Guide to PBP

By Scott Sylvester

With busy schedules these days there seems to be precious little time for the more mature and adult gamers to indulge in their teenage passions of gaming. Back then, there were countless hours in the day that could be carelessly frittered away around the gaming table listening to your favorite GM spin a tale of adventure and mystery. Suddenly, however, you found yourself all grown up. There were college classes to attend, bills to pay, wife and kids to make time for, and sacrifices had to be made. Now your weekly gaming group struggled to meet monthly and even then conflicting work schedules often prevented those meetings. If you are like me, you long for the opportunity to pick up your laser rifle or raise your sword over your head and charge back into battle once again. Thankfully modern technology has afforded many of us that opportunity again.

Play by Post, or Play by Email is not a new forum for gaming, but it has recently garnered new interest among working professionals. Even with my erratic work schedule, I get the opportunity to carry on my passion. We all check email almost daily, and it only takes a few minutes to respond to an email with the actions of your character based on the description you have been given in the email by your GM.

I hope to give you the basic ideas of how a PBP or PBEM works. I will cover it from the GM, and the player’s perspectives. I will talk about my experiences and the programs I use that have made my games a success. By the end, I hope to encourage many more of you to start your own games online via email, posts, or bulletin boards.


Getting Started

Wow, gaming without a table…what a great idea. Now, where do I begin? Ironically you start the same way you would for a tabletop game. As a GM you need to have your basic plot outline, have an idea of how many characters you want in your game. If you like to make maps and sketches of the areas your PCs will be playing in, get them prepared too. Once you have all your preliminary work done, you need to find a table top to put it on. An online table.

For my games, I use Yahoo Groups. The best part about them is that they are free. Free fits into the average gamers budget quite well. To get your own Yahoo Group you simply go to groups.yahoo.com and click on Start A New Group. Fill out the required information. Once your Group name is selected, the Group will be activated. The Yahoo Group automatically comes with a pair of email addresses for the Group Moderator (You the GM) to use. The first email address is the Group Email, the second is a public but direct email for the GM to use. All messages sent to the Group Email address will be automatically posted on the Group site. This is important later when your players respond to the Emails and posts the GM sends out. The second email is for use by the GM. Both email addresses have the same prefix so they are easy to remember. For example, it will read something like: Groupname@yahoogroups.com and Groupname@yahoo.com The former being the group and posting address, the latter is for the GM use. All email addresses are public and the information on the group sites are readily accessible to the public so I strongly caution you about posting personal information.

Using a group site is great because it offers several different options to you as a GM. On the left column there are various heading that will aid you in establishing and customizing your group. The ones you will use most often are the Files Section, and the Photo Section.

Files: The Files section is where I post all pertinent game related info. You can create folders and sub folders to help keep things organized. Some of the folders in my games are for things like, Characters, GM Info, and Experience Log. As your players create their characters, it is a good idea to have them post them on the Group Site so you (the GM) can see it and have a record, but also so the other players can look over the skills, equipment, etc of each other. Plus if the character sheets are posted, it keeps the PCs honest. I do not want to accuse any player of cheating, but I have seen “Modifications” made to character sheets when the GM wasn’t looking.

In my GM info folder I keep a list of NPC’s that the party comes in contact with, a list of equipment that is available to the group, and even a list of House Rules. In every game there seems to be situations that arise that the rules don’t cover. So, as the GM, you make the call and create a rule for that situation in case it happens again. I highly recommend that you keep a list of all the house rules you create on the group site. It is just fair, and open, and prevents problems when various situations reoccur.

Photo Section: I use this section for tons of things, as do my players. I like to put up maps of the area or draw pictures of the locations of my players versus the bad guys. It helps with the visual part of the game immensely, and replaces the use of miniatures. Maps are excellent things to post there as well.

For one game a GM, and friend of mine, was running a game in the desert of Texas. He took a picture of the red dirt, mesa, and scrub brush and posted it in the photo section so we, as players were able to understand what kind of terrain obstacles we might encounter. It gave a flat online game a great visual aspect. I did something similar when running a Rifts game set on the Coalition’s Brown Water Navy using the Mississippi River. I searched under Yahoo Photos and found two or thee good pictures of the Mississippi and put them in the Photo Section of my Group site.

Note: Yahoo will resize the photo to a smaller size. If you have specific details that need to remain in the original scale, such as a map, you may want to put it in the files section instead.

Those are the main ones that I use. Yahoo Groups offer a Polling section on the Group Site. My players often like to create polls about the situations in the game or ask general gaming questions. In another game I play in, I am a member of a Mercenary Group. The GM asked us for suggestions to name the group. Using the Poll area on the Group site, the GM put up all the prospective names and then we as players voted for the one we like best.


The Nitty Gritty

So now the group site is ready to go, what do I do? Well, as the GM it is up to you to find players. Advertise your game via bulletin boards, forums, or word of mouth among your friends. For the Palladium games I run, I went to the Palladium Books web site and accessed their Forums. In the Palladium Forums, they have a topic for Gamers seeking Gamers. The other place that got me good results was the now defunct RPG Think Tank.

