6 Ways to Speed Up Your Play-by-Post Game
Expected read time: about 11 minutes Downloadable outline at the end of article
When a play-by-post game slows down, it risks getting stuck and stagnant, which most often leads to the death of the game. Today we’re going to talk about how to keep that from happening!
Related: Why You Should Love Play-by-Post
The best PbP Dungeon Masters always pay careful attention to the pace of their games; a finger on the pulse, if you will. The right nudges of energy and momentum can keep a play-by-post game vibrant and running smoothly for months or even years.
One of the biggest drawbacks of PbP is that it takes far longer than usual to progress in the game as participants wait for each other to find the time or motivation to read and make posts.
Following are six ways to avoid stagnation and encourage your players to keep posting!
1. Use Chat for Player Communication
The first tool is also the easiest to implement. While many play-by-post forums have a special channel or thread for OOC (out-of-character) conversations, the nature of forums just means that the process for checking on the game progress is a little more involved. You log in and check for updates, possibly respond, and then check back later to see if anyone has answered your question or otherwise replied. Soon, you find that you’ve spent minutes and hours of your life just waiting for forum pages to load instead of actually playing.
The answer? Instant-messaging. Using a group text, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp can let you reach players instantly. Quick questions can be answered with a word or sentence, rather than waiting possibly hours or days for someone to get back to you—and you know right when they do! Players can chat easily back and forth about their characters and the campaign, exchanging jokes, memes, and gifs. Easy and fast communication fosters enjoyment of the game, immersion in the world, and energy to push the game forward.
I used Facebook Messenger for my Icewind Dale play-by-post campaign and particularly enjoyed seeing the players’ icons appear at the bottom of my messages, indicating that they had read and were up-to-date on the latest goings-on. The Role Gate app skips the forum idea altogether; all play is instant-messaging, with some interesting tools in place to separate ‘story’ from ‘out-of-character’.
Not surprisingly, Discord is king when it comes to instant-messaging these days. With customizable servers and channels, thread capability, and the Avrae bot’s integration with D&D Beyond, it’s become a heavy-weight in the play-by-post realm, both as just an out-of-character messenger and as a platform itself on which to do PbP games.
If you’re participating in a play-by-post game with trusted friends or family, you probably already have access to instant-messaging with them. On the other hand, if you’re playing with random people from a forum, you’ll want to be more careful about giving out your phone number or Facebook profile without getting to know the other players first. Again, Discord comes to the rescue, as it’s easier to maintain some safe anonymity on a Discord server that you can leave or delete at any time.
2. The 24-Hour Rule
This is an addition that most play-by-post games find useful. Whether it’s a turn in combat or the middle of a conversation, there should be a determined window of time for a player to respond, after which the game just moves forward. If not, the game risks grinding to a halt as they wait for a post that might be days or weeks in coming—if it ever comes at all! Most players find 24 hours to be an acceptable window, but depending on the group it could be a different amount of time.
In combat, if a player hasn’t posted their turn within 24 hours, their character is assumed to just take the Dodge action and end their turn. It’s not a direct contribution to the fight, but at least it minimizes the chance that the character dies while their player is absent.
Sometimes, however, the party needs the full help of that missing character. In a particularly difficult or important battle, they might need the cleric’s healing, or the wizard’s blasting power. If the player has given permission, the DM or another player might post on their behalf, deciding the character’s actions so that it can do something more useful for the party. It’s never fun when a party fails simply because one person didn’t have the time to post!
Outside of combat, it’s usually easy to just ignore a silent character. If the player can’t post their part in a conversation or other event, after 24 hours the other players just continue on. But if the scene at hand is particularly important for the missing player, it might be best to pause the game, though doing so risks the chance that it never starts up again. It’s a choice to take seriously.
In my Icewind Dale play-by-post campaign we had been playing for over a year when something really important happened for one of the characters. Ug, the goliath barbarian, found out his mother was alive and being held captive by fire giants. The next story arc was all about rescuing her. Unfortunately, Ug’s player had a lot of big events going on and he wasn’t able to post for weeks at a time, with no end in sight for months. I decided not to pause the game, but let him know when the most important things were happening so he could chime in when it most mattered. It maybe wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been otherwise, but Ug still managed to reunite with and save his mother, and the campaign didn’t die.
