Quellian-dyrae
2018-05-10, 12:01 AM
Play-by-Posts die. Often. I've been playing them for a while now. I've been a player, I've been a GM. Most of the games have died, some are still ongoing. I've been lucky enough to be in a few that have earned the term long-runners. I think only one has come to an intended conclusion (well, a second one kinda did, in that the first of three intended parts was successfully completed, but that was essentially a campaign in and of itself), although I'm fortunate enough to have a group of players that have kept three going steadily enough that as I write this they're all coming into the home stretch. I'd like to think that I've accumulated enough experience to be able to offer some useful advice on keeping Play-by-Post games going, although I do want to emphasize this is only general advice based on my own experience and observations. Here it is.
The First Rule of Play-by-Post Gaming: Momentum is Everything
I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the One Rule to Rule them All. Momentum is absolutely critical to the health of a PbP. Games can easily slow down. They almost never speed up again later. You can probably get away with a round or two of posting slowdown. But if your game goes three posting rounds in a row at a certain speed, chances are that's the new speed of the game. (This is, however, only true in terms of slowdown.)
And while I can't say for sure it's a direct causation or if it's just me, or in which direction causality goes if it is direct, but I have observed this in my PbP experience: speed correlates to fun. I find that I am more energized to post in a game that's moving at a good clip, and I'm usually enjoying or looking forward to posts in those games more. An excellent story, a compelling interaction with other PCs, or a character I'm really invested in can all also have an impact, but end of the day, I'm pretty confident that speed matters.
Now, this isn't to say games have to post daily to be fun or anything. If your group can manage a round of posting a day, awesome. In my experience, something like 3-5 posting rounds per week is really good to shoot for. A posting round every three days is solid. A round of posts per week is about the slowest I've seen games go and still feel like the games can be called healthy.
And worth keeping in mind, games move at the speed of their slowest player. And it can easily be a deadly cycle. If most of the group is able to post most days, and one posts every three days, eventually the other players will decide there's not really any point in posting daily, because they clearly have three days to do it. So they'll settle to the every three day rate. And if the slower player sees that everyone else is posting slower, they might let themselves slip down to four or five days. And so on. You don't want to give anyone undue pressure, but be aware that a single player is all it takes to permanently cripple a game's momentum or even kill it entirely. It's hard and I hate to say it, but the truth is that sometimes you may need to skip or NPC a character on some turns to keep them from hurting the game for everyone. And of course, if the slow poster is the GM, that's where the game faces some real risk, so it's important for GMs to keep their momentum going as high as possible.
Many of the tips in this guide are centered around keeping up momentum. GMs, you can do your part by keeping on top of the players if their posting lags, and by posting as soon as you can once everyone who needs to has gotten a post in. Players, don't hesitate! Post when you get the chance, even if not all the players are posting so quickly.
Indecision Kills Games
Games lose momentum because people aren't posting. Often, people aren't posting because they don't have any ideas for what to post, or aren't sure if they should post (if they're on turn or whatever). It is stupidly easy for indecision to kill a game. The GM posts, the players read the post, each one individually isn't sure what to do, or what the group will want to do, or whatever. They all give each other time to come up with something, maybe making some basic discussion posts in the meantime. The GM isn't given a new course of action and doesn't want to railroad and so holds off posting. The game subscription doesn't pop up to remind people because nobody's been posting. People start to awkwardly wonder if the others/the GM lost interest and don't want to be pushy. Three weeks go by. The game is dead.
I imagine that everyone who's been in a decent few PbPs has seen more-or-less that exact thing happen at least once, and probably several times.
And a sad truth about PbP is, games can easily die because everyone is being too polite. Players don't want to try to dictate the party's action or do something before everyone's had a chance to weigh in. GMs don't want to railroad. Nobody wants to be a pest, especially to someone who we have no idea what is going on in their real life (which will always come first, as well it should). And that's all well and good, except that it can all too easily lead to indecision, to lost momentum, and to another dead game.
One of the most important rules you can follow in PbP is this: When in doubt, post! Don't worry about knowing the best move, or clearing things with every other party member. Make a decision and go for it. Include some hedges if you want. "As long as nobody has any objections." "If nothing happens to prevent it." "If nobody tries to stop me." Whatever. If someone has a different idea, they can say they stop you and the party can figure things out. But honestly? Most of the time, if someone takes the lead, the rest of the group will be fine with it. What kills games is when nobody is willing to take the lead.
