How many pbp games actually succeed?

[clash]

A while ago I decided to start trying play by post here on the forum. So coming from a d&d in person background I assumed that the general pattern was you find a game with players and a dm and most of the time you can count on it running at least a few months of not the entire life of the campaign before the group falls apart for one reason or another. Obviously it's a bit different posting with strangers but I wasn't expecting what I experience have experienced so far.

I've been involved in 7 psi by post games so far. Twice as a dm and 5 times as a player and no campaign thus far has lasted past a few weeks and a couple combats. So I'm, is this usual? For those in successful games, what percentage of your games you join fail? For those that have never been successful, how many games did you join before giving up? Interested to see what others have experienced.

[JadedDM]

That's been my experience, on this site. I've been to other sites where things can be a bit more stable. But here on the playground, the vast majority of games dry up within a page or two. I've participated in one or two exceptions, though.

[Batcathat]

Yeah, that's mostly my experience as well. While exceptions do exist, a lot of games fail quite early.

[KorvinStarmast]

A while ago I decided to start trying play by post here on the forum.

Ours was doing fine until the mods banned our DM for reasons I do not fathom. We had pages and pages of back and forth.

[Amnestic]

A lot of them do dry up relatively early, though there are some that stick it out. My Iron Crisis game started around April 2020 and is ongoing - we're on our third IC thread now since the first two capped out on posts. I've also 'completed' a Red Hand of Doom PbP (the party wiped at the end of Act 4 of 5, so not a technical completion but near enough - it died because of a TPK rather than the interest dwindling).

I would say a solid majority will not come to true fruition which is a damn shame. Of course a lot of IRL or otherwise real time games also die prior to 'completion' it does feel more prevalent with PbP, likely because there's a distance in social obligation and it's easier to lose interest simply due to time gaps. PbP's main benefit (flexibility with schedule) is also its downside - it takes a lot of real life time for things to happen. A combat in a real time game might last 10-30 minutes of real time play. That same combat in PbP can take anywhere between a few days to a few weeks depending on people's posting speed, and once one or two people start slowing their posting rate the whole game slows down so unless all of you are on it, it's going to see a slowdown.

[DataNinja]

So, something that I found drastically increased game longevity back when I was doing PbP more regularly was including a realtime OOC chat (using Discord, Skype, smoke signals, etc).

It let there be a lot more casual communication between people, more than an OOC thread gave. And less people ended up ghosting when you started to get to know the people behind the screennames. (Plus it's a lot easier to quickly clarify something with the GM if need be, meaning things bog down the game less.)

Granted, this wasn't foolproof. A lot of games still ended up dying. But the success rate - and the duration of the games that failed - shot up quite noticeably.

[Ameraaaaaa]

As a guy with particularly bad luck when it comes to games I'd say I've only been in 1 complete game on any site. And it was the play by post equivalent of a one shot. Anyways I'm in one of the longer lasting games right now so that's good. Who knows? this could be another complete game by the end of it.

[Alcore]

I've been involved in 7 psi by post games so far. Twice as a dm and 5 times as a player and no campaign thus far has lasted past a few weeks and a couple combats. So I'm, is this usual? For those in successful games, what percentage of your games you join fail? For those that have never been successful, how many games did you join before giving up? Interested to see what others have experienced.

Seven games? And all of them actually reach the playing part?! :smalleek:


I didn't realize that Play by Post was so active and fast or you were lucky, so vary luck. Maybe, instead, it is this site itself? Largely academic as this site has the worst performance ever (high lag, long load, missing text [some of it faced "white out" as I typed this] and so much more. No other website I visit.)


I can honestly from Mythweavers that you got it good. Someday you might find "the one". Til then keep trying. I stopped after a truly toxic game; I can barely bring myself to read through that system.

[KineticDiplomat]

I've seen some live and some die,. A few trends to the ones that lived, and almost all of them ultimately deal :

1) When the player base has autonomy to semi-gm parts, it keeps things moving.

Imagine you have a scene where your player wants to hip check the Corp sec booking him, yank out the guy's pistol, then socket it in his ear and take him hostage, all while the Corp sec's buddies are busy trying to react.

