All right, ladies and gentlebeings, this is gonna be a weird trip and I don’t know what’s gonna happen. That’s why, by the way, I’m classing this as Random Bullshit. So let me explain the context. The need to ramblingly explain the context is another reason I have to call this a Random Bullshit Feature. I have no idea when, or even if, I’ll actually get to anything resembling a point. Consider yourself warned.

I needed a one-off topic to quickly fill a gap in the schedule. I didn’t want to just phone it in by going back to the Ask Angry well. So I let my Discord community fight over what I should write. Frienemy for Life and Editor of Adequate Adventures, the monthly community fanzine for quick and dirty adventures, NoxAeturnus, selfishly suggested that I explain a drive-by answer I gave him weeks ago to a question I was totally unqualified to answer.

See, NoxAeturnus is one of those poor, unfortunate souls who lacks the real-life friends or the online time to run actual roleplaying games these days. Which is a real shame, I should note, because the dude’s got pretty great adventure-design chops. I’ve been greatly impressed by his work. The point is, though, he’s been stuck running Play by Post games off and on for a while now. His view on it is, “Any game is better than no game.” My view is, “There’s a time when you admit roleplaying gaming just doesn’t fit in your life.”

Don’t tell me, by the way, to wait until I’m in the same boat. I’ve gone through periods in my life when Play by Post would have been my only option and I discovered there are lots of other hobbies in the world. I ain’t talking out of my ass when I say, “Better no game to host, than resorting to Play by Post.”

Sorry. I gotta focus.

Anyway, in my Discord server, Nox said he was thinking of starting a new PbP game and he wanted to know what systems people might recommend as being particularly good for a Play by Post game.

To understand my response, you have to know two things about me. First, on Discord, I only have two modes. Either I take over a conversation and deliver a series of long, angry speeches or monologues or lectures which are the conversational equivalent of dropping a brick wall across a go-kart track during the final lap or else I deliver a quick, single-sentence, drive-by response like this…

here’s my totally correct five-word answer with zero context or explanation because I don’t have time to explain because I have too much shit to do but if you get lucky and manage to catch me at a good time and ask nicely someday maybe I’ll explain but not today and it doesn’t matter anyway because the correctness of my correct answer is all that matters okay bye

Then I post that Gruncle Stan smoke bomb GIF or one of a speeding car and vanish from Discord for three days.

Incidental, access to me via Discord is something people financially support me to get. Isn’t that insane?

Anyway…

The second thing you have to understand is that, as I implied — explied, really — above, I’m not the biggest fan of Play by Post gaming. The last time I did any PbP gaming, it was done via online forum. A message board. Discord wasn’t even a thing. The first time I did it, by the way, it was literally Play by Post in that you had to write down your response, put a postage stamp on the outside, and post it through the postal service. Yes, I’m that old.

The point is, I had no business answering that question, and — for reasons that will become clear in a bit — I have no business expanding on my answer, which is what I’m doing today. Sort of.

So, I blurted out…

If I was forced at gunpoint to run a PbP game, I’d use Dungeon World or some other Powered by the Apocalypse game or maybe I’d use Genesys. I don’t have time to explain or expand though and that’s a shame because it’d be a fun thought experiment. Actually, what would be really fun is to imagine how I’d design a system specifically for Play by Post gaming. But not today. I’m too damned busy. Remind me when I have time and I’ll maybe think through this shit. Bye. Smoke bomb!

Nox is an opportunistic bastard and he also knows me and my weird sense of honor and integrity a little too well. When I said, “I need a one-off topic outside any of my main series to fill the final spot in my August content schedule,” he leaped on that opportunity and said, “You could explain your answer about PbP games and maybe give some advice about running Play by Post games.”

Check and frigging mate. Nice move, Nox, but I will have my revenge. Today, in fact. Because I’m going to give you a really shitty answer.

What you have to understand — yes, this is still all context — is that when I’m asked a question I know I have no business answering, I either do an ass-ton of research or else I decline to answer. I don’t actually talk out of my ass. I speak either from a position of experience or a position of knowledge. So normally, what I’d do is look at what other advice exists out there for Play by Post games, synthesize the important points, consider my own personal experiences and everything I know about Game Mastering, game design, and system design, and then offer an intelligent answer. I’d punch it up with some swears and insults, come up with a funny analogy involving genital torture so I could say I’d rather dip my g’nads in barbecue sauce and dangle them in a piranha tank than run a Play by Post game myself, and call it a day.

