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A Complete Idiots Guide to Play by Post Gaming

Highlights

No Dynamic Exchanges

  • because of the slow and asynchronous nature of the game, you need to avoid back-and-forth exchanges. It’s kind of like the difference between a debate and a negotiation.
    • In a negotiation, there are a lot of low-content messages flitting back and forth. Negotiation is basically two people firing proposals and counter-proposals at each other over and over again until they hit one they both agree on. Messages are short and there are lots of them.
    • Contrast that with a structured debate. There’s a single talking point and each participant then delivers a speech about the topic. When they’re done, the next participant gets to deliver their own speech responding to the previous one. Then the first participant responds. And then topic is closed and a new one begins. You thus end up with small number of high-content messages.
  • There are lots of little fiddly bits like that in D&D that would make it hard to cut out the negotiational nature of action resolution. There’s lots of shit on the character sheet that interrupts and affects action resolution at various stages. Everything from, “After you roll the die, you can…” to “As a reaction, when a creature…” Not to mention all the fiddly little buffs and debuffs and conditions people can give each other.

It's Bigger Than You Think

  • Real, actual conversation is a rapid-fire slew of low-content messages and so are the best social interaction scenes in tabletop roleplaying games.
  • By necessity, I can’t imagine playing a naturalistic conversation in a PbP game just because it’d take a week and there is a limit on patience and pacing even for a low-commitment activity. There comes a point where every human gets bored with being trapped in the same scene for four days.
  • you’ve got to accept that things like conversations are going to play out very differently so, for example, conversations are going to be more like each characters taking turns delivering speeches and you have to play into that with how you narrate shit or you’ve got to do a mix of both. I would probably land on doing both. I’d definitely shy away from naturalistic conversation and combat both
  • But there’s another victim here because there’s another kind of low-content negotiational dynamic exchange that happens frequently at the game table and which I’d say is core to the roleplaying game experience. I’m talking here about intraparty, interplayer communication. Those are exchanges between the players as they work out their plans or try to solve problems together.
    • e.g. hat happens at a normal game table when the party comes to an intersection and you, the GM say, “Left or right guys?” Now take that committee debate and insert four to twenty-four hours for every statement every player makes.
  • if I were running a PbP game, I’d probably have two communication channels. One is the official channel where I narrate and adjudicate and players act and the other would be a chatter channel where the players can talk among themselves whenever and however often they want.

There’s Such a Thing as Too High-Content

  • a player will describe an entire sequence of actions. “I’ll say this and then do this and if that works, I’ll follow it up with this,” and so on. I have to say something like, “Let’s see how that first thing works out and then you can continue.”

Go Ahead and Split the Party

  • simultaneous independent actions
    • Once I’ve got an action queued up for everyone, then I describe all the results and poll for new actions

Dungeon World or Genesys

  • Dungeon World
    • Resolving an action in Dungeon World involves recognizing the moment when a player says something that requires a resolution and then using a chunk of mechanics called a Move to resolve it. So, when a player says something like, “I’ll smack the goblin with my sword” or “I examine the weird statuette to see what I can make of it,” the Game Master says, “It sounds like you’re Hacking and Slashing, roll plus Strength” or, “You’re trying to Discern Realities, roll plus Wisdom.”
    • There’s not a lot of negotiational back-and-forth in basic action resolution and the whole game is based on just listening to natural descriptions of actions to decide how things play out.
  • game.genesys (Private)
    • you resolve actions in Genesys by building pools from lots of different dice of different sizes marked with different symbols. There are dice for Attribute scores and dice for Skills, dice for positive and negative circumstances, and dice that represent the task’s Difficulty. The pool provides a high-content result. Success and failure are measured in degrees and you can have lucky or unlucky happenstances ride along with them. Not to mention crits and fumbles that sometimes just add to the results rather than overriding them.
    • kind of clunky and clumsy to work with. Building pools takes time, interpreting the results carries a learning curve, basically everything you’d expect. But with slow, asynchronous play, those downsides don’t matter. Especially if you, the Game Master, handle the rolling yourself. You don’t work through building the pool with the player and then have them roll it — and you skip any mechanics that require negotiational back-and-forth that affect the roll or else require players to pre-choose those things — and instead just build the pool, resolve the action, and describe the result.

Everway

  • Everway is a weird fantasy multi-verse adventure game very steeped in a variety of ancient Earthly mythologies — particularly non-Western mythology — and based strongly on the Hermetic elements, astrology, and Tarot cartomancy. Especially Tarot cartomancy. The game comes with a special, in-universe Tarot-like deck called The Fortune Deck, which is used in character generation, plot and adventure planning, and action resolution.
  • the Game Master has to focus on resolving shit a little above the individual action level. When a fight breaks out, for example, you don’t resolve individual maneuvers and attacks, but rather, you resolve gambits or sorties.
    • say the party encounters a dragon. The warrior charges into battle, the wizard casts a protection spell, and the dragon readies a gout of flame. The Game Master would resolve that whole round of action and determine how it works out for everyone involved. Depending on the card pulls, maybe the warrior is held at bay by the dragonfire, but the worst of the blast is stopped by the wizard, and the dragon is now on the offensive.
  • You resolve situations rather than individual actions.

Comments

  • I tried PbP in the past because of its allegedly low commitment, but the reality of reading several long posts and coming up with my own paragraph of prose every day led me to bail on it within a couple of weeks. If I could get by on reading a single Discord page or less of interactions and posting a couple of sentences of my own, I would probably enjoy PbP.
  • , I could see maybe something really zoomed out, where every player contribution represents an extended amount of time. Something like The Quiet Year or some multiplayer version of Thousand Year Vampire. But at that point you’re doing a collaborative writing exercise that’s so different from a TTRPG that it’s silly to even consider it the same activity.
  • it’s a good thing real time gaming doesn’t have that prose

Thoughts

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