And GMs? Sometimes, that means you have to step in and move things along. Railroading is something of a dirty word in the role-playing community, but in PbP, yes, sometimes the GM has to advance things. Players have a really bad tendency (and I do it too, even though I know better well enough to write a guide about it) to declare an intent to do something without actually declaring they are doing it. "Okay let's go." "Sounds good." "Works for me." *Crickets* Really useful tip for GMs: if at least one party member has declared an intent to do something, and a reasonable amount of time passes without anyone else voicing an objection, take that to mean they're doing it. If they really don't like it they can correct you.
But here's the thing: you have to leave some flexibility in there. Don't be afraid to do a bit of retconning if someone has an objection. "Act, and if there's a problem we'll fix it" is a much better way to approach PbP than "Make sure you're certain before you act, because once you do that's set in stone." And of course, for players, it's your job not to take advantage of your GM's flexibility. Don't go taking risks, waiting to see what happens, and then having someone object if it doesn't go as well as you hoped! GM's need to be encouraged too!
Posts Carry a Cost
This is weird, but I'm pretty sure it's true, and it's probably one of the most important things you can know for understanding why PbP games are so fragile. There is a cost to posting. Not just in terms of time, certainly not in terms of money, but in our heads we have some sort of cognitive bias telling us not to post unless there's a good reason for it. Unless it will be meaningful. You want to see this bias in action? See how much more frequently people post in a Discord chat than an OOC thread.
I have no idea where this bias comes from, and even knowing it exists it still affects me. But you need to account for it, especially if you're the GM. Because then it falls to you to give players a reason to post.
The tip I have for you there is this: always give your players something to interact with, not merely something to react to.
Players are more likely to post when their posts will have a meaning, an impact, a purpose. And, particularly, one that someone else isn't covering. If you end a post on an NPC making some dramatic statement or big reveal, you're risking the players not doing anything because they don't have anything to add. Sure, they can react, and maybe some of them will, but even that is likely to discourage later players because the main reactions have been covered. What you want to do is end on a spot where the characters have something to do. Ask questions, fight an enemy, prevent a danger, choose an NPC to interact with, something. And ideally, you want there to be something for everyone to do.
This comes back to keeping things flexible. You're better off pushing through to the point where there's something to interact with, or a choice to make, and maybe adding OOC something like, "So I typed up the whole explanation just to get through it, but if there's any bits you guys want to ask questions about or discuss in more detail we can jump back." Because sometimes there won't be, or there only will be for one or two people. Unlike when playing around the table, PbP makes it easy to run multiple different scenes or even multiple parts of the same scene in parallel. This is a huge advantage and you should absolutely use it! By getting more out there at once, players have more things to do, and so there's more chance that they'll all have something worth posting.
Encourage Action
Honing in on the GM side of things, this means that whenever possible you want to encourage action (frankly, I find this is true in any game, but it's especially true in PbP). Recently, I ran a one-shot game that I had declared would be "hard mode". It was intended as a high-challenge game. What I didn't mention up-front was that the challenge would not be due to overpowered enemies or the like (in fact, the opposition was a bit weaker than the party mechanically, although they made up for it with a bit more versatility and one additional member), but because the enemies would have access to a lot of information, they would be prepared for a lot of actions, and they would be absolutely ruthless about exploiting whatever advantage they could to win.
That game died. And I'm pretty sure I know why: the enemies were prepared for a lot of what the characters tried. Pretty much every time the PCs tried to get some ally to help them, they found the enemy had planted bombs there in preparation. When they called in allies from elsewhere, the enemy went out to attack them before they could arrive. When they spent resources securing themselves in a heavily-defended location, the enemies just backed off and let the resources go to waste. Was I playing the villains appropriate to their intelligence and capabilities? Sure. But I was discouraging the players from acting. There was no clear path to advantage that they could be sure wouldn't lead to disadvantage. The players became less decisive, posting slowed, and that was it.
