Forum > Play by Post Games
The Play by Post Forum
Bedrockbrendan:
Thanks Benoist.
boulet:
--- Quote from: Benoist;486652 ---And also ? God dammit man, make your NPCs react to stuff. Describe smiles and smirks and sighs and looks and gestures and laughter. Much is conveyed in a conversation by other cues than just the verbal content of the message itself. That's how NPCs end up feeling like people, you know I'm sure.
--- End quote ---
This. It's not going to be as immersive as playing the role, creating speech mannerism or making expressive faces at the table, but OTOH there's place for more subtlety and it's not as draining since you've got typically hours between posts.
hangedman:
this is one reason that i do fairly well with running a PbP, but not tabletop.
i have time to think and integrate between posts.
Mario D20 Gamemaster:
I do enjoy running my game by post as it allows me to put more thought and time into my campaign, as well as opening up options like having players in other states or even across the globe. I find that short posts work best, with longer ones reserved for dream sequences and the like where responses aren't possible.
I take some of the extra time to work on describing things effectively, character development (I'm currently writing a short story that explains how one of my NPC's escaped from his oppressive homeland and wound up adventuring) and general background info.
One area where my campaign is different: I employ Google Drive, and every character has their own designated font, text color, and text background color- it's a tactic I borrowed from Sierra's QFG series and works very well- you always know who's talking, and people who are trying to speak differently can, say, whisper in italics, or put on a gruff voice by using bold, or whatever. The downside is that I have to keep a fairly long list of NPC's they have run into just to keep things consistent.
I do of course have the complaint that the campaign runs only as slowly as its slowest member updates, which is becoming such a problem that I'm considering running a second, lower-level campaign just to assuage my frustration with slow posters. (PM me if you're interested- Mario D20 is the name of the game, as it were.)
I nearly always make rolls for characters, which is good for keeping things mysterious. (I don't have much trouble with cheating among my current players, though.) Sometimes I request an Init roll just to be certain that everyone knows they're in combat, but other than that I use an online D&D dice roller.
Mario D20 Gamemaster:
Just trying to keep this thread from fading into oblivion.
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