It’s a trade-off, and depends a lot on the players involved. If everybody can afford it, daily is great, ofcourse.

With daily posts, the gaps between times that you need to stay motivated are shorter, which makes staying motivated easier. But everyone is different, and you’re right that same frequency = more important than the specific frequency.

I’d like to modify the “daily posts” a bit. It’s important that everybody posts at roughly the same frequency, but that doesn’t have to be daily. Weekly posts could work just as well (and is easier to keep up with for people with jobs and busy schedules), but you’ve got a serious problem if two people post daily and two post weekly.

Thanks for the links.

This is especially important if you are gaming with people you have never met (theoretically if you are playing with your college chums or the gals at work, you already have a community of sorts, a FTF community). It is also important if you want to grow or expand into more games set in the same community.

That’s been my experience at the Wold, and it is also what two big PBP game founders told me in these two interviews I posted on my blog.

To address the question of combat and experience … In my PBP games we have combat less frequently, and it often seems to end sooner. That’s a function of the DM gaining experience in creating challenges that are both threatening and fast to resolve. In D&D terms, enemies with fewer hit points that do lots of damage make good foes.

A D&D-based experience model (assuming 13 encounters per level gained, more or less) has to be thrown out the window. In the D&D-based Wold, a character gains two to three levels a year. The DM grants story-based xp awards at the end of each “module” (aka plot line, aka adventure), with the amount tied to the goal of two to three levels a year.

David: I can see how even d20 combat could be kept manageable if everyone posted at least once a day — if not more often.

It might even be worth trying scheduling an IM or IRC session just for combat, to resolve it in real time.

CJ: That double blind system for rolls is neat — I’ve never heard of that.

As far as turn order, I actually went the opposite route that you suggested for my PbP: I stated all of the monsters’ actions up front, and let the PCs react accordingly. That worked pretty well, at least for my group.

Mark: You’re welcome. It was a fun post to write — thank you (and Kreik) for suggesting the topic.

I’d say that the key to a successful RPB is to keep if loose and adaptable.
Trust die rolls, and allow for the DM to storyline liberally. A RPB is not, and cannot be, the same game as tabletop.

Keep the story moving forward. Don’t sweat the details.

For example, GMing D&D 3E, I’d probably make everyone state their actions for the round, then I’d post what I’d already written up for the foes to do. Then roll for initiative (the only situation where I’d roll every round).

Double-blind on all die rolls would be worth the trouble here. Effectively, everyone has committed to a course and a resolution for the round, but no one knows what the outcome will be until the DM resolves all the roll codes. You resolve a whole round of combat in one posting cycle. Maybe it takes two for special situation resolution.

You’d need some adjustments for niche cases–such as whether two opponents that moved past each other enroute to someone else got AoO on each other. And I guess you’d just have to deal if your arrow shot takes someone already taken down.

But the bigger point is that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to use mechanics specifically designed for table-top, without some adjustment to take advantage of the posting environment. Simultaneous action actually works better there. Or maybe that’s an argument to not use d20, but a different system that already uses simultaneous action (probably poorly) in the tabletop game.

All you need is a grid with a number of cells that is a multiple of 20. 20×20 would work best, if you want to allow people to pick their results. Populate the cells equally for each possible result. Label the rows with numbers and the columns with letters (or same numbers, if this will not confuse everyone).

When a player makes an attack (or skill roll or whatever), roll for a column or just pick one. Then roll damage as if you had hit. Maybe follow up with the confirmation roll (or pick) and critical damage in case that happens. The DM has already picked the letter(s) for your attack. He cross indexes your submitted number with his letter, and that’s what you rolled.

Of course, to be a true “double-blind”, you need a third party that receives both the number and the letter from the grid, or at least handles the timing. That kind of thing gets used in PBEM wargaming, where both sides send the appropriate lists on set dates–the post office stamp thus fulfilling the third party role.

The above system works fine for RPGs, since the DM is already being trusted with a lot more. He can even generated a list of his results well in advance, then apply them to the player submissons as they happen. You could do the same thing for each dice, though that would seem gross overkill.

-David