In a PbP, you want to encourage your players to do stuff. Doing stuff means posting stuff. Indecision kills games. So it's actually a good idea, in PbP, to avoid tricks, traps, and twists that turn the players' actions against them. Those things create doubt, a desire not to do something that might hamper the entire group. You're better off setting up situations so that actions will generally lead to advantage, but the trick is taking the actions that lead to enough advantage to succeed. Likewise, remember per above that you want to be able to move the characters along when you need to. If the obvious route is the wrong route, you don't want to be in a position where you can't, say, just move things along so the characters go through the door and get hit by a trap. And you likewise don't want to move things along so players avoid the trap you were planning for them to hit. End of the day, you're the GM. You don't need to wait for your players to blunder into trouble when you can just as easily throw the trouble straight at them!
And while I admit to having a certain bias here, this does also mean that transparency and clarity can be more useful in PbP, so it might not hurt to be a bit more open about what's going on mechanically. If a player knows it has a decent chance of accomplishing something, or knows what rules are in play for whatever it's trying to do, it's more likely to try it than waffle. You want players moving boldly onward, not hesitating to move forward because something terrible might happen.
You Don't Have Time For That
On a related note, recognize that you may not have time for certain things in PbP. Indecision kills games; situations that lead to greater indecision must thus be handled with care. Here's a problem though: a lot of (most?) RPGs emphasize specialization, especially in noncombat areas. You have a scout, or a face, or an investigator, or whatever, and they handle their thing. Even in regular games, this sucks because the rest of the group is sitting around for ten minutes where the person with the right skills handles the problem. In PbP, it's worse because instead of ten minutes, it might be ten days!
I tend to focus mainly on combat and role-playing in my games, rewarding other skills where I can (and I do have a system for Downtime Actions that helps a lot with that) but not making them major parts of the game. It works, but it isn't for everyone. Just bear in mind, this is a bad enough problem normally and exponentially worse in PbP. If you want social interaction or investigation to be a big part of your game, make sure the players know it up front, and make sure all the characters are capable of providing meaningful and unique contributions! Players will tell you they're okay with staying quiet while other players handle the tasks their characters aren't built for. And that may well be, but their doing so is still unhealthy for the game, because it reduces momentum (especially if you try to "give them a chance" to do something, slowing things down to wait for them when they have no particular intention to act).
But even beyond the contribution issues, you want to be careful with these things. A circular argument kills momentum. An investigation where the players don't recognize what the clues are supposed to mean kills momentum. A red herring that causes players to realize that the last three real-world weeks were completely wasted discourages action. A complex battle that requires a lengthy tactical planning session kills momentum. Sandbox games are great in theory, but in reality, I'm sorry to say it, but most players cannot be trusted to drive the story. If you let players wander around until they find something, they're likely to lose momentum. If you're going to run a sandbox, be prepared to give them something interesting to interact with pretty much no matter what they do, because you don't have the time to just let them go until they find something interesting to interact with. Nobody wants to spend three weeks posting "Now I go here, now I do this" without anything meaningful going on.
Use Block Initiative
I really can't stress this enough. I've actually been seeing it pretty much standard recently so maybe this one doesn't even need to be said any more, but I'll include it anyway for completeness if nothing else. It is so ludicrously easy to lose track of who is on turn with regular initiative, and it means that the time required to complete a combat round is the sum of all posting times, rather than merely the highest posting time. I have seen games die due solely to normal initiative rules. Just use block initiative.
Working In Episodes
I've found an episodic format to be extremely good for PbP. It keeps people focused, I think. Each episode has its plot, and you handle that, and then it's on to the next, rather than having a big ol' sprawling campaign to negotiate. Beginning, middle, end, rinse, repeat. Sure, you can build up a Myth Arc and such, but keeping things in episodes helps keep it manageable, I think.
Answering the Question "Am I Ready to GM?"
It seems almost tritely obvious to say this, but it's something worth acknowledging: GMing is hard. It is much harder than playing. Not even counting the preparation and not even assuming greater post length. In my experience, writing a GM post always costs substantially more creative energy (distinct from time) than writing a post of equal length as a player. Because you've got so much more responsibility. You need to respond to what all the players have done, resolve any mechanics, play all the NPCs, describe what's going on, give everybody something to interact with, handle any plotting details, and so on.
