Tips on Improving pbp GM skills

What are your tips on enhancing my GM skills for pbp games, where quick feedback and player reactions aren't as evident as in live sessions, and gathering post-game feedback takes longer due to extended game durations?

That would be an easier question to answer if you weren't already such a solid PBP GM 😄

I'll try to think of something

Have a plan written down - or a published adventure.
I'm an improvising GM around the table, and whatever idea the players have I tend to run with it or when inspiration hits. This does not work in PBP. The pace is so slow that if you just run with inspiration, you can change course several times. First time I ran a game it didn't go well.
That was when I found that I need a public adventure that gave me guidelines to stick to

Thank you for the kind words. I believe that you and the rest of the group deserve the same amount of credit to the success of our Loop game. I'm having a lot of fun playing it.


Thanks, I like this. I can see that a plan/adventure can help steer everything forward to a satisfying story.
Do you think this is because of the back and forth required that happens when you improvise? i.e. Waiting a day or more to answer each question is what slows things down. Or do you think it's because of something else?

Unfortunately I never had the opportunity (yet =)) to play with you, but I think the answer (in a general sense, not specifically related to your skills) starts by looking into the person's goals for GMing and what specific GM skills a person wants to improve.

I may be reading it wrong, but if you wanna tips related to having more feedback from your players, I have seen some GMs here on Gamersplane using complementary tools (ie. Discord) to have more frequent and informal feedback from players.

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I have decades GMing in tabletop, where I know all my player's preferences and I even know how they are going to play my adventures before our sessions. I don't have this kind of experience with PbP, nor I have as much time anymore, so I hope to learn with this thread as well.

Thank you for your excellent question. =)

You've been super-solid in our T2K game so far, SS, but we can always get better, right?

◼ Ask for feedback regularly. I know it's slower, but I still try to do that roses & thorns or stars and wishes thing.

◼ Keep notes about what's going on, what the players are angling for for their PCs, plot thoughts you have that evolve, etc. PbP can be so slow that, if you're like me, you'll forget what you were thinking if you don't write it down!

◼ If it's a new game you're teaching to your players, do it in bite-sized chunks -- just like you're doing in T2K.

◼ Develop 'player aide' character sheets that the players can see for tracking statuses, injuries, clocks, house rules, etc.

Great advice so far. I'll add:

Expect the players to check in and post regularly, and pester them when they don't. PbP dies when players get inactive, so do what you have to do keep them active! Some systems have mechanisms for this. "Paint the scene" questions are one example. But others don't, and sometimes you'll have a player go silent. Ask them to do something in game. If they remain silent, send them a PM to ask if everything's OK. Ask the other players if they know what's going on. Worst case, be proactive when you have a player ghost you: return to the Tavern to recruit a replacement.

Thanks for the insights and advice everyone!

I have really wanted to start PbP GMing but nervous honestly.

I have access to a lot of good modules to help the plan but I worry personally my descriptions won't be good in written format

They'll be awesome. Be reliable and you succeed.

Creativity and detailed descriptions can be foster and improved through effort and feedback. Oh wait, that was language and arts classes. Ug. 😁
They are always more players than GM. I am sure whoever plays your games will be understanding and help out with questions and feedback, especially if your are open and ask for it. This place has a great community and many helpful players and GM.
I know my players have to deal with my spelling getting auto corrected to gibberish and still stick around.

Maybe that is it. Just be open and take the risk.

Honestly, I have ran the first chapter of Humblewood twice irl so starting with something familiar maybe

Would it help if I went and got that guys prosthetic ear?

A couple of tricks you can use if you're unsure about your writing chops:

1) Use ChatGPT. Give t a prompt like, "Please write 1 paragraph in the style of [author] and in the present tense describing a large Elven palace as a group of adventurers walks through it." It will spit something decent out, and you can tweak it.

2) Deputize your players to do a lot of the work! Say something like, "Qralloc, what does this Elven palace look like? Psybermagi, tell me what the king is doing and what he looks like. vadladdaMadun, who else is present and what are they doing?"

I really like this.

Just bear in mind not everyone (as a player) likes doing that. :)

It's awesome when it works, but I'd clear that methodology in session zero / the pre-game if the system doesn't come with those expectations normally.

Just want to say there was some encouragement here that I think will push me to start my first GMd game here.working on getting player material ready but hopefully I will post a recruitment thread this week

That's wonderful! I am using some of the advice posted here too. Good luck with your game!

I worked on this a while ago. As I continued, I realized I had a bunch of things I've observed have worked well, so it kept growing, but then I didn't post it because I thought I should add more...and then I forgot about it, distracted by all the games I'm running/playing.

This is just what I've observed; YMMV. There's stuff that I could include, like reformatting character sheets or creating new ones, that I decided to not include, because the benefit to GMing quality isn't as clear. I've split my recommendations into two categories: base-line, basic tips or GM Best Practices, and mid-tier tips for what to do when you've got the basics covered. I just realized that I hadn't actually replied to the post with what I'd written, and I figure I can add to it more later, if anything more occurs to me.

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.

MID-LEVEL TIPS FOR PbP GMs:

1. Establish a default "This is what my PC will do in my absence" set of turns/actions from each player. That way, when they are unable to post on the game's schedule, their PCs don't suddenly go catatonic in combat. Instead, you can take their turn for them according to their established wishes.

2. Use periods in your life when you have time to prepare material in advance. If you're posting once a day, don't wait until that day to start writing the post for that day. Instead, use your downtime to prepare some turns in advance, to the extent that it's possible to do so. Obviously, you can't anticipate everything that the characters are going to do or say, but you can know what the villain's goals are, and what they will do if they aren't thwarted by the PCs. Write a couple of turns in advance.

The reason to do this should be obvious, but in case it isn't: you, too, will have occasions where you're pressed for time and can't spend half an hour creating and posting the next turn. The amount of stuff you've prepared in advance - maps, actions, area descriptions, clues that PCs find - can greatly decrease the amount of time you need to post in a hurry.

3. Incorporate other media as appropriate. Drawing a picture or a map and including that in a post goes a long way toward engaging players with sight. Just remember to archive master versions of those maps in your reference thread!

Linked audio files can both set the mood for a scene, and provide key sound effects. Video can enhance your description of a scene or a character. Just check with your players to make sure that this works for them, as players in different regions may have limited access to the third-party sites you use for audio/video.

4. Establish a place on each player's character sheet where you can add notes/key information. Often it isn't clear to the players what the key information is, or they understand it but don't capture it for future reference when it appears in the game. Having an explicit section on their character sheet gives them a specific place to look weeks later when they're looking for it...and it gives them some reassurance that you aren't going in and randomly editing any part of their character sheet.

5. In your reference threads, start the thread with a "table of contents" post, and have the entries in that table of contents be links that point to specific sections. Then create a post for each category of reference. Say you're running a time travel campaign, and the game moves between 1000 BC Greece and 1880 Chicago: you'd make a post titled "Ancient Greek Characters" that lists all of the major NPCs the PCs have met in that time/location, and another post titled "19th Century Chicago Characters" that lists all of those NPCs. Update these threads regularly; they will help you at least as much as they help the players. Basically, any world-building details you add to the game in the course of play should go into your reference threads. In one of my games, I recently had to refer to the names of coins the players and I invented; I knew we had named them, but I was kicking myself because I didn't put the names in the reference thread. I ended up having to search through hundreds of posts across dozens of threads trying to find the one place where we'd discussed it. Learn from my mistake!

6. Don't neglect yourself! Work with the players to incorporate their feedback and to do the stuff that you find fun. Consider how you can provide them a means (and incentive) to contribute to the stuff that they enjoy/want to see more of, so that it's not all on you as the GM. It's very important - key, even - to get players to buy-in to contributing to their own fun in any RPG, but this is particularly true of play-by-post because anything provided by the GM alone is going to be more sporadic/intermittent than if all the players are taking part. If you have a 5-player game that posts three times a week, and the game relies on the GM to provide the content alone, everybody's going to get just three opportunities to react and enjoy. But if all five players are also empowered/encouraged to contribute, then each player has up to 15 opportunities.

Take role-playing, for example. If your players say they want to do more in-character role-play and you like that, follow up with each player with "Here are some ideas of how we could do that." Draw upon the character background that the player has created, or make suggestions on how they could flesh out their PC's background...particularly as it connects to other PCs' backgrounds. If your players say they want to do more in-character role-play and you don't like that, follow up with the players with some ways that they can look to each other to support that impulse. I like role-play, but I also have a rule in some of my games that characters earn character advancement points when they engage in interludes of in-character conversation with other PCs.

But do look to what you enjoy, too. GMing is a responsibility, but it is not just a responsibility: it should be fun for you, too! As often as you are soliciting feedback from your players, check in with yourself: what did I enjoy about this part of the game? What am I looking forward to next? What can I do to make the other parts more fun for me? GMing is a big job, but it should always be fun enough so that it never feels like a burden. When it starts to feel like a burden is one way that GMs burn out and quit play-by-post.