But that ain’t what I’m doing. Because I actually did have a good reason for suggesting the game systems I did. And I have one more to add, which is Everway, but that’s a tough ask because I’m the only one who bought a copy of that complete failure of an RPG published by Wizards of the Coast before they bought Dungeons & Dragons. My answer wasn’t based on experience, but rather on thinking through what I saw as the big issues in Play by Post gaming, why I hated the medium, and what I might do to mitigate that to make it almost tolerable.

So that’s what I’m doing today. And I’m really hoping that, in the rewrite, I can punch up this rambling introductory story of how this article came to be so that it’s at least an entertaining read.

My Problem With Play by Post Gaming

So, why did I answer the way I did? What is it about PbtA and Genesys that make them good candidates for a style of gaming I not only hate but have no experience with and thus have no business telling people how to run? It comes down to what would have to change to make Play by Post palatable to me. Yes, my answer is all about, “If I had to run a game this way, how could I possibly make it less shit?”

The first problem — and I shouldn’t really go into this because it’s not very actionable but I’ve already committed to this stream-of-consciousness bloggy bullshit and counting on being entertaining to carry me through — the first problem is that gaming is what I do when I want to be social. I am not actually obsessed with roleplaying games. I’m not one of those people that loves the hobby and the medium so much that I wish I could be doing RPGs all the time and so I try to fit everything into RPGs even in my alone time. Nope. RPGs are one of the ways I enjoy hanging out with other people. They’re not even the only way I like hanging out with other people, by the way. In the past, my gaming friends have tried to invite me to gaming-themed holiday parties and gaming-themed weddings and all of that shit and I’m like, “Uhh… thanks… but… can’t we just have a holiday party? I’ll play a board game after a delicious dinner and drinks, but, I really don’t need to roleplay through the whole damned evening. It’s okay to leave the gaming table, you know?”

That, by the way, is also why I kinda hate running games online. Because it’s barely social. Voice and video chat over the internet is not spending time with human people. I’m sorry. I do it, because it’s fun in its own way and because I’m separated from some of my closest friends these days, but it ain’t quite the same.

No system will make Play by Post gaming social. Because exchanging text messages is not social. At all. Not remotely. It isn’t. Sorry.

My next biggest problem with Play by Post gaming is pacing. You might have noticed from that whole True Game Mastery thing that I consider pacing to be one of the top five Game Mastering skills and I’m pretty sure it’s the thing that separates an okay game from a great game. A master of pacing can be merely proficient at all other Game Mastering skills and they’ll still be one of the best Game Masters ever. It’s why I run great games and also why my online games suck and why none of my online players think I’m anything more than a mediocre Game Master.

But I digress…

PbP is… you all know how Play by Post works, right? I guess I should explain it. This is why I outline and plan my Features these days instead of doing stream-of-consciousness blog bullshit. Sorry.

Play by Post games are played by exchanging messages. We used to do it by mail, like I said, and then e-mail, and then message boards. You can do them on Internet forums or even social media. In theory, they work just like normal tabletop roleplaying games except they’re asynchronous and therefore play out over text exchange. That said, there’s probably no reason why you couldn’t run a PbP game using recorded voice messages these days. That’s interesting. I wonder if anyone’s doing that. Sorry…

I have this ugly feeling — because I’m not actually in the PbP scene and don’t know all the ways people do it — I have this ugly feeling that someone’s going to point out that you can run a PbP game that isn’t asynchronous. Like, everyone is just typing out their messages on Discord but everyone’s connected at the same time so responses come right away, but I would consider that Play by Text rather than Play by Post.

To me, asynchrony is a defining feature of Play by Post. I, the Game Master, can drop my narration whenever I want to. I post it to the Discord group or forum thread or send it out via e-mail and then people can respond whenever they want by declaring their actions. Once I’ve got all the actions declared, I can resolve them and then send out a message which describes all the results and then invites everyone to respond with new actions. Round and round it goes.

It’s basically just a tabletop roleplaying game with long pauses inserted between everything everyone says. It’s like gaming in extreme slow motion.