Now, I can't give a precise comparison, but at a rough estimate, I'd say running a PbP game is roughly equivalent to playing in three. So, if you've played in three games simultaneously and handled it fine, chances are you can handle GMing one. If that taxes you, or takes more time than you have, or whatever, GMing may be more of an investment than you want to make. Again, very rough estimate, but it's my best guess.
Also, you probably don't want to try starting a game unless your life is in a pretty stable place. If you've just started college, or gotten a new job, or started a family, or something like that, don't expect to be able to add GMing to your plate. If you expect such a change in the near future, work on the assumption that it will probably kill whatever games you're GMing. Plan your game lengths accordingly; if you're in your Junior year of college, and you have sufficient time and creative energy that you want to run a game, awesome! But maybe plan for the game to reach a conclusion before two years pass (in reality most games will die way before two years pass, but hey nobody plans for the game to die so you might as well assume it won't!) Flip side, if you're planning to start a new job in six months, maybe go with a short-term game or one-shot, rather than trying to start a whole campaign.
How to Avoid Burnout
...Yeah I wish I had something useful to write in this section. Sorry all.
Calibrating Expectations - What Is A Successful Game?
Sad truth? Most games die before they hit ten pages.
I've kept my subscriptions to pretty much all of my inactive games. Going back through them, I count 84 IC threads over the course of some five and a half years. 13 of those (15%) died on the first page.
44 of them, more than half, died five or fewer pages in. 61 of them, more than two-thirds, were dead before ten pages.
Fewer than ten exceeded twenty pages. Fewer than five exceeded thirty. A grand total of two reached a second thread.
Note: The two games that I mentioned at the start being completed are not included in this total, and neither actually needed a second thread to complete. Page count isn't all that matters.
That said, half of the games I'm currently in at the time of this writing have gone past thirty pages (two of them on their second IC thread, another one about to be), so that's nice. Notably, there's a pretty fair amount of player overlap in those games. Getting a good group will do more for a game's survival than a guide like this ever could, I'm just saying.
That said, if you manage to get a game to five pages, you've at least got it off to a solid start. Ten pages is an accomplishment. If you get a game to twenty pages, call it a success, because few get that far. Thirty pages is officially a Long Runner, far as I'm concerned.
One last word of advice. The longest IC thread in my inactive list, and in fact, still the longest IC thread I've been in to date at the time of this writing (although not for long, HoM's just a page behind!) ended on Page 84, with three players and the GM having all been there from the beginning. It is not one of the two I count as completed. It lost momentum and died just like so many of the others. Length is not a guarantee of continued survival, and no game is ever truly safe. Momentum is everything!
The First Rule of Play-by-Post Gaming: Momentum is Everything
I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the One Rule to Rule them All. Momentum is absolutely critical to the health of a PbP. Games can easily slow down. They almost never speed up again later. You can probably get away with a round or two of posting slowdown. But if your game goes three posting rounds in a row at a certain speed, chances are that's the new speed of the game. (This is, however, only true in terms of slowdown.)
And while I can't say for sure it's a direct causation or if it's just me, or in which direction causality goes if it is direct, but I have observed this in my PbP experience: speed correlates to fun. I find that I am more energized to post in a game that's moving at a good clip, and I'm usually enjoying or looking forward to posts in those games more. An excellent story, a compelling interaction with other PCs, or a character I'm really invested in can all also have an impact, but end of the day, I'm pretty confident that speed matters.
Now, this isn't to say games have to post daily to be fun or anything. If your group can manage a round of posting a day, awesome. In my experience, something like 3-5 posting rounds per week is really good to shoot for. A posting round every three days is solid. A round of posts per week is about the slowest I've seen games go and still feel like the games can be called healthy.
And worth keeping in mind, games move at the speed of their slowest player. And it can easily be a deadly cycle. If most of the group is able to post most days, and one posts every three days, eventually the other players will decide there's not really any point in posting daily, because they clearly have three days to do it. So they'll settle to the every three day rate. And if the slower player sees that everyone else is posting slower, they might let themselves slip down to four or five days. And so on. You don't want to give anyone undue pressure, but be aware that a single player is all it takes to permanently cripple a game's momentum or even kill it entirely. It's hard and I hate to say it, but the truth is that sometimes you may need to skip or NPC a character on some turns to keep them from hurting the game for everyone. And of course, if the slow poster is the GM, that's where the game faces some real risk, so it's important for GMs to keep their momentum going as high as possible.
