How to PbP

Hey everyone, the Total Party Thrill podcast recently did an episode of the ins and outs of play by post gaming. I thought it was a pretty great primer on the subject, something I'm sharing with my new player group. Has anyone else heard the episode? What did you think?

I liked the episode as well. I don't think I completely agreed, but I suspect where I differed was more on opinion (and maybe from running this site) than anything else. It also showed me I have to somehow promote GP more accurately.

Interesting to hear you didn't agree with their characterization of GP. What did you think they got wrong, and what is the more accurate version? Were there other things you disagreed with?

I think it may just be me being a webdev, but for example, I do remember it being said that GP is not quite a site, not quite a forum, but a forum optimized for PbP. It may just be my perspective on it, but GP is an entire site designed for PbP. For example, games are not attached to forums, but rather the other way around: a game is created, and then a forum is created for the game. Games, character sheets, forums, dice, they're all independent, and brought together, just like in real life, each component (forum being substituted for the table persay) is separate from the others.

For as for publicizing, I do also want people to know they can use the GP to store their character sheets. I know a few people here do that, but its one of the reasons the character library is a high priority for me; I know it can be a useful tool outside of PbP (and I like to think GP has some of the best digital characters out there).

I noticed that as well Keleth. The host was a little confused on how to describe it, but what you said up there makes sense. The forums are yet another tool designed to support the game and the gamers, rather than being the primary focus (even if they get a ton of use!).

It should be pointed out, I looked at a lot of the other PbP sites out there when I started working on GP all those years ago. Even now, they're almost all sites that use tools that exist (pre-existing forum tools, wikis, etc) and modify them/add on top of them to make them work for PbP. Myth Weavers and RPG Crossings, both super big sites, are vBulletin sites that were customized. Gamers' Plane was built from scratch specifically for Play-by-Post. Every feature was considered for how it'd fit into the RPG environment. Pieces of forums that made sense in general that didn't fit into PbP were scrapped, and things like how characters interact on forums is ingrained at the core.

Paraphrasing Bane, those sites merely adopted Play-by-Post (though well), Gamers' Plane was born of it.

That's a fair criticism.

I think the tips about how to play in a PbP game were spot-on and really jived with my personal experience. I'm no newbie to PbP and definitely took away useful info.

This I completely agree with. My criticism of their view of GP aside the core and important part of the podcast, PbP advice, was fantastic.

Just listened to the episode. Overall pretty good. Thanks for the share.