Slowness Ain’t the Problem

Now, I’m not saying anything remarkable yet. Everyone knows that PbP is slow because of the asynchrony. And I’m sure that anyone running a PbP game has already taken steps to mitigate that basic problem. I’m sure every PbP Game Master starts by establishing some kind of shot-clock expectation where everyone’s expected to check in, say, every 24 hours or so and if too much time passes before they respond, they get skipped. That shit’s just obvious.

Moreover, though, it doesn’t matter if PbP games are slow. Actual table-top roleplaying games — in person and online — are high-commitment activities. To play one, you’ve got to give up three or four hours and be fully attentive to the game once every week or two or whatever. To run one, you’ve also got to commit some number of hours to prepping between game sessions. Consequently, table time is highly valuable. If you’re gonna commit to that shit, you want to spend the hours at the table getting in as much game as you can.

Not so with PbP games though. Tossing off some narration and a response takes just a few minutes and you can pretty much do it whenever you want. If you can find just fifteen minutes once or twice a day, you can play. You can even play while pooping. And when I imagine what it would take me to run such a game, I consider that the prep time would also be so stretched out as to be practically nonexistent. If I were running a PbP game, I’d probably barely prep anything but a really basic outline. If even that. I’d probably run a much more free-form game. Play to find out what happens and all that horseshit.

The point is, that slowness ain’t the problem, and the low level of buy-in means that people are inclined to be more patient so some basic expectations management and occasional prodding from the Game Master are enough to keep everyone invested.

But, there are a few problems downstream from the slowness that I would definitely need to manage if I were ever going to run a Play by Post game. Or if I were ever to design a Play by Post system.

No Dynamic Exchanges

The first problem I’d have if I were running PbP games comes from the slow and asynchronous nature of the game, but it’s not the slowness itself. Rather, it’s the lack of dynamic exchange. What does that mean? It means that you need to avoid back-and-forth exchanges. It’s kind of like the difference between a debate and a negotiation.

In a negotiation, there are a lot of low-content messages flitting back and forth. Negotiation is basically two people firing proposals and counter-proposals at each other over and over again until they hit one they both agree on. Messages are short and there are lots of them. Do you see what I mean?

Contrast that with a structured debate. There’s a single talking point and each participant then delivers a speech about the topic. When they’re done, the next participant gets to deliver their own speech responding to the previous one. Then the first participant responds. And then topic is closed and a new one begins. You thus end up with small number of high-content messages.

Of the two, it’s pretty obvious which one you’d prefer if you were running a game in asynchronous slow motion. Every message you send has a long time-delay so you want to send as few messages as possible and each of those messages should move the game along as much as possible.

When I think about the action in a typical Dungeons and Dragons game, I see a lot of low-content messages flying back and forth. Consider, for example, what it takes to resolve a simple attack. First, the Game Master describes the situation, of course, and then the player declares their intention to attack a specific target with a specific weapon. The Game Master approves the action, applies modifiers, and asks for an attack roll. The player then rolls the attack and announces the result. If it hits, the Game Master says so and calls for a damage roll and the player does the damage roll and calls out the results. The Game Master applies the results and describes the outcome.

Now, I hope I don’t have to point out that I’m not actually an idiot. I am merely trying to illustrate a thought process. I know for a fact that if I were running a PbP game I would not handle attacks that way at all. I’d be smart enough to just roll the whole attack and damage myself or there’d be a dice bot connected to the server and the player would roll both their attack and damage at the same time and all that shit if players wanted the fun of rolling their dice or I’d establish some kind of standard for players including the die roll with action declarations or whatever. The point is, I’d have a system to cut out all the negotiation and back-and-forth math that goes into resolving an action and I assume every other person running PbP games does the same if they’re even using dice.

My point here is that, even without die rolling, there are a lot of back-and-forth dynamic exchanges in D&D. Every action is a negotiation where the player declares an action and the GM then decides what ability score and skill is in play and then the player has a chance to invoke special abilities on their character sheet to change the odds before rolling and then the dice are rolled and then the player has a moment to spend resources to change the outcome. There are lots of little fiddly bits like that in D&D that would make it hard to cut out the negotiational nature of action resolution. There’s lots of shit on the character sheet that interrupts and affects action resolution at various stages. Everything from, “After you roll the die, you can…” to “As a reaction, when a creature…” Not to mention all the fiddly little buffs and debuffs and conditions people can give each other.

