LOW-LEVEL, BEST PRACTICES FOR PbP GMs:
1. Post when you say you're going to.
You said you'll post once a day, make sure you post once a day (and make sure that it is a post that advances the game, not just a "I'm still waiting for you guys"-type post). This may require skipping a slow player's turn, or running them as an NPC.
2. Create a thread for the game, a thread for out-of-character conversation, and a thread for important info that the players will want to reference later (clues, character names, quests, maps, etc). If the game goes on long enough, create separate threads for the major beats of the campaign/adventure. The goal should be to keep the number of pages that players have to click through to find something (that was posted weeks or months ago) to a minimum. When you provide a ruling, the players (and you!) need to be able to easily/quickly find that ruling again, and it will be both slow and difficult if they have to search through 50 pages of one thread.
3. Check in periodically (once a month or once a quarter) to ask for feedback, and then be open to adjusting your game in line with that feedback. You can get feedback from the players by explicitly asking for it, inviting people to comment in a feedback thread (which you create), inviting players to send you a Private Message, or doing a combination of both. Some people like to provide feedback openly, in a conversation, while others prefer to be more circumspect. But asking what they're enjoy and what they don't can go a long way toward preventing players from rage-quitting on you. Of course, that means that you need to make adjustments to your game and how you're running it, sometimes. If a player says that they're really enjoying the skill mechanics, don't change the skill mechanics (unless more players say they don't like them, of course). If players say they really like roleplaying the characters' dialogue, give them plenty of opportunities to talk to NPCs (and encourage the PCs to talk amongst themselves). If players say they're really unhappy with how combat is going, explicitly check in with them to see how you can improve it. Not being responsive to what players want/don't want VERY often results in players quitting your game, and this seems to be MORE true in PBP than in real-time games. It probably has to do with all the time that the players have to stew in their resentments between each post.
4. Format your posts for legibility. Infrequent posts allow and even encourage us GMs to post a lot of information in each post - that one post has to last the players for a day or more, after all! - but the drawback of that is that players can miss important information. So a really important practice is to format your text to highlight important information and differentiate different kinds of text. For instance, a common practice on GP is to put dialogue in bold text:
"This is the default way dialogue is presented in almost every game I've played for the last eight years." Prompts for character action can be in a different color, or underlined. "The earth quakes and the others are thrown over the edge of a chasm that appears before them. Two of them manage to grab onto the edge, but it is clear to Gabby that they both will be shaken free in a split second. They're too far apart to reach both of them, so now Gabby needs to choose who she's going to save: Amelia or Henrietta?
Choose one and then test Gabby's agility!" I've also taken to putting
PC names in blue and
foe names in red, to make it clearer for those with color vision.
5. Always be clear as to what response you want to get from the players. If they've seen something horrible, tell them
"Each PC needs to make a sanity check now" rather than something vague like
"How do you react to that?" or, worst of all, no prompt at all. Feel free to use something like
"What do you do next?" when there isn't a specific thing the players need to do, but do
end each post with a prompt. A GM post without a prompt either feels like it doesn't need a response, or that the GM hasn't finished editing it. The prompt is the punctuation that tells the players "OK, you can respond to this now."
6.
Avoid or, if that's not possible,
downplay mechanics and situations that require player discussion
before action can be taken. Many players can only post to the schedule you have set for the game - once a day, twice a day, or five times a week, are some typical frequencies - so it's better to set players up where they can act AND have discussions, rather than have needing to engage in discussion and agree as a group to resolve a decision before action can be taken. If your game requires everyone to draw a card, and the suit of the cards decides which PCs can assist each other that round, that's a fun mechanic for real-time play, but in PbP each round will take a week or more of real-time to just determine what the PCs are going to
try to do, before they even get to rolling dice, resolving those actions, and reacting to the results.
Last edited March 19, 2024 4:41 pm
