Play by Post Dungeon Crawling Advice

Hi everyone,

As I'm running more games, I am realizing that one of the things I like to do for the games I run is somewhat difficult in play by posts, and that would be dungeon crawling. I'm not an old school player, so to keep us on the same page when I say dungeon crawling I mean using maps like those made by paratime design and having players explore the rooms, using a combination of set piece rooms where major events happen and wondering enemies to add surprise to other rooms.

The main friction that I see is how slow this can go. If the players come to an intersection, I don't want to just declare "you go right", but at the same time such a decision isn't very fast and thus the time it takes players to say where they want to go and such makes such a style sluggish. Not a knock on the players, but on the style merging with play by posts.

Should I try to avoid using dungeon crawls on PbPs? Is there a way to make them faster without removing agency? Have any of you found anything that works well for you?

Dungeon Crawls are WAY more fun at an actual table than in PbP. I think some of it is the speed at which the action takes place (or, rather, the lack of it) in PbP and the relative focus on Combat that tends to sour pure Dungeon Crawls. Aside from combat and a rare few puzzles (because they can take a month to resolve) there's not much RolePlay to do in dungeons and that's usually where most people get their PbP engagement factor.

As to how to remedy the situation? Big ask, there... My option would to be add non-combat engagement factors for the PCs to deal with, keep the combat novel and short except for one or two big battles, let them do awesome things. Another issue is that sometimes Dungeon Crawls can devolve into a Players v. GM dynamic (perceived or real) and that's never a good time...

Having your players define their default actions that you can fall back if they havent responded within their allotted time.
If there is an abetary choice between the south or the north corridor, don't wait for the players to make that decision. Roll a die* and move on in the dungeon. If the choice is important, or have more information bout the choice, then they should make the choice.

Provide a map, so the players know how fare they have come, and what the need to explore still.

For specifically the problem of decisions taking too long to discuss, I think polls are a good solution for simple cases. Clicking a poll option takes less effort than posting, can be done with little time and allows everyone to see what other players want right away.

Something like this?

Maybe don't let the players spend time exploring 'empty rooms' where nothing happens, if there is an empty room to the east and a room that has something interesting to the west, tell them "the room to the east is empty" and let them trust the GM that this is true. They can then decide to explore the west room or not, but that cuts down on many decision-points in a classic dungeon crawl.

The players can say beforehand how much effort their characters are putting into investigating every nook and cranny and you can handwave that they spent the agreed upon time doing so where nothing happened. This lets you still use up their light and food, and roll for wandering monsters or whatever you want to do in the dungeon.

Think about point-crawls rather than hex-crawls. You can look up the difference, but point-crawls only concern themselves with the interesting points and don't concern themselves with the nitty-gritty in between.

Maybe give the players the whole map, or most of the map, and let them tell you what looks interesting. The players can be disciplined and not act on their knowledge of stuff their characters have not been to, if they can't, you can't use this technique. YMMV.

Here's a post from my long running Pathfinder game of Mummy's Mask which has a lot of tomb exploring.

Dungeon delving can indeed be a chore in the PbP format. Great comments above, but I believe one of the reasons it's fun live / at the table, and a bit boggy in our beloved text format is because of all the back-and-forth that's needed for true old school delving, where the GM is describing and the players are asking questions... and the GM is describing more... which might summon more questions, etc. In conversation, this can be rapid and engaging -- in text... it's just slow.

I tend to keep the delving to a minimum, and admit I don't dig 'standard operating procedure' type actions as it really just feels at that point like you're going through the motions. I'd lean towards smaller, shorter dungeons where there's lots going on -- factions, few rooms that are empty, etc. The five-room dungeon is a good model to follow for PbP, I think...

Tell your players about the traps. Skip the empty rooms. Assume the characters are competent.

It's a lot more interesting to ask HOW the players negotiate the swinging blade trap, than to ask for them to roll vs 2hp damage if they don't check every inch of a room.

Yeah; everything is slower in play-by-post. That doesn't mean that it's not fun. I have been playing in the Stonehell game, which is entirely about exploring a dungeon, for more than a year. It's a BIG dungeon; in that time, we've explored a bit of the ground level, most of the first level, and a tiny bit of the second level - we've found and explored between 40 and 50 rooms so far.

What makes it fun? Well, first, an important caveat: while it has never ceased being fun for me, other players have dropped out. Mostly that's because they got frustrated that their characters died in traps, but for some it was also the pace. So it's not going to please everyone. But I think those of us who have stuck with it are really loving it. Nothing is going to appeal to everyone; people drop out of games on GP all the time for a variety of reasons. But there are definitely many people who like dungeon crawling.


Fun things I enjoy about the Stonehell game:
- Mapping. The DM doesn't provide a map (with one notable exception early on, to get us started), we have to draw the maps ourselves, and we have a thread where we share what we've drawn so far. It's hugely fun to compare maps and see how others have interpreted what the DM has described.
- Agency. Any player can announce where they're going, and any player can respond that they are hanging back or going another way. That said, though, it rarely happens that the party splits. Why? Because we're adults, and we're playing in a mega-dungeon: both things incline us to stick together for survival. There have been several times where we've stopped to discuss what the next action should be, but those discussions have nearly always been about role-playing interactions with NPCs, not pathfinding/choosing. There's lots of "How do we handle negotiations with a particular faction we've encountered in the dungeon?" and very little of "Do we go right, or left?"
- Establishing standard actions. In exploring the dungeon, we've found lots of traps (they've killed some PCs). We have learned ways of checking for traps - particularly probing the ground in front of us with poles/spears as we move. "From now on, I will go in front, testing the ground in front of me with my pole." Once we stated that, the DM understood that that's what we've been doing; he hasn't been trying to catch us with gotchas or insist that "if you don't say it every time, you're not doing it." It is enough for us to periodically remind the DM that we are still doing that. "I lead the way west, tapping on the ground ahead of me with Fenwick's spear as I go." We do post such things from time to time, but they are more for role-playing/setting the scene - sort of a "remember, everybody, we're going slow because we have to test the ground in front of us" - than that the DM will kill our PCs if we don't say it.
- Interesting details: Every room has had a purpose and/or a history, provided as part of the room description. Why is this room all charred? Who wrote all this graffiti? How recently was this kitchen used last? There's no "you find an empty-seeming room. What do you do?" Every room has a unique description (which helps us in mapping, by the way - we give every room a name based on its contents).

No, I don't think you should avoid them.
Things to make exploration (because this isn't just limited to dungeons) faster:
- let anyone decide where their PC(s) is/are going in a post (but allow for other players to say they're hanging back or going a different way in a subsequent post). Traps, if any, affect the PCs who explicitly said they were in the lead.
- make lots of areas interesting and unique. No "this is another 10' square room. It looks like all the others"
- gloss over the "transitions" between one interesting feature/discovery and the next. If there's a 100' corridor before the next door, don't have the party move 10' and then prompt them to see what they do next even if there is a secret door there. Instead, post something like "You move 100' down the corridor and arrive at a door. You can faintly hear a rhythmic mechanical noise through the door." PCs will come back and try to look for secret doors in corridors if they see that there's room in the map for something to be there.
- It's okay if players miss stuff!