It’s Bigger Than You Think

The problem with having to limit low-content negotiational dynamic exchanges goes well beyond action resolution though. Because there are lots of other such exchanges that take place at the tabletop roleplaying game table. Consider, for example, a good, well-played social interaction scene. Real, actual conversation is a rapid-fire slew of low-content messages and so are the best social interaction scenes in tabletop roleplaying games. By necessity, I can’t imagine playing a naturalistic conversation in a PbP game just because it’d take a week and there is a limit on patience and pacing even for a low-commitment activity. There comes a point where every human gets bored with being trapped in the same scene for four days.

That ain’t an insurmountable problem either. It just highlights that you’ve either got to limit scenes that require dynamic, negotiational exchanges — like combats and conversations — or you’ve got to accept that things like conversations are going to play out very differently so, for example, conversations are going to be more like each characters taking turns delivering speeches and you have to play into that with how you narrate shit or you’ve got to do a mix of both. I would probably land on doing both. I’d definitely shy away from naturalistic conversation and combat both in my PbP game and I’d have to change how they’re paced and presented.

But there’s another victim here because there’s another kind of low-content negotiational dynamic exchange that happens frequently at the game table and which I’d say is core to the roleplaying game experience. I’m talking here about intraparty, interplayer communication. Those are exchanges between the players as they work out their plans or try to solve problems together.

Consider, for example, what happens at a normal game table when the party comes to an intersection and you, the GM say, “Left or right guys?” Now take that committee debate and insert four to twenty-four hours for every statement every player makes. Yeah.

Now, again, this is one of those problems that I’m sure those who run frequent PbP games have solved with a combination of purpose-built solutions and expectations management. For example, if I were running a PbP game, I’d probably have two communication channels. One is the official channel where I narrate and adjudicate and players act and the other would be a chatter channel where the players can talk among themselves whenever and however often they want. I’d read it, of course, but it’d help to separate the two and I’d have to suspend my disbelief a bit when the players have a three-hour discussion about how to respond to a trap that is literally springing on them in an instant or some shit like that.

There’s Such a Thing as Too High-Content

If I were forced to run a PbP game, I’d have to accept that the communication medium greatly prefers a small number of high-content communications over negotiational dynamic exchanges. I can live with that by adjusting how I resolve actions, by setting proper expectations, by implementing tools to manage the pace like shot-clock expectations and a side channel for player chatter, and by downplaying certain kinds of encounters and decision points. Fine and dandy. But I also foresee a problem with high-content communication.

If you give a roleplayer a text document and literally hours to fill it out, they’re going to fill that document. It’s gonna be like a firehose. The best-case scenario is a lot of self-performing flowery descriptions for every action. I can deal with that to some extent, but I do have to read every post and if they get too long, then I’m putting in more than a few minutes a couple of times a day and now this is a high-commitment activity and my patience for it wanes drastically. The worst case scenario though is a problem that I already sometimes have at my roleplaying game table wherein a player will describe an entire sequence of actions. “I’ll say this and then do this and if that works, I’ll follow it up with this,” and so on. I have to say something like, “Let’s see how that first thing works out and then you can continue.”

I mention this again because I’m thinking through the problem as an outsider. I’m sure, once more, that basic guidelines for posts and expectations management are de rigueur for those who run PbP games regularly and I’d definitely implement my own guidelines and expectations. But it’s something I would be looking out for.

While I’m on the subject though, I have to admit I can foresee one place where the whole PbP thing would make my job easier. In fact, it’d probably become the cornerstone of my Guidelines and Expectations if I were forced to run a PbP game.

Go Ahead and Split the Party

In the past, I’ve had trouble explaining to Game Masters and players alike the concept of simultaneous independent actions. What am I talking about?

The simplest example is what happens when the players come into a room that has a bunch of interactive things to check out. Maybe there’s a treasure chest and some furniture and a bookshelf and a strange jeweled statuette and a corpse or whatever. Lots of stuff to play with. Modern Game Masters tend to resolve one interaction at a time. So Adam says, “I open the chest” and the Game Master describes the contents and goes back and forth with Adam a bit. Then Beth says, “I want to read the titles on the bookshelf; do any stand out?” and the Game Master goes back and forth with her a bit.