Many of the tips in this guide are centered around keeping up momentum. GMs, you can do your part by keeping on top of the players if their posting lags, and by posting as soon as you can once everyone who needs to has gotten a post in. Players, don't hesitate! Post when you get the chance, even if not all the players are posting so quickly.
Indecision Kills Games
Games lose momentum because people aren't posting. Often, people aren't posting because they don't have any ideas for what to post, or aren't sure if they should post (if they're on turn or whatever). It is stupidly easy for indecision to kill a game. The GM posts, the players read the post, each one individually isn't sure what to do, or what the group will want to do, or whatever. They all give each other time to come up with something, maybe making some basic discussion posts in the meantime. The GM isn't given a new course of action and doesn't want to railroad and so holds off posting. The game subscription doesn't pop up to remind people because nobody's been posting. People start to awkwardly wonder if the others/the GM lost interest and don't want to be pushy. Three weeks go by. The game is dead.
I imagine that everyone who's been in a decent few PbPs has seen more-or-less that exact thing happen at least once, and probably several times.
And a sad truth about PbP is, games can easily die because everyone is being too polite. Players don't want to try to dictate the party's action or do something before everyone's had a chance to weigh in. GMs don't want to railroad. Nobody wants to be a pest, especially to someone who we have no idea what is going on in their real life (which will always come first, as well it should). And that's all well and good, except that it can all too easily lead to indecision, to lost momentum, and to another dead game.
One of the most important rules you can follow in PbP is this: When in doubt, post! Don't worry about knowing the best move, or clearing things with every other party member. Make a decision and go for it. Include some hedges if you want. "As long as nobody has any objections." "If nothing happens to prevent it." "If nobody tries to stop me." Whatever. If someone has a different idea, they can say they stop you and the party can figure things out. But honestly? Most of the time, if someone takes the lead, the rest of the group will be fine with it. What kills games is when nobody is willing to take the lead.
And GMs? Sometimes, that means you have to step in and move things along. Railroading is something of a dirty word in the role-playing community, but in PbP, yes, sometimes the GM has to advance things. Players have a really bad tendency (and I do it too, even though I know better well enough to write a guide about it) to declare an intent to do something without actually declaring they are doing it. "Okay let's go." "Sounds good." "Works for me." *Crickets* Really useful tip for GMs: if at least one party member has declared an intent to do something, and a reasonable amount of time passes without anyone else voicing an objection, take that to mean they're doing it. If they really don't like it they can correct you.
But here's the thing: you have to leave some flexibility in there. Don't be afraid to do a bit of retconning if someone has an objection. "Act, and if there's a problem we'll fix it" is a much better way to approach PbP than "Make sure you're certain before you act, because once you do that's set in stone." And of course, for players, it's your job not to take advantage of your GM's flexibility. Don't go taking risks, waiting to see what happens, and then having someone object if it doesn't go as well as you hoped! GM's need to be encouraged too!
Posts Carry a Cost
This is weird, but I'm pretty sure it's true, and it's probably one of the most important things you can know for understanding why PbP games are so fragile. There is a cost to posting. Not just in terms of time, certainly not in terms of money, but in our heads we have some sort of cognitive bias telling us not to post unless there's a good reason for it. Unless it will be meaningful. You want to see this bias in action? See how much more frequently people post in a Discord chat than an OOC thread.
I have no idea where this bias comes from, and even knowing it exists it still affects me. But you need to account for it, especially if you're the GM. Because then it falls to you to give players a reason to post.
The tip I have for you there is this: always give your players something to interact with, not merely something to react to.
Players are more likely to post when their posts will have a meaning, an impact, a purpose. And, particularly, one that someone else isn't covering. If you end a post on an NPC making some dramatic statement or big reveal, you're risking the players not doing anything because they don't have anything to add. Sure, they can react, and maybe some of them will, but even that is likely to discourage later players because the main reactions have been covered. What you want to do is end on a spot where the characters have something to do. Ask questions, fight an enemy, prevent a danger, choose an NPC to interact with, something. And ideally, you want there to be something for everyone to do.