That's a situation that doesn't fit neatly with most rule sets, almost certainly requires several sets of dice roles in all but the most narrative systems, might require NPC stat knowledge and could have a wide variety of outcomes.

Try to play it like you're at the table, it might take half a month. Let the player figure out what those checks are, interpret the NPCs to the best of his ability, roll for himself and them, and end the post at the next suitable dramatic decision point...and it happens in one post. The GM glances at the dice for abuse, fiddles the results just so if he has some points of disagreement, and returns the volley. Hooray, two weeks became two days or two hours.

2) The system matters. Communications without the beat and reply of "in person" conversation helps - A game about sending letters between the leaders of Frederickian Europe for example - or where large swathes of action can be resolved in a few dice rolls, these have higher chances of success. If you can keep conversation and mechanical resolution separate, so much the better - at least the players can talk while the long slow dicing occurs.

Games where players need to talk to each other frequently to communicate, or wait in turn order for half a dozen dice rolls on each side, well, they're dead. Because who spends three real life weeks waiting for a quip between a bard and a wizard, and then the adjudication of a fireball?

3) To reinforce what someone said above, the medium matters. Discord is way more likely to survive than a forum.

[Imbalance]

I gave up. I don't have the patience for so many starts that go nowhere.

[TaiLiu]

Yeah, it's rare. I've never played a PBP game that concluded successfully, though I DM'd a PBP game here that ran to completion. It was a D&D 3.5e one-shot module and what would take maybe a session or two in real time took around one and a half years.

The main killer is loss of interest. People change over time and things happen and people grow bored. The secondary killer is too large of a scope. Epic campaigns can take years in real time. It's practically impossible to run one in a PBP format, especially if you're playing with pseudonymous strangers. But it feels like people try to run large-scope campaigns here all the time. That's a mistake.

If you wanna play or run a successful PBP game, my tip is start small and stay small and be willing to weather periods of boredom that stretch out in ways that synchronous games don't.

[Imbalance]

Yeah, it's rare. I've never played a PBP game that concluded successfully, though I DM'd a PBP game here that ran to completion. It was a D&D 3.5e one-shot module and what would take maybe a session or two in real time took around one and a half years.

The main killer is loss of interest. People change over time and things happen and people grow bored. The secondary killer is too large of a scope. Epic campaigns can take years in real time. It's practically impossible to run one in a PBP format, especially if you're playing with pseudonymous strangers. But it feels like people try to run large-scope campaigns here all the time. That's a mistake.

If you wanna play or run a successful PBP game, my tip is start small and stay small and be willing to weather periods of boredom that stretch out in ways that synchronous games don't.

How about a 1-3 level ongoing meat grinder? My biggest DM shortcoming is a lack of experience dealing with mechanics in any one system. A while back, after so many failed pbp games, the idea I had was to basically just invite newbs to try things out in, say, a 5e Acheron setting. Just keep feeding new players into the conflict, since nobody sticks around long anyway, let their characters die if there's no participation in a given time frame. I was too discouraged to try it. Still am.

Part two of the idea was to make a separate, more legit campaign for those who did stick with it and survived. As in, the gods have smiled on your courage and achievement, welcome to the rest of the adventure. It's been so long that I no longer have the time nor aspiration to run such a thing, but I'm still curious if it could work.

[Theoboldi]

How about a 1-3 level ongoing meat grinder? My biggest DM shortcoming is a lack of experience dealing with mechanics in any one system. A while back, after so many failed pbp games, the idea I had was to basically just invite newbs to try things out in, say, a 5e Acheron setting. Just keep feeding new players into the conflict, since nobody sticks around long anyway, let their characters die if there's no participation in a given time frame. I was too discouraged to try it. Still am.

Part two of the idea was to make a separate, more legit campaign for those who did stick with it and survived. As in, the gods have smiled on your courage and achievement, welcome to the rest of the adventure. It's been so long that I no longer have the time nor aspiration to run such a thing, but I'm still curious if it could work.

What has worked in my experience were short one-shots and episodic games with a limited over-arching plot. With the speed of play by post, those can last you a year or multiple years already, and keeping things episodic or as a one-shot means that you can bring in people without making them feel like they'll have to read up on a ton of backstory for the current adventure.

