Why do PbP games fade away from inactivity?

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I play PbP now exclusively (except for one online chat game, but I'm not so interested in that as you'll find out), and for me it's the only way. I have many reasons why I don't join face-to-face games, most them making online play that much more necessary. But play-by-chat requires me to sit on my butt for long stretches of time and wait for the game to crawl along. I don't have that kind of attention span.

Really the difference I find between real-time games and PbP, at least for me, is that my butt's less sore and the game feels like it moves faster because I'm not having to spend the time between people doing things just waiting.

My biggest observation is that PbP suffers from people trying to keep to the format they'd use in a real-time game: i.e. everyone controls only one part of the action. This negates the ability to have nice, snappy dialogue and obviously makes combat slow to a crawl. I'm not sure what can be done about the latter seeing as how no system (that I know of) is designed not to handle combat that way, but the former can be worked with by allowing all players to control all characters for the purposes of dialogue and plot development. Yes, it requires a different kind of attitude, but I've now played 7 games that way and we've managed to maintain more or less the same group continuously throughout that time.

 

[drothgery]

Since I've had several games fade out on me, and several I've tried to run have died, too...

The biggest killer of PBPs is when non-game things keep the DM from posting regularly (in my case, I started a game when I was unemployed; lately I've been working very long hours, which has caused me to put my games on hold), which causes players to post less regularly, and you get a spiral into oblivion. The second biggest killer is when enough players fail to post regularly that the DM is less motivated to post, and you get a spiral into oblivion that way.