Following up on the previous point of this article, it always pays for all the players and the DM to be in communication with each other. If a player has legitimate causes going on in life and can’t post, it’s best to just let everyone know so that the group can come to a decision about how to proceed. The main problem comes when a person doesn’t post and doesn’t communicate why.
If the players are all aware and accepting of the 24-Hour Rule, it also helps to effectively set up some of the other concepts mentioned later on in this post.
3. Everyone Makes Actionable Posts
To keep a play-by-post game’s momentum, look for both quality and impact.
Not all posts have to be large, but the key is that posts should spur some sort of action, reaction, or interaction either for the DM or for the other characters. A post that doesn't lead on to something new is just kind of stagnant, and it makes the game stagnant too. If a post can be removed from the thread without any change to the plot, that's a sign that it isn't doing much for the game and is contributing to stagnation.
One of play-by-post’s strengths is that you can take your time to really immerse yourself and mentally put yourself in your character’s shoes, then write up vivid descriptions of your actions. But there can be a tendency to get lost in the writing if you don’t keep in mind the end goal of driving the story forward. As perhaps a silly example, it doesn’t matter how beautifully-described the paladin’s sword swing is, if the player never rolls the die then the story doesn’t move forward. We end up with text that, if removed from the thread entirely, doesn’t actually affect the game or the story.
Making a post that doesn't engage with any plot points, that is jarring in tone, or that just sits without engaging anyone else isn't going to do much for the game. To give a very simplistic example, if your character is asked a question, don't just answer 'yes' or 'no'. Whatever your reply is, drive the narrative further by interacting with the world, asking a question in return, drawing in another character, or recommending a course of action. Small posts here and there as commentary or comedic relief are great for exploring different aspects of storytelling, narrative, and roleplaying, but it’s critical to also keep things moving at the same time.
If your players are having trouble putting this idea into practice, consider giving out Inspiration or your roleplaying game’s equivalent to players that do manage to do it. Rewarding their good example (especially when Inspiration can be hard to remember to give out anyway!) can help show the struggling players how to engage with the game.
A Side Note on Combat
Combat is where play-by-post roleplaying games most tend to feel drag. Once a battle starts, Dungeons & Dragons and most roleplaying game systems impose an ordered structure where you can generally only act on your turn, whenever that happens to be. In a live game, combat can be exciting and dynamic, moving from one turn to another and proceeding through an entire round in a matter of minutes. Done right, it’s quick.
For PbP games it can sometimes feel like the game has hit a wall since everyone must wait for one person to take their turn at a time. Ideally, you never want the game to be stalled waiting on any single player, because that means that the rest of the players can’t engage with the game until that person’s turn ends. That’s fine in a live game, because each person’s turn is over quickly and play moves on. But being on hold for days at a time risks ringing the death knell of your play-by-post game.
The next few points specifically focus on speeding up combat in play-by-post games.
4. Use Side Initiative
There’s a variant rule on page xxxx in D&D 5e’s Dungeon Masters Guide that explains how to manage alternative forms of initiative. Instead of each combatant rolling initiative and taking its own place in the turn order, you just determine which side goes first—the party or the bad guys—by rolling a d20 for each.
When the DM declares it’s the party’s turn, the players can take their actions in whatever order they like. Those who are available to post their actions are free to do so, and don’t need to wait on the others. And those who can’t engage immediately just post when they can.
The key here is that instead of everybody waiting on one player for each turn in combat, the players each get to post during the same window of time. First come, first served. And as explained in a previous point, that window is no more than 24 hours. If you have four party members against three monsters, that would normally be seven total creatures, or seven total turns, each with their own individual window of 24 hours to act. It will likely take one week to finish one round of combat, and in that week each player only gets to post once.
In that same scenario, using side initiative would mean that there are only two turns each round, two windows of 24 hours, allowing up to three-and-a-half rounds of combat in a week. Given that the majority of 5e combats only last about three rounds, that means you can finish an entire combat within about a week or even less. As opposed to the 21 days it would take to finish the same combat using regular initiative. And best of all, you get to play D&D just about every day! It’s exciting, immersive, fun, and fast-paced.
To put it succinctly, the fewer individual turns in a round of combat, the more days you get to cut off of your wait time.
5. Skip the Last Player
To make combat even faster, you can end the players’ turn after the second-to-last player posts, skipping the very last player of that round. Then, on the next turn for the players, let the skipped player act twice—essentially giving that player two turns, to make up for the one it missed.