This method also makes it way simpler to bring in new characters or pull out old ones when their players leave. I have gone as far as simply retconning the characters of leaving players as never having been there, which has helped keep the focus on the adventure and prevent those old character from clogging up the narrative with questions of what they are doing.

New characters I've also sometimes retconned in, but also sometimes introduced as old friends of the players that showed up at a fortunate time, or simply had them join the party off-screen between adventures.

It requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but pays dividends in how it keeps the game going and your sanity as the GM intact.

[TaiLiu]

How about a 1-3 level ongoing meat grinder? My biggest DM shortcoming is a lack of experience dealing with mechanics in any one system. A while back, after so many failed pbp games, the idea I had was to basically just invite newbs to try things out in, say, a 5e Acheron setting. Just keep feeding new players into the conflict, since nobody sticks around long anyway, let their characters die if there's no participation in a given time frame. I was too discouraged to try it. Still am.

Part two of the idea was to make a separate, more legit campaign for those who did stick with it and survived. As in, the gods have smiled on your courage and achievement, welcome to the rest of the adventure. It's been so long that I no longer have the time nor aspiration to run such a thing, but I'm still curious if it could work.
I don't know. My intuition is that it'd be hard to make it work, cuz you're talking about running two games, one after the other. And by the end of the meat grinder people would be too exhausted and wouldn't wanna play the second game.

I've also thought about possible PBP games that take into account people going and coming. Like a large dungeon, where characters can die and other adventurers can join up. But I'm not sure stereotypical dungeons are a great idea for PBP, since people'll get bored of the same scenery.

[DigoDragon]

I've have the experience lately of joining games that don't last past a couple weeks; GM disappears, players bail out, stuff like that. I agree with others here that Discord helps keep a PbP game alive.

Another thing in my experience is that the games I am in that last tend to have several players in common. Some people are reliable, and you'll know who those are.

[J-H]

Most fail. It's hard to keep up a game after having players ghost repeatedly as a DM. As a player, DMs are usually the ones who ghost.

I had two 3.5 games that I ended after about 5 years. The first 6-9 months were very fast paced (multiple posts per day) but eventually slowed down to posts per week and petered out.

I have run a couple of 'successful' 5e games, where success as defined as the game having a start, middle, and end. These were shorter games running a single module, nothing long.

I think a long-term campaign is much less likely to succeed.

This applies to RL as well. Once you go past a year or more, people have work changes, family changes, and other things that impact scheduling and you have to replace players.

[Metastachydium]

Yeah. I have two completed PbP games under my belt, one as a player, one as a DM. Both were one-shots, played at a good pace. Still, "one or two pages before it dies dead" is not my experience. Most of the games I've been in here thus far went on for 4 or 5 pages at the very least, and the 9 to 13 range was more common than that. I've also been involved in a very fast, very wild one that lasted 22 pages before the DM vanished without trace and I'm currently in an another, very much alive and ongoing one that has 52 pages already (I joined at around [check] page 30). The only Discord-augmented one I'm involved in is likewise alive, albeit on-hiatus.

[DigoDragon]

I've also 'completed' a Red Hand of Doom PbP (the party wiped at the end of Act 4 of 5, so not a technical completion but near enough - it died because of a TPK rather than the interest dwindling).

I attribute much of the success of that PbP in that you communicated very well with us whenever you were going to be absent for a few days, and us players did much the same. That made a huge difference in the pacing of the game.

Also, you did an excellent job in keeping the battles moving along. RHoD was a combat heavy module, and fights can bog down games. So two kudo points to you!

Personal note, I'd play again under your GMing.

[Batcathat]

Also, you did an excellent job in keeping the battles moving along. RHoD was a combat heavy module, and fights can bog down games. So two kudo points to you!

Yeah, combat (and other rules-heavy situations) feels very likely to kill a game, especially if the players have to act in a particular order so a single missing player can make everything grind to a halt. I think all the long-lasting PBP games I've been in have been either freeform or fairly rules light.

I've been thinking about running a game in Risus or some equally simple system specifically for that reason, partly as an experiment to see if it works better.

[J-H]

On the other hand, my experience is that games fall apart in the non-combat area because everybody waits for everybody else to do something instead of having a clearly defined call for action.

