Carl D. talks eloquently about PbP gaming, Into The Odd style saves, and Nightmare over Ragged Hollow.
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Definitely some good thoughts on there. My own experience with PBP echoes a lot of what was said. The “One Post per Day” idea was what we used as well, and we ran into the issue of some folks being online more often than others, and inherently getting more “screen time” which caused others to feel a bit left out.
Any ideas for that? Carl didn’t get into it much.
You either need to set a strong “soft” expectation that people don’t want to get too far ahead of (difficult) or impose a ceiling of some kind (feels bad to tell someone “sorry, you’re too involved and contributing too much,” especially when the opposite kills PBP so often)
Chuubo’s and its sequel systems have some helpful structure here imo, where there’s a maximum of two “XP actions” or spotlight moments per player in each narrative unit, and if you’ve already used yours, you’re expected to “fade” while other players get a chance to shine.
As far as posting frequency it’s a bit of a balancing act for sure, but the best advice I have is the evergreen, “talk to your players.” Once Jason brought it up that he was feeling pressure we were, to a person, “oh wow, me too!” Now we are much more likely to chime in on the OOC Chanel with something like, “hey it’s date night, or parents are visiting, I’ll be away till tomorrow.”
But the biggest thing is as the GM you have ultimate control over the pace. Players/characters can scheme or discuss amongst themselves as much as they like, but the world won’t react until you (GM) do. The flip side is you don’t want to lose momentum from not enough posting either. I’m finding just chatting in OOC or the general channel maintains engagement (we talk about the game and anything else) while I think how to respond or to allow a busy player time to act.
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