Me? I poll everyone and then resolve a bunch of actions at once. After Adam says he wants to open the chest, I say, “Okay, Ardrick enters the room and approaches the chest. Beth, what’s Beryllia doing as he does that?” and so on. Once I’ve got an action queued up for everyone, then I describe all the results and poll for new actions. Of course, I adjust the whole queue based on how long a given action might take.

It takes some training to get newer players used to that way of doing shit and it takes some explaining to teach Game Masters how to do it…

“How do I remember all the actions?”
“Have you considered taking notes?”
“You mean with my hands? That’s like a baby’s game.”

… but eventually, they get it down. Until they get to town and don’t realize that it works the same there. That it’s totally okay to split the party in reasonably safe, civilized areas — or even frontier areas that have been swept for danger — and that each player can do their own thing.

I suspect that PbP games not only facilitate that kind of shit but make it super easy to grok. In point of fact, I’d probably make it part of my basic pacing and spell it out in my Guidelines and Expectations.

Once I’m done narrating and I poll you all for actions, I will not resolve anything until everyone has declared what they’re doing for this action pass.

I also suspect I’m not breaking any new ground and avid PbPers are just saying, “… and the last horse crosses the finish line. No shit, Angry, this is Play by Post 101. We all know this.”

Dungeon World or Genesys

Everything above — not counting the first thousand words of quote-unquote context — is what went through my head when I happened to glance at my Discord server when NoxAeturnus said, “What systems do you think would be good for a Play by Post game.” All that shit about low-content vs. high-content communication, negotiational action resolution, encounter types, and a strong bias toward simultaneous polled action is why I blurted out, “Dungeon World or Genesys.”

I’ll get to Everway in a minute.

Dungeon World is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. That engine took great pains to build a system around the basic roleplaying gaming conversation. That is, it basically encodes the “Game Master describes, player declares action, Game Master resolves” mechanic that’s core to the roleplaying gaming experience. As such, it focuses on low-negotiation, high-content action resolution, and the world and the situation only change after the players take actions.

Resolving an action in Dungeon World involves recognizing the moment when a player says something that requires a resolution and then using a chunk of mechanics called a Move to resolve it. So, when a player says something like, “I’ll smack the goblin with my sword” or “I examine the weird statuette to see what I can make of it,” the Game Master says, “It sounds like you’re Hacking and Slashing, roll plus Strength” or, “You’re trying to Discern Realities, roll plus Wisdom.” There’s not a lot of negotiational back-and-forth in basic action resolution and the whole game is based on just listening to natural descriptions of actions to decide how things play out.

Action resolution is also a bit more high-content than action resolution in D&D. In D&D, actions succeed or fail, but in Dungeon World, there’s a whole system of “yes, ands…” and “no, buts…” tied to action resolution and failed actions invite the Game Master to counteract through the world.

Dungeon World thus really lends itself to asynchronous play. The one fiddly bit that I’d change is that action outcomes often offer players choices. If you barely hit with a ranged attack, for example, you have to choose to either penalize your damage or decrease your ammo or move into danger. If I were running Dungeon World by Post, I’d probably just make the choices myself based on my read of the situation and how the player described their action or else invite players to pre-make their choices when they take actions. “I fire my bow… and if I can’t get a good shot, I’ll move out into the open for a clear line,” vs. “I fire my bow… and I’m willing to fire as many shots as I have to for a decisive hit.”

Genesys is a generic game engine that Fantasy Flight Games made by filing the serial numbers of their Star Wars RPG engine. While the Star Wars versions are a little bit fiddly and weighed down with lots of character abilities and extra mechanics, the generic Genesys system is a lot lighter weight and easier to manage. There are a lot fewer little picayune character abilities that demand a lot of negotiational back-and-forth during action resolution. But I think what makes Genesys a great fit for Play by Post is the Narrative Dice Pool System.

See, you resolve actions in Genesys by building pools from lots of different dice of different sizes marked with different symbols. There are dice for Attribute scores and dice for Skills, dice for positive and negative circumstances, and dice that represent the task’s Difficulty. The pool provides a high-content result. Success and failure are measured in degrees and you can have lucky or unlucky happenstances ride along with them. Not to mention crits and fumbles that sometimes just add to the results rather than overriding them.

