Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gambler1650" data-source="post: 2789171" data-attributes="member: 11033">General InformationOk, so how is this going to work?  First of all I'll describe what I want from the players:1. Prefer roleplay over rollplay.2. No rules lawyers.  If I get something 'wrong', let me know.  If I made a mistake I'll correct it if possible.  If I didn't make a mistake due to some factor the players or readers aren't aware of, I'll let y'all know.  3. Character driven instead of MinMax driven.  I'd prefer my players to pick a skill, or feat, or combat action because it fits their character rather than maximizes their effectiveness.  Doesn't mean the two can't coincide, but I want players to keep their characters in mind first.Now a general 'mission statement':The goal is to create a 'shared story'.  While I have an overall story arc in mind, it is changeable based on the characters' actions and player desires.  I am something of a novice DM although I've done a couple of real life games (in other systems) before that were well received.  This format should suit me better for a variety of reasons.  The pacing will be something along these lines:One or two 'decision points' a week (I define a 'decision point' as one requiring a choice by the players, without which I can't continue the narrative - for instance, hearing an orc patrol passing by in the distance, unless the party has given me a 'standard response').  Players should be able to check in approximately every other day and respond.  Battles obviously will be somewhat different (more on this below).  In between the decision points, players are more than welcome to RP amongst themselves (asking about backgrounds, telling stories, helping another character to learn something, etc).  These will be the times in which I'll probably permit other people to create 'one shot' NPCs to interact with the players if it's appropriate (the person they just saved, a random villager at the tavern, etc).  Once in awhile (every couple of weeks), I might try to get the group together at the same time to see if we can't crank out more RP, but this will not be a requirement.I've read other play by post games, and the one thing I've noticed has been a tendency for the narrative to get bogged down by battles.  This isn't a bad thing at all, as long as the players enjoy such.  I don't plan to create highly detailed maps and ask players for their round by round actions.  Instead, I will describe the scene to the best of my ability, and ask players for their general actions along with some 'trigger' situations (such as falling to 50% HP, seeing a target of opportunity, etc) and their actions at that point.  Then I'll 'automate' the battle by running it myself until a situation arises that's not covered and ask the appropriate people for new actions.  I'll provide the description of the battle at various points.  If a battle is highly unusual or a climactic one, more detail will be used, but I don't want a situation where a simple battle takes up an entire week's worth of posts.  If players request more detail that's fine, but the number of battles will probably be inversely proportional to the amount of detail requested. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification