Jan 21, 2024 11:34 pm
One of the main differences between tabletop and play-by-post is the pacing. In a tabletop RPG, once you are able to spend a couple of hours with your group, you can easily have a gaming session that's both complete and generally satisfying. Specially if you're playing an one-shot game.
But there’s the day-job, the kids, the scheduling issues and a million reasons why you can’t just play a whole evening!
Well Play-by-Post eliminates all those issues! PbP is an asynchronous method for playing RPGs, that means that you don’t need to schedule a time in the week when everyone is free. Instead, the game unfolds over a text-based medium and people post when they can throughout the day.
In PbP there is no such thing as having fun if you have a free afternoon. You can't expect to post more than once in this timeframe. The slow pace of play-by-post is one of the big ‘culture shocks’ of this mode of game-play. And it can really irk people. And walking away is fine! Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody. It’s perfectly understandable that it doesn’t work for you.
There are advantages, of course. One of the biggest benefits is that the players and the GM have time to think about their actions, reactions and dialogue. This means that there is a higher quality of story-telling occurring. The GM can really consider their descriptions and everyone can have much more realistic and genuine dialogue in the game as they take time to craft their speech. We can also have simultaneous threads and everybody can be at the spotlight at once.
But as I said, for PbP to work, we should talk about posting frequency. This is my default posting rules here on GP:
Ideally, every PC will have one relevant post-a-day, but skipping one or two days since your last post is ok. After more than three days without a post, a character might get DMPC'd (directed by a fellow player or the DM). If this process repeats another two times, for ten days without a post in total, DMPC is just taken for granted until the player returns.
If its months, with the player having been ghost'd, no communications or reasons, its just assumed real life has taken them away from the gamin table. The PC will retire, leave, disappear or even die, if that's dramatically appropriate.
Every gaming group has their own rules and conventions. So, let's talk about ours.
But there’s the day-job, the kids, the scheduling issues and a million reasons why you can’t just play a whole evening!
Well Play-by-Post eliminates all those issues! PbP is an asynchronous method for playing RPGs, that means that you don’t need to schedule a time in the week when everyone is free. Instead, the game unfolds over a text-based medium and people post when they can throughout the day.
In PbP there is no such thing as having fun if you have a free afternoon. You can't expect to post more than once in this timeframe. The slow pace of play-by-post is one of the big ‘culture shocks’ of this mode of game-play. And it can really irk people. And walking away is fine! Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody. It’s perfectly understandable that it doesn’t work for you.
There are advantages, of course. One of the biggest benefits is that the players and the GM have time to think about their actions, reactions and dialogue. This means that there is a higher quality of story-telling occurring. The GM can really consider their descriptions and everyone can have much more realistic and genuine dialogue in the game as they take time to craft their speech. We can also have simultaneous threads and everybody can be at the spotlight at once.
But as I said, for PbP to work, we should talk about posting frequency. This is my default posting rules here on GP:
Ideally, every PC will have one relevant post-a-day, but skipping one or two days since your last post is ok. After more than three days without a post, a character might get DMPC'd (directed by a fellow player or the DM). If this process repeats another two times, for ten days without a post in total, DMPC is just taken for granted until the player returns.
If its months, with the player having been ghost'd, no communications or reasons, its just assumed real life has taken them away from the gamin table. The PC will retire, leave, disappear or even die, if that's dramatically appropriate.
Every gaming group has their own rules and conventions. So, let's talk about ours.