play by post

>>53818735
Play by post goes to >>>/qst/
Forum games are generally bad or worse, set your expectations low.
Also source.

>>53818748
i dont want it to play on /tg/. i want advice on how to make a system for play-by-post.

no source

>>53818828
>no source
booo
[Tanabe Kyou] Petit Tomo

>>53818735
If you want PbP to work well, you need a lot to happen in a single post so it can remain fluid. Or have people with no lives playing, but you'll generally have at least one person who's not a total fuckup.
Really, the place to begin is by taking a page out of the books of play-by-mail and play-by-email games. Focus on parallelism of decision making, partial uncertainty, and make damn sure your system gives response time if you want responses.

>>53818748
no they don't, ya fool.

>>53818735
The biggest hurdle to running a successful play-by-post game is the downtime between players posting, which affects progression, but also hang-ups out of character such as asking for questions/waiting for clarification.

Any system that requires specific order of initiative from players is problematic as it brings forward progression to a halt by bottle-necking posting.

An ideal play-by-post system has several features
1) Simultaneous character action/resolution
2) A method to determine outcomes upon player absence
3) Freedom for players to contribute to the story

GMs can generally write multiple paragraphs in a single post aimed at different characters anyway, so ensuring that everyone has something to do at all times is normally not a system issue. However, a pbp system could incorporate a result-range structure, to provide some method of charting cooperation or obstacles. For example, even if 3 characters are doing three different things in a chase sequence, you still have an overarching meta-goal that they were working towards and accumulating points towards, which in turn can spawn new obstacles. Likewise you could use the same system for foes.

The second would actually provide a ruleset/guideline on what to do when a player is absent for an extended period of time (that the GM can decide upon when starting the game). For example, if player has not posted within 24 hours, then X table to determine actions.
Most of the time a GM can fudge or NPC the character anyway, but a set of guidelines established at the beginning as neutral arbitration can make it easier as well as better understood by players what happens when they are absent for too long. In fact, you could go so far as to have players designate a specific chart, or even incorporate that into their character sheet, that helps to determine their "auto" actions. It could be fairly archetypal, or divided into personality, archetype, something else.

>>53818968
Thanks for the source mate, but a little sad that they weren't traps.

>>53821212

As for the third point, it is not really surprising that "freeform" games or "rules-light" games tend to have less obstacles to run on internet forums, largely because there is less delay in arbitration by the GM for every minute detail.

Players taking the initiative in describing their actions and being able to add their rolls into their post at the same time speeds up play quite a bit. Especially if they are able to determine the outcome of their roll without having to wait for GM ruling (static d6 systems, or FATE, for example).

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>>53818735

>>53821252
Oh damn, I came here for that. Nevermind then

>>53821531
they don't really
it's just your average loli exhibitionist sluts

>>53823817
>>53823747
God dammit this isn't /d/, why am I sad that the girls don't have penises?

>>53823867
Because we were deceived in the regular way, not the fun way.

>>53818828
Without a variable to store values in, you could go lowtech and just require people to spend their points at certain milestone posts that you mark. Those who reply to the milestone with properly calculated choices get the training/array bonuses, those who don't reply in time are counted as not having any bonuses for the next encounter series. The benefit is that you can run a game on any forum without special programming.

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>>53823867
Because you're gay. You see a cute girl and want her to be a cute boy.

>>53818735
>no RNG
You've gotta be very sure on what you'll let them get away with, and be able to be EXTREMELY consistent on this. Also, some of your players might feel like they need to look for "the solution" to an encounter, which is like metagaming but more justified.
If you have access to the Unix timestamps of a post, you could use that as an effective d10 or d100.
>renewable source of points
How renewable? After each encounter, after each day, GM's discretion?

For a while I thought about cannibalizing a handful of Chuubo's mechanics for a diceless pbp system.

The system would have worked kinda like this. Players start by picking TRAITS to their characters and assigning numbers to them. Stuff like "Justice is not Blind (3): [character 1] is a police detective with 30 years of experience." and "Swordmaster (1): [character 2] is a novice swordsman, and a professional braggart." Maybe some (0)s and (-1)s if they're significant to the character.

The player says what they want their character to do, and then spends WILL points to do so. If a TRAIT is relevant, its value is added to the total amount of points spend. For example, [character 2] starts boasting how good of a swordsman he is to discourage someone from fighting. He spends 2 WILL and has a +1 bonus from Swordmaster, resulting in a value of 3. Chuubo had a table that said how happy your character and others were with the result of their action.

When your WILL hit zero, your character would become unable of imprinting their will onto the world and would fall unconscious/leave/die/be captured/etc. Basically, in most games when your life reachers zero, your character stops being able to do anything, so I decided to cut the middleman.

Additionally, there are AFFLICTIONS, which are similar to TRAITS but negative. They can be temporary or permanent, physical or metaphysical, but actually roleplaying them awards the player XP. But it was at this point I wasn't sure how I wanted to do level progression, so I stopped there. Now I decided to use dice, and roll them myself if I GM a pbp.