Whatever system of game you want to play, seek out other Yahoo Groups and ask the moderator of that group if you can advertise on their site and recruit players, or go to the game manufacturers or printer’s web site and see if they have a forum or BB you can post on. When advertising make sure to include the following:

The RPG System you will be using to play the game, How many players you are looking for, any restrictions regarding the types of characters you want to be in your game including experience levels, an estimated start time for your game (1 week, 1 month), and be sure to include the Group Site address or a link to the Groups site, as well as your own Email contact information. This is also a good time to write a short (1 paragraph or so) description of your game’s theme or plot.

It is a slow process because not everyone is into PBEM games. I have had players join my game and then drop out because the game moves too slowly. I have had other people contact me and show interest and then disappear. I have and people send me completed character sheets and then disappear. Why people drop out or want to play is a mystery, but the key to a successful game is finding players that will join for the long haul. PBEM /PBP games are very slow moving. A round of combat can take a week to a month to get through. When the GM is tied up with personal issues the games can sometimes stop for a week or more at a time. Players need to be patient and understand that it will take years to resolve a campaign. But that in itself is part of the fun, because, no matter how busy life gets all you got to do to be involved, is check your email.

Once we have all our players organized it is time to get the game started. As a GM, I recommend you print out a copy of the players in your group and keep them in a folder somewhere handy. During game play as you read and respond to the player’s posts, it will help you quickly reference the particular PCs abilities and skills etc.

The game begins with the GMs first post. For Yahoo Groups you are allowed to give a title to your post. I use the title area to keep track of rounds/actions as well as to delineate what part of the story the players are in. For example, in the Rifts Atlantis game I am running I divide the story into Chapters. An example of this type of post heading is the following: Chapter 4: Uncertain Futures –Turn 2. By adding the turn or round or action number to the end of the chapter or heading it also helps players keep track of when new posts are put up, and it will help you as a GM later when you have to go back to look up something in the messages section of the Group Site. There is nothing worse than going back of previous posts looking for some bit of info when all the post titles are the same.

The actual post itself is where you, the GM, tell the story. When running a Play-By-Post or Play-By-Email game, you need to be somewhat literate in the English language (or whatever language you are running the game in) and not have a hard time describing things in detail. The more details you give about the setting, the NPCs, and the actions the enemies are taking, the better your game will be. Nothing bogs down a PBEM or PBP than having the player’s post a ton of questions they need answered just so they can respond to your first post. Try to think ahead when you write. What bits of information do the characters need to respond to the situation? For example: If I were going to write a battle scene where a line of troops are ambushing a column of vehicles, you would need to write the following: The speed the vehicle is going, the amount of armor the vehicle has, the number of people in the vehicle and what kinds of weapons they have, how many troops are in the ambush, where the troops are hiding in relationship to the incoming vehicle, are the troops behind cover or are they merely concealed behind bushes? What kind of armor do the troops have, and what kinds of weapons do they carry? It sounds like a lot of details to include, but if you take the time to write it up well, your players will appreciate it, and respond to your posts faster. To answer the above questions you do not have to break it down into a Q&A session. Make it part of the story. For example:

The lightly armored APC was moving at a crawl towards the hedgerow. Little did the four unarmed occupants know that the hedgerow contained a dozen of the kings best soldiers, all of them armed with the Kings standard issue laser rifles, and heavy body armor bearing the kings seal? All of the soldiers lay in a line across the roadway poised and ready to fire when the APC reached the intersection. The heroes spotted the soldiers in time but there was no way to warn the travelers. They could only hope the armor on the APC would hold till they could get there to save them…

You get the idea. Just a simple paragraph and all the questions were answered. Obviously, you can write more if you feel it is necessary, or if you have time. You could describe the color of the APC, what type of laser rifles the soldiers carried, the weather outside can also dictate the accuracy and timing of the attack. This is where you decide what is best for your story. Whatever you write, remember that Adjectives are your friends. The more descriptive you are, the more your players will look forward to your next post, and the longer they will stay interested.

There is no set length that any post should be, you can say a lot in just a couple of paragraphs. Don’t feel inadequate if your post is short. As long as you cover all the info necessary to advance the game, the length in inconsequential.

There will also come a time when an NPC and PC may have to conduct some dialogue. The best way I find is to have the players post their list of questions for the NPCs in their response posts, and you, as the GM summarize and rewrite them in your next storyline post.

At the end of every post is the key to a successful game. The end of the story line post should end in a cliff hanger. Write what you need to get the characters filled in on what is occurring, and then leave it all open ended. The open ending encourages players to post because it is human nature to fill a void. Think of your favorite TV show or book. Surely you have noticed that every episode or chapter ends with just enough info to make you want to keep reading, or to tune in for next week’s episode. That void at the end of the story is where your characters jump in and finish the story. When your story ends your players should be dying to fill in their part which will progress the game for you, and enable you to set them up for the next cliffhanger.