This makes it so that the player group is never waiting on any single player, and it has the added benefit of allowing the Dungeon Master some leeway to choose when to end the players’ turn and start posting for the bad guys. It’s important that the DM be able to post when they have the time to, or once again you end up with the entire party waiting on one person. This rule helps with that.
I’ve heard some people express concern with this rule, that players would be tempted to delay their turn on purpose so that they can have two turns later. In my experience, players enjoy playing. If they’re invested, they post when time and life let them. They want the game to continue as well. And even if they were to hold everyone up on purpose, it isn’t as though the game is broken by them delaying their turn. It all evens out.
Following this rule, it’s possible to double the number of combat rounds completed within the same time frame. That three-round combat referred to earlier is now doable in a couple of days, rather than a week—or three weeks!
6. Display Enemy Stats
This last tip might be the most controversial.
Imagine the following situation…
The characters are in combat. The fighter’s player excitedly writes about how he charges forward to attack his hobgoblin foe, swinging his flail with all his might. The player rolls the dice, either real or digital, and adds up his bonuses, resulting in a 17 to hit. Then what? The player messages his DM to see if a 17 hits the goblin.
Meanwhile, the DM is out to dinner with her boyfriend, phone politely silenced. Hours later, she checks her phone and messages back that since the hobgoblin was wielding a longbow instead of its sword and shield that it’s Armor Class is only 16, so the fighter’s attack hits.
The fighter’s player is asleep by then, so he doesn’t see the answer until six hours later when he wakes up. He then rolls for damage, totaling at 8 damage to the hobgoblin. But, is that enough to kill it? The player once more messages his DM to ask, because of course if that’s enough damage to kill the hobgoblin, the player wants to describe how his character awesomely dispatched his foe.
But the DM is at work where there is a strict “no phones” policy. She doesn’t get back to the player until her lunch break, at which point she finally shares the news that the hobgoblin still has three hit points left.
Now imagine if the DM had posted the hobgoblin’s Armor Class and hit points beforehand. Instead of being left in doubt and unable to continue the narrative, the player would have had all the information he needed to write up his awesome post and be done, having avoided some 15-20 hours of waiting to hear back from his Dungeon Master.
Now, there are many arguments against letting the players peek behind the DM’s screen at some of the monster statistics. It makes people focus on mechanics rather than story, or handling concrete numbers breaks their suspension of disbelief, or they don’t want to know things their characters don’t know. However, as Matt Colville is fond of saying, the characters actually live in the game world. They’re there, seeing and experiencing the world in ways that the players can’t. We can only see and understand the world and its inhabitants through abstract numbers. The characters are more competent than we are.
To continue the above example with the hobgoblin, it’s actually pretty easy to justify the fighter’s player knowing the hobgoblin’s Armor Class. The fighter can see that the hobgoblin is wearing chain mail and isn’t wielding a shield. Surely the fighter, who is a competent adventurer and has extensive training in heavy armor, knows exactly how much protection chain mail gives—an Armor Class of 16. And he would know well the extra defense a shield grants.
Similarly, hit points are an infamously obscure abstraction of toughness, luck, and pretty much anything you might think of that contributes to a character staying alive. Seasoned adventurers shouldn’t have trouble, for the most part, in sizing up an enemy and knowing to a reasonable degree how tough it is. That ‘reasonable degree’ is just expressed to us—who experience the game world imperfectly—as numbers.
Particularly in combat, the more information the players are given, the fewer questions they have, the less time needs to be spent on asynchronous communication, the more time everyone has to continue the story and enjoy the PbP game.
Wrapping it Up
Combining the six concepts above can really make your play-by-post game more fun and engaging, and let you play D&D every day. I’ve had complicated boss fights that would have taken at least an hour to complete in a live game finished up in a single day of play-by-post. Granted, that’s usually on a Saturday or holiday and most people had time to make multiple posts; it’s not a pace we could keep up every day. But the point is that PbP can be done at a much faster pace than many people think.
So there it is! If you’ve found your play-by-post game to feel too slow, I hope these tips can come in handy for you. Do you have any other tips? Please share them in the comments!
I’ve got some other tricks up my sleeve to speed up PbP combat, but they get further under the hood of 5e’s mechanics. One of these days I’ll get them written up properly and posted here for anyone to use. Until then, happy gaming!