In real life, Genesys is kind of clunky and clumsy to work with. Building pools takes time, interpreting the results carries a learning curve, basically everything you’d expect. But with slow, asynchronous play, those downsides don’t matter. Especially if you, the Game Master, handle the rolling yourself. You don’t work through building the pool with the player and then have them roll it — and you skip any mechanics that require negotiational back-and-forth that affect the roll or else require players to pre-choose those things — and instead just build the pool, resolve the action, and describe the result.

Honestly, with the right adjustments, I think Play by Post is the one thing that would make Genesys playable to me. Especially with all the other Guidelines and Expectations crap I already discussed and especially if I used the Pool results to cover gambits instead of actions. What does that mean? Well, let me tell you about Everway.

Everway by Post

I think I’ve mentioned this game before — possibly during my weird Tarot obsession — but Everway: Visionary Roleplaying — I shit you not; that’s what it called itself — was written by Jonathan Tweet — yes, the D&D 4E and 13^th Age guy — in 1995 and published by Wizards of the Coast. It was one of their many attempts to get into the roleplaying game market both before and after Magic: The Gathering hit shelves and then, a couple of years later, actually caught on. I think I bought my copy in late 1995 in a bargain bin so that just shows how well Everway did.

Everway is a weird fantasy multi-verse adventure game very steeped in a variety of ancient Earthly mythologies — particularly non-Western mythology — and based strongly on the Hermetic elements, astrology, and Tarot cartomancy. Especially Tarot cartomancy. The game comes with a special, in-universe Tarot-like deck called The Fortune Deck, which is used in character generation, plot and adventure planning, and action resolution.

To resolve an uncertain action that demands more than a simple stat comparison, the Game Master draws a card from the Fortune Deck — which can be upright or reversed — and describes the outcome based on the card’s meaning and symbolism. Basic meanings are printed right on the cards so you don’t have to memorize things.

Obviously, this leads to very high-content action resolution of the type I’ve been going on about because drawing a card like Drowning in Armor in combat is very different from drawing Striking the Dragon’s Tail or whatever. There’s lots of room for very loaded resolutions. But beyond that, Everway also requires a different approach to action resolution that I think would shine in the Play by Post space.

See, to pull off an Everway game, the Game Master has to focus on resolving shit a little above the individual action level. When a fight breaks out, for example, you don’t resolve individual maneuvers and attacks, but rather, you resolve gambits or sorties. Say the party encounters a dragon. The warrior charges into battle, the wizard casts a protection spell, and the dragon readies a gout of flame. The Game Master would resolve that whole round of action and determine how it works out for everyone involved. Depending on the card pulls, maybe the warrior is held at bay by the dragonfire, but the worst of the blast is stopped by the wizard, and the dragon is now on the offensive. See what I mean? You resolve situations rather than individual actions.

Do you see why I think Everway might just be perfect for a Play by Post game if you can get your hands on a copy? It helps that it’s pretty light on mechanics and heavily focused on the narrative. If I were doing an online Everway game, I’d probably take the time to scan or “find” images of all the cards so that every time I resolved an action, I could post the image of the card at the top of my resolution.

I’d probably use icons to do the same if I were running Genesys; post the string of icons representing the Dice Pool result at the top of my resolutions. And, if I were running Genesys, I’d use the same Everway philosophy of resolving sorties and gambits rather than individual actions after I got a full declaration from every player of their character’s disposition in a scene.

Sorry If This Is Shit

I don’t actually know how helpful any of what I said might actually be to you, Nox, or anyone running a Play by Post game. I’m sure I said some really obvious shit that everyone who plays by post already knows. I’m pretty sure my system recommendations are good and maybe my analysis might help some folks who’ve been struggling with their own attempts at Play by Post.

Honestly, though, I didn’t want to just search for the best advice about Play by Post gaming, synthesize it, and put my own spin on it. Anyone can do that. If you do want to know how to run a better Play by Post game and nothing I said helps, answers are just a search engine away. I know; I did check. I’m hoping that my unique perspective and analysis provides something you can’t get from anyone else. If not…

What can I say? I took a chance.