[Seward]

I've been doing play by post and before that play by Email (late 80s/early 90s) for a long time, but usually with big gaps between attempts.

The fundamental flaw is that one player failing to respond can derail the entire campaign, and it is very rare to get enough characters engaged for long enough to finish even one story arc.

Best I've done is an early one where I met my future wife, play by mail back about 1990. I got thorugh an entire arc, and about 2/3 through another one before the game imploded.

These days I consider it a successful effort if the play exceeds the time polishing the character and applying.

A good result is something like this, from something I did maybe 5 years back.

Dresden Files campaign. Everybody was engaged when doing the city building (as important as the characters, similar to how a Covenant is deeply important to an Ars Magica campaign). We had a structure with several GMs offering to tell stories in that space and maybe 10ish characters, we figured we could get some fun in with that many people, especially as it's a setting and game where you can shift who shows up from seesion to session without too much difficulty (invoke an attribute and you can sideline somebody absent for a scene easily, another and somebody can happen to show up who is present).

Well...first GM vanished. I was next and got my scene started. We actually got through the first scene without losing any players, which was fairly complex, taking place with action in two settings and characters only combining near the end to investigate the fallout. They learned enough to continue, transitioned to a chase scene (both escaping pursuit and heading to the next important center of the overall conflict) and a lot of players dropped off. Fortunately it was easy to explain that, one was a sacrifice to let the others escape (with his fate unknown), others split off or went for secondary objectives, stuff that might matter in long run but was well within their ability so didn't need to happen "on camera" and characters still available if players returned.

Two players made it to the final setting, but only one made it to the final scene. They'd done enouguh that some NPCs were involved and still could find a solution, and much to my pleasure as a GM one that I'd never anticipated (even one player can still do fun things to a plot with their ideas)

We worked out together what happened long term and wrapped it up. That was on the good scale of play by post. while most involved essentially wasted most of the work, those of us who stuck with it got a story to conclusion and made use of what they left behind.

Far more typical is you get a little way in and the whole thing just falls off a cliff and you just have to make up for yourself how it ended. I've had a lot of those. It is why I don't play by post very often and when I do I have expectations firmly in check (starting with "it better be fun enough to create the character for this setting to be happy if that is all I ever get out of it")

[Myth27]

i think i played something like 10 campaign, three as a DM.
1 as DM was done from start to finish, lasted 2-3 years. only two players.
8 failed within months or less
1 I personally abandoned as a player but i know it's still going after years.

[TaiLiu]

On the other hand, my experience is that games fall apart in the non-combat area because everybody waits for everybody else to do something instead of having a clearly defined call for action.
Yeah, that's right, I think. I must've done this, too, as a player. I wonder what the solution is.


The fundamental flaw is that one player failing to respond can derail the entire campaign, and it is very rare to get enough characters engaged for long enough to finish even one story arc.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if solo campaigns might be more likely to finish. But then you lose out on all the benefits of having a party.

[J-H]

Yeah, that's right, I think. I must've done this, too, as a player. I wonder what the solution is.


Just post with a note of "Anyone else? If not, let's move along" after 3 days.

[Marcarius5555]

I enjoy the format -- but I think the time issue brought up above is a big one.

Paizo APs or something similar would probably take 5-7 years to finish w/ regular posting, and with a high level of turn over among participants in that time (but that would probably happen for a year long a campaign in real life -- I haven't found a whole lot of difference between the turn over in pbp vs. gaming real time on discord online with strangers). Peoples' lives change. Hanging with something for a year and a half is a decent participation -- it's hard to say at the beginning of something you want to do it for most of a decade. You might well enjoy a Rise of the Runelords Campaign for 3 years and decide at that point you'd had enough of it, and only be half way through it.

The time frame also makes it hard for people to keep up with -- stuff that got mentioned months or years ago just goes by the wayside and people forget what's even happening over months of time.

I tend to see it as an opportunity to try out different systems and I now pretty much focus on episodic story arcs that don't require specific characters. I also don't really care if stuff fails because I reuse material, and my worldbuilding and map folders just grow over time. That's why I set up the Midgard game we're doing right now with a very general story line that's not linked to specific character backgrounds and story arcs -- I've tried that before and the churn is too high generally for it to be worth planning stuff like that. People honestly just forget all those details too.