This comes back to keeping things flexible. You're better off pushing through to the point where there's something to interact with, or a choice to make, and maybe adding OOC something like, "So I typed up the whole explanation just to get through it, but if there's any bits you guys want to ask questions about or discuss in more detail we can jump back." Because sometimes there won't be, or there only will be for one or two people. Unlike when playing around the table, PbP makes it easy to run multiple different scenes or even multiple parts of the same scene in parallel. This is a huge advantage and you should absolutely use it! By getting more out there at once, players have more things to do, and so there's more chance that they'll all have something worth posting.
Encourage Action
Honing in on the GM side of things, this means that whenever possible you want to encourage action (frankly, I find this is true in any game, but it's especially true in PbP). Recently, I ran a one-shot game that I had declared would be "hard mode". It was intended as a high-challenge game. What I didn't mention up-front was that the challenge would not be due to overpowered enemies or the like (in fact, the opposition was a bit weaker than the party mechanically, although they made up for it with a bit more versatility and one additional member), but because the enemies would have access to a lot of information, they would be prepared for a lot of actions, and they would be absolutely ruthless about exploiting whatever advantage they could to win.
That game died. And I'm pretty sure I know why: the enemies were prepared for a lot of what the characters tried. Pretty much every time the PCs tried to get some ally to help them, they found the enemy had planted bombs there in preparation. When they called in allies from elsewhere, the enemy went out to attack them before they could arrive. When they spent resources securing themselves in a heavily-defended location, the enemies just backed off and let the resources go to waste. Was I playing the villains appropriate to their intelligence and capabilities? Sure. But I was discouraging the players from acting. There was no clear path to advantage that they could be sure wouldn't lead to disadvantage. The players became less decisive, posting slowed, and that was it.
In a PbP, you want to encourage your players to do stuff. Doing stuff means posting stuff. Indecision kills games. So it's actually a good idea, in PbP, to avoid tricks, traps, and twists that turn the players' actions against them. Those things create doubt, a desire not to do something that might hamper the entire group. You're better off setting up situations so that actions will generally lead to advantage, but the trick is taking the actions that lead to enough advantage to succeed. Likewise, remember per above that you want to be able to move the characters along when you need to. If the obvious route is the wrong route, you don't want to be in a position where you can't, say, just move things along so the characters go through the door and get hit by a trap. And you likewise don't want to move things along so players avoid the trap you were planning for them to hit. End of the day, you're the GM. You don't need to wait for your players to blunder into trouble when you can just as easily throw the trouble straight at them!
And while I admit to having a certain bias here, this does also mean that transparency and clarity can be more useful in PbP, so it might not hurt to be a bit more open about what's going on mechanically. If a player knows it has a decent chance of accomplishing something, or knows what rules are in play for whatever it's trying to do, it's more likely to try it than waffle. You want players moving boldly onward, not hesitating to move forward because something terrible might happen.
You Don't Have Time For That
On a related note, recognize that you may not have time for certain things in PbP. Indecision kills games; situations that lead to greater indecision must thus be handled with care. Here's a problem though: a lot of (most?) RPGs emphasize specialization, especially in noncombat areas. You have a scout, or a face, or an investigator, or whatever, and they handle their thing. Even in regular games, this sucks because the rest of the group is sitting around for ten minutes where the person with the right skills handles the problem. In PbP, it's worse because instead of ten minutes, it might be ten days!
I tend to focus mainly on combat and role-playing in my games, rewarding other skills where I can (and I do have a system for Downtime Actions that helps a lot with that) but not making them major parts of the game. It works, but it isn't for everyone. Just bear in mind, this is a bad enough problem normally and exponentially worse in PbP. If you want social interaction or investigation to be a big part of your game, make sure the players know it up front, and make sure all the characters are capable of providing meaningful and unique contributions! Players will tell you they're okay with staying quiet while other players handle the tasks their characters aren't built for. And that may well be, but their doing so is still unhealthy for the game, because it reduces momentum (especially if you try to "give them a chance" to do something, slowing things down to wait for them when they have no particular intention to act).
