogs down a game, I've seen it fly by as well. Fly-by combat, though, requires players to basically be online at the same time as the DM. Games with more than 4 people really limit that possibility. Sometimes 2 seperate characters (me and Sollir in one case) can finish thier combat rounds at an incredible pace compared to all 6 of us. I have leveled up a few times, but only in the Psionicle. I've had PCs level up before, but only in the Light Hearted Hack N' Slash adventure. They were going to be hitting level 6 (after starting at first), but this was because when the game was active, it WAS a LHHS.

Currently I only DM 2 adventures, and play in the Psionicle, Emerald's Game, and have a character in LEW, but other than that I'm a bit too busy. I have an adventure I'm in that is ran by Kalanyr, but he hasn't been updating. My major boards occupation nowadays is play by post moderator/Living EN World Judge.

I have never played in an adventure that has finished completely, nor have I ever DM'd an adventure that completely ended. This is mostly because none of the games I run or play in are supposed to end. Emerald's PbP "ended" but we all opted to continue this as a campaign.

My most fulfilling experiences so-far have been the LHHS and IR. The IRR was the most work intensive DMing project I ever undertook, but LEW is catching up quickly.

One thing that's just LEW related is that the players are really anxious, and I'm just not sure about a lot of things. I'm not one to rush stuff, especially things like class proposals and abilities.

 

[Endur]

Months playing: 7
Games started (as player): 0
Games started (as DM): 1
Games officially dead as of now: 0
Games that progress very slowly (if they're even still alive): 0
Games that have finished: 0
Total levels my PCs have gained: 1 (including all chars in my games I dm)

Player Turnover for the game I run
Players Initially Recruited in June: 8
Players that officially quit: 2
Players that vanished: 2
Player that shows up very rarely (once a month): 1
Original players still active: 3

New Players Recruited Last Month: 5
New Players Still Active: 4

I have one game that I gm going on. Its going fine, although play by post is slower than I initially expected.

I handed out one level-up in the six months the game has been going on. They'll probably get another level up sometime soon (i.e. in the next couple of months). PbP Game play is just slow, even when you post multiple times a day.

 

[DanMcS]

I'm curious if I'm unlucky in PbP games. Here's my rough stats:
Months playing: 10
Games started (as player): 18
Games officially dead as of now: 7
Games that progress very slowly (if they're even still alive):4
Total levels my PCs have gained: 3

There's certainly more to DnD than gaining levels, but it's nice to do that once in a while. DMs do need to be somewhat generous w/experience.

No, you're not unlucky. Birthright, when it came out from TSR, had a great rules set for domain-based games that made it natural for play-by-email games. So I've been playing online by-email. by-IRC, and by-post since maybe 1996.

Online games die early and often, and slow to a crawl even more often. It can take a tremendous amount of work for a DM to run a (face-to-face) weekly game. For an online game, you're potentially putting in that amount of work for every day; while not a lot gets accomplished in that day (a round or two of combat), it takes a heck of a lot of time to type up even those two rounds of combat for the day. You're on-duty as much as you are online and capable of, and people realize too late that it takes a lot more work than they thought it would to run such a game. And you don't feel like you're accomplishing much, when you compare the round of combat that took a day or two, to the two multi-round combats that you blew through at your weekend face-to-face game. Conversations similarly flow slowly. It takes a big mental adjustment to run an online game.

That's why I'm holding off starting a by-post game here, because while I think it would be cool, I don't think I can commit the time to it. Thinking about it has got me looking at these forums I've never payed attention to before, though, so that's something anyway

 

[Creamsteak]

I will confirm the Psionicle is about 2 or more years old, being ran by GW, and continues still. It's the oldest still running game, I'm almost positive. Though I havn't been contributing my part recently (mostly because I'm having such trouble getting back into that characters mindset for the current trauma).

 

[Jemal]

Months playing: 12
Games started Um... can't count that high. maybe I'll just stop right there.

No more comments.

On the upside, I've gained numerous levels...
Though many of those were from the ICCG

 

[garyh]

I've been playing for 14 months... I've had probably 40 or 50 characters over the course of that, and tried to start 2 games that didn't pan out.

I used to have a problem.

Yeah, "used to."