Fundamentally, also, a lot of people just have incompatible play styles, and pbp just makes it take longer to determine that -- but if that's the case, no one wants to play for 7 years in a game they don't really like. It's also in my experience just very hard to determine beforehand if a group and DM are going to gel in terms of play expectations and narrative style.

The pbp I don't almost ever see work, and I'm not sure work in this format really period, are the super high level gestalt games -- the mechanics become so complicated that people have to spend hours looking up all the rules interactions for their spreadsheet style combat action. Also, it's just fundamentally really hard to DM for -- PCs can ignore almost everything. Also, people that enjoy that kind of stuff also like arguing about rules, and that can really bog down character creation and combat if there's a week long argument about how, for example, RHD buy off does/should/could/might work for a particular game.

[TaiLiu]

Just post with a note of "Anyone else? If not, let's move along" after 3 days.
Yeah, that's what I used to do, too. But you gotta keep doing it over and over again. So I just got tired of it. Other people might be better at handling it.

[Marcarius5555]

I really like the format because sometimes I want to game for like 5-10 mins a day instead of trying to coordinate schedules to game for several hours. I also like having time to look up rules and make sure I actually understand stuff and have gotten rulings correct. Sometimes it's just hard to find stuff -- like I was looking up rules for spirits in Werewolf 20 the other day. They don't have attributes like other creatures and use other stats for checks with attributes. That game, like a lot of games, has thousands and thousands of pages of rules. In pbp it's easier to take the time to find the right answer to stuff. I think most enthusiasts also agree that it's easier to do more roleplaying in this format as well, and I tend to be a heavy worldbuilder, so I enjoy that aspect as well.

[clash]

Thanks for all the replies. I like the idea and the format but I feel like the casualness of the play might be it's downfall.

[Marcarius5555]

I've also had issues trying to schedule and keep people coming to live games. I'm in a live-session Swords and Wizardry campaign that just started and we're having real issues keeping enough people showing up to play.

[animorte]

Thanks for all the replies. I like the idea and the format but I feel like the casualness of the play might be it's downfall.
Probably this. I've wanted to participate in one for some time, but just looking over a few doesn't feel like it's for me.

[Marcarius5555]

I think one thing you have to be clear on is it's a very different experience from a live game -- the assumptions from one don't really carry over to the other. It has to be played and DM'd differently, and also enjoyed in a different way than a live session -- at least to be successful. Like there is no 'rush' of a fast moving combat, but you can potentially do more with strategy b/c you have more time to think about.

[TaiLiu]

I think one thing you have to be clear on is it's a very different experience from a live game -- the assumptions from one don't really carry over to the other. It has to be played and DM'd differently, and also enjoyed in a different way than a live session -- at least to be successful. Like there is no 'rush' of a fast moving combat, but you can potentially do more with strategy b/c you have more time to think about.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of talking about it. There's a lot you lose from not playing a synchronous game, but the slower pace lets you and your players write things more carefully, look up complicated spells and rules, and do things more seriously.

[Marcarius5555]

I've read some people hypothesize it's because there's a larger user base, so the population of players is less stable. I personally think a lot of it is the focus on mechanical concepts over a story pitch in a lot of recruitments -- like 'I want to play stacked gestalt Akasha' -- but without an obvious storyline to use that for. It's not that easy to come up with stories for stuff like spheres/path of war gestalt hive mind characters. I'm not staying it couldn't potentially be very fun and make an interesting story -- it's just more difficult to do the more unusual builds and rules become. That aspect of the recruitment also seems to be really secondary a lot of the time. I think it's the same with some of the more exotic WoW games like Wraith -- like it's a really interesting idea, but what exactly are characters supposed to do? All the fluff about the kingdoms of the afterlife is awesome... but still not super clear what individual characters are supposed to be doing exactly.

[Saintheart]

I can say I have finished two games as a DM. My bias is that I run 3.5, and only 3.5. One was Red Hand of Doom, albeit on another site, and that took me the better part of 10 years mainly because I didn't learn about pushing the game forward until much later. The other was a homebrew one-shot of my own devising here on GITP, and despite being relatively straightforward it took us just over 2 years to get from start to finish, and we lost all but 3 players by the end. Wasn't a particularly complicated game, though.

