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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9394542" data-attributes="member: 86653">I’ve been playing and running PbP games for about 13 years now. It can be great fun and incredibly frustrating. Expect about 4-6 months of PbP to amount to about 4 hours of face-to-face play, and plan accordingly. Don’t bother with initiative, as others mentioned. Let the PCs all act and post in whatever order. Have the monsters go after. This clumps your posts together, which saves time. React to and adjudicate all the PCs’ actions and do the monsters in one go. Do what you can to minimize handling time of the game. Depending on the posting rate, something as simple as calling for a check can take days depending on time zones, work schedules, etc. If you’re going “super fast” at one post a day. Day one: What do I see? Day two: make a perception check. Day three: 21. Day four: Okay, you see… So whatever you do, don’t do that. Passives, pre-rolled list, you roll for them, assume auto success most of the time, anything. Collapse that to a question and an answer. Don’t ask the players to preemptively roll for things in the above. “What do I see? 21 perception.” This can really mess things up, waste more time than it saves, and lead to weird metagamingMake it clear to the players that dialogue isn’t an action declaration. A PC saying, “We should go over there” is not a player saying, “We go over there.” This matters because if you assume they’re the same you’ll have players argue when something negative happens. Combat is slower than frozen molasses. Make combat as interesting as possible by ramping up dialogue, secondary objectives, using cool terrain, etc. Always hard-frame scenes. Start as close to the action, drama, and conflict as possible. Don’t let things meander. Shopping scenes, long conversations, go nowhere dialogue, etc need to be avoided at all costs. A quick conversation at the table can take a week or more in PbP. Lean into the form. You’re collaboratively writing a story together. Embrace that. Things that work at the table won’t work here. Things that work in fiction writing work here. If you’re not a fiction writer, read up a little on some basic tips and tricks. You also have way more time to think between posts, so use that. It’s far easier to “improvise” a PbP game. You can read the posts in the morning and not respond until later that day or the next.</blockquote>

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