But even beyond the contribution issues, you want to be careful with these things. A circular argument kills momentum. An investigation where the players don't recognize what the clues are supposed to mean kills momentum. A red herring that causes players to realize that the last three real-world weeks were completely wasted discourages action. A complex battle that requires a lengthy tactical planning session kills momentum. Sandbox games are great in theory, but in reality, I'm sorry to say it, but most players cannot be trusted to drive the story. If you let players wander around until they find something, they're likely to lose momentum. If you're going to run a sandbox, be prepared to give them something interesting to interact with pretty much no matter what they do, because you don't have the time to just let them go until they find something interesting to interact with. Nobody wants to spend three weeks posting "Now I go here, now I do this" without anything meaningful going on.
Use Block Initiative
I really can't stress this enough. I've actually been seeing it pretty much standard recently so maybe this one doesn't even need to be said any more, but I'll include it anyway for completeness if nothing else. It is so ludicrously easy to lose track of who is on turn with regular initiative, and it means that the time required to complete a combat round is the sum of all posting times, rather than merely the highest posting time. I have seen games die due solely to normal initiative rules. Just use block initiative.
Working In Episodes
I've found an episodic format to be extremely good for PbP. It keeps people focused, I think. Each episode has its plot, and you handle that, and then it's on to the next, rather than having a big ol' sprawling campaign to negotiate. Beginning, middle, end, rinse, repeat. Sure, you can build up a Myth Arc and such, but keeping things in episodes helps keep it manageable, I think.
Answering the Question "Am I Ready to GM?"
It seems almost tritely obvious to say this, but it's something worth acknowledging: GMing is hard. It is much harder than playing. Not even counting the preparation and not even assuming greater post length. In my experience, writing a GM post always costs substantially more creative energy (distinct from time) than writing a post of equal length as a player. Because you've got so much more responsibility. You need to respond to what all the players have done, resolve any mechanics, play all the NPCs, describe what's going on, give everybody something to interact with, handle any plotting details, and so on.
Now, I can't give a precise comparison, but at a rough estimate, I'd say running a PbP game is roughly equivalent to playing in three. So, if you've played in three games simultaneously and handled it fine, chances are you can handle GMing one. If that taxes you, or takes more time than you have, or whatever, GMing may be more of an investment than you want to make. Again, very rough estimate, but it's my best guess.
Also, you probably don't want to try starting a game unless your life is in a pretty stable place. If you've just started college, or gotten a new job, or started a family, or something like that, don't expect to be able to add GMing to your plate. If you expect such a change in the near future, work on the assumption that it will probably kill whatever games you're GMing. Plan your game lengths accordingly; if you're in your Junior year of college, and you have sufficient time and creative energy that you want to run a game, awesome! But maybe plan for the game to reach a conclusion before two years pass (in reality most games will die way before two years pass, but hey nobody plans for the game to die so you might as well assume it won't!) Flip side, if you're planning to start a new job in six months, maybe go with a short-term game or one-shot, rather than trying to start a whole campaign.
How to Avoid Burnout
...Yeah I wish I had something useful to write in this section. Sorry all.
Calibrating Expectations - What Is A Successful Game?
Sad truth? Most games die before they hit ten pages.
I've kept my subscriptions to pretty much all of my inactive games. Going back through them, I count 84 IC threads over the course of some five and a half years. 13 of those (15%) died on the first page.
44 of them, more than half, died five or fewer pages in. 61 of them, more than two-thirds, were dead before ten pages.
Fewer than ten exceeded twenty pages. Fewer than five exceeded thirty. A grand total of two reached a second thread.
Note: The two games that I mentioned at the start being completed are not included in this total, and neither actually needed a second thread to complete. Page count isn't all that matters.
That said, half of the games I'm currently in at the time of this writing have gone past thirty pages (two of them on their second IC thread, another one about to be), so that's nice. Notably, there's a pretty fair amount of player overlap in those games. Getting a good group will do more for a game's survival than a guide like this ever could, I'm just saying.
That said, if you manage to get a game to five pages, you've at least got it off to a solid start. Ten pages is an accomplishment. If you get a game to twenty pages, call it a success, because few get that far. Thirty pages is officially a Long Runner, far as I'm concerned.
One last word of advice. The longest IC thread in my inactive list, and in fact, still the longest IC thread I've been in to date at the time of this writing (although not for long, HoM's just a page behind!) ended on Page 84, with three players and the GM having all been there from the beginning. It is not one of the two I count as completed. It lost momentum and died just like so many of the others. Length is not a guarantee of continued survival, and no game is ever truly safe. Momentum is everything!