Part of it depends on your player base. Never mind party balance, give me at least one or two players heavily active in the OOC thread and that sucker has good odds of surviving as long as the DM chooses to stay committed to it. Fair number of games where I've played, the DM has just disappeared, which obviously kills the game. And I admit freely to being guilty of that one a couple of occasions myself.

Part of it also rests on your determination as a DM. I'm a bit stubborn on that one, if I start a game my tendency is to want to continue with it, and I have what is probably a slightly unhealthy anxiety about the thread going quiet or dying on me. More practically, although PbP might look it's suited to it, nothing more reliably kills a game than turning it into a true democracy where everyone gets polled before the group makes a decision. (Combat is its own thing.) If a game's getting slow - no followups after, I dunno, maybe 4-5 days - then I tend to take whatever the majority viewpoint is at that point and run with it. Haven't had serious objections from players with that approach. If people can't keep up that pace then they'll usually let me know and I'll always let them go without any question. Life is life, sometimes it moves pretty fast and if you don't look around once in a while you can miss it. I don't tend to impose hard deadlines on responses outside combat. I'll autoroll stuff like foraging or Knowledge or similar, waiting around three days for someone to write 'square bracket, roll, squarebracket, 1d6, squarebracket, forward slash, roll, squarebracket' is just nails down chalkboards at the best of times. Again, haven't had serious complaints yet.

As for combat, I do have modified initiative to get through the damn thing, because 3.5 initiative just does not allow a moderately complex combat to finish in less than a month, I'm happy to die in a ditch on that one. In my games, everyone's initiative gets rolled for them, and the team gets split into two groups: the ones that rolled higher initiative than the monster, and the ones that rolled lower. Ones that rolled higher, they're in Group 1. Ones that rolled lower, they're in Group 2. Group 1 gets a hard 48 hour deadline to post their actions, which are implemented in the order of posting. Miss the 48 hour deadline, your guy gets dropped to Group 2. Monsters then act. Group 2 then gets 48 hours hard deadline to post their actions, implemented in the order of posting. Anyone who misses the deadline is on total defense for the round. Seems to get through rounds fairly efficiently.

PbP can succeed, but information retention is a thing. There's more reminding people what happened a few days ago IC, but weeks or months ago in real time. There's more library posts, maybe more custom Wikis if you're that insane. But if you get the right group of people who accept the conditions under which the game is happening, you can still have magic. It can work. I don't FtF at all, all I really have the opportunity for is PbP, and these days I question whether I'd actually have it any other way.

[GreenDragonPage]

I am new here but a veteran of PBP games. In general, the issue has to do with posting frequency (slow posting leads to dead games), players not vibing with the DM's style, DMs not vibing with the players (or their characters) and/or DMs realizing the idea they had for a campaign was less well thought out or not as fun as they had imagined when they threw up the recruitment thread. Unlike IRL games, there is no social pressure keeping everyone together, so abandoning a game has zero costs (in general) to the person leaving the game. Ideas and campaigns are a dime a dozen in the world of PbP, so window shopping (ie joining/quitting in quick succession) is really common as well. In my experience, you often wind up with a massive failure to success ratio, upwards of 10 or more to 1 (maybe even double that if you are a player-only). However, the successes are often very long term affairs, lasting a year or more.

[icefractal]

I think one factor is GMs biting off more than they can chew, because the async nature makes it seem easier:
"Sure, we can use this subsystem I have no experience with, plenty of time to look stuff up"
"Sure, I can custom build all the foes"
"Sure, it can be a sandbox with both unlimited travel speed and deep content in every location"

And yeah, those are possible, but most people will quickly get burnt out trying to do them. IMO, if you wouldn't be confident including something in an in-person game, think twice before including it in PbP.

Not only GMs either - I've thought about using impractical-for-realtime characters like a polymorpher who really considers all options, or a shadowcraft mage who makes full use of the versatility, but then I think about all the unfinished character builds I've started - motivation is limited even when time is plentiful.

