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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3876917" data-attributes="member: 11760">Eh, I learn by doing. My first pbp game, the Midwood campaign, will be two years old in January. Everyone will have scaled the heights of fourth and maybe even FIFTH level at that point. (My goal is to have them around eighth or ninth by the time 4E is here, for a campaign finale adventure, but that's probably optimistic.)I made some mistakes, and there are certainly adventures that work better in pbp than others, IMO, but if people can play chess by snail mail, any D&D game is doable via message board with a little elbow grease.This is a player-specific issue. We alternately white out our text (it's a board with a light background they use) or just italicize it to show that it's in a different language. My players have been zealous about not "cheating" with things their characters wouldn't understand.Player-specific, but yes, that Private Message button is very tempting. If you run your own board, change the in-box settings to be MUCH larger -- you'll need it. And use the Save PM feature to store critical ones in a different folder.As readers of my Story Hour know -- up to 10k reads as of today! -- my Midwood campaign is now split in two, with the heroic guys in their hometown and the schemers on the run across the world currently. Once they weren't mixed in together, a lot of the intrigue and PMs went away (although the fugitives still send the bulk of them). You might want to look at party composition as much as who your players are.And, frankly, they may be telling you that they LIKE this style of play. I'd have a conversation with them about this.Well, this is a pbp problem in general: RP stuff works much better than action and dungeon crawls, partially because you can just do the RP stuff at work at the spur of the moment, without (much) referring to charts and stats. And because of the slow pace, dungeon crawls are particularly awful, since the group may be in a single room for days, weeks or even months and even the coolest rooms will lose their charm in that time.I really recommend urban and RP adventures to dungeon crawls. If I had to do it over again, my current Vock Row pbp game wouldn't be in a dungeon at all. I'm going to ride it out until the end, though, and then have them do RP-based stuff from here on out, with mini-dungeons of three rooms or less at most in future.This is a muscle you'll get better at exercising as time goes on.Talk to the players or, better yet, split the fast posters into their own group and let them go at their own speed. I'm doing that in my current Midwood game, and the fast guys are now almost done with their track, while the slow guys are still at the start of theirs. But the fast guys are OK with that, since they got to go as fast as they want -- including lots of fast combat, for pbp -- and are OK with just kibitzing for the next few weeks.Get a wiki. It's invaluable having character sheets and notes available 24/7.I like private forums, personally. Everyone has PMs, and we can sprawl over as many threads as we like and keep older archived adventures in a subforum.You sound like you're doing fine to me. It's just the shifting of expectations -- that everyone does with pbp, if they're successful at it -- that you're going through currently.</blockquote>

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