[J-H]

I think one factor is GMs biting off more than they can chew, because the async nature makes it seem easier:
"Sure, we can use this subsystem I have no experience with, plenty of time to look stuff up"
"Sure, I can custom build all the foes"
"Sure, it can be a sandbox with both unlimited travel speed and deep content in every location"

And yeah, those are possible, but most people will quickly get burnt out trying to do them. IMO, if you wouldn't be confident including something in an in-person game, think twice before including it in PbP.


I pre-write all of my stuff. Right now, running PBP is a way to playtest things before they go up on the DM's Guild. This also means I have a firm beginning and ending in mind, and a fairly good idea of what the PCs will do, so I don't have to worry about lots of random sandbox content that I'm not invested in.

I am currently finding that having a Discord server for OOC chat keeps everyone more involved, helps them swap ideas more quickly, and post faster. If you WFH like I do, and can do DM IC posts multiple times per day, this helps.
If you're a slow DM who posts twice a week, this may not make a difference.

[TaiLiu]

More practically, although PbP might look it's suited to it, nothing more reliably kills a game than turning it into a true democracy where everyone gets polled before the group makes a decision.
Oh, yeah. Like, these discussions can bog down a real-time game for half an hour or more. On the other hand, one thing that TTRPGs do well (in contrast to video games) is offer freedom and choice. So it's kinda weird that PBP games lose the best aspect of TTRPGs.

[Saintheart]

Oh, yeah. Like, these discussions can bog down a real-time game for half an hour or more. On the other hand, one thing that TTRPGs do well (in contrast to video games) is offer freedom and choice. So it's kinda weird that PBP games lose the best aspect of TTRPGs.

They don't lose it as such, because I take the working assumption in PbP that if you're not objecting to it, you're taken to have agreed to what's being proposed. You therefore are getting all the choice you want, you're just choosing to not disagree or choosing to remain silent. If there were really different opinions on how to approach a situation, or if people cared that much about the approach, people would voice their concerns. Hopefully this also teaches people by experience: if you think the group's doing something wrong, then you should care enough to voice your concerns, not just go with the flow. In a PbP, loss of momentum is death. All other things being equal, if it's a choice between moving forward and having a vote or further discussion, a DM should move forward.

[zlefin]

I've only had one that finished, and it only really did becuase I Dm'd it and made it finish, and it was a short module. The others all failed out for various reasons.

I'd say the core problem is the other people :P, which might sound off, but I've played some videogames by Pbem over the years, and one thing that becomes very clear over time is that some players are simply far more reliable than others. And unless you filter out the unreliable players there will be problems; the overall system on here isn't setup to filter out unreliable players; and probably at least half of players are fairly unreliable; and there's really only a core of like 10-20% of people that are truly highly reliable.
In a very small community for a game it's somewhat better, in part because when people recognize each other more the social pressure is greater, and in part because when there's few people it's easier to remember and learn who is and isn't reliable.

[TaiLiu]

They don't lose it as such, because I take the working assumption in PbP that if you're not objecting to it, you're taken to have agreed to what's being proposed. You therefore are getting all the choice you want, you're just choosing to not disagree or choosing to remain silent. If there were really different opinions on how to approach a situation, or if people cared that much about the approach, people would voice their concerns. Hopefully this also teaches people by experience: if you think the group's doing something wrong, then you should care enough to voice your concerns, not just go with the flow. In a PbP, loss of momentum is death. All other things being equal, if it's a choice between moving forward and having a vote or further discussion, a DM should move forward.
It looks like you're partly talking about players staying silent or not participating. I agree that that's a big problem in PBP games, but I was referring to its opposite—players involved in a long back and forth. This can be productive. In my synchronous game a few sessions ago, we decided to embark on a totally different path than what the discussion started off with.

But often you can't have that long back and forth in PBP games. You lose momentum. So the DM has to kinda take charge at points in a way that would be railroady or wrong in an in-person game.

I agree that you sign up for the DM doing that in a PBP game. But it still feels you need to cut off some aspects of TTRPGs when doing PBP. You gain others, so it's a tradeoff.

[animorte]

But often you can't have that long back and forth in PBP games. You lose momentum. So the DM has to kinda take charge at points in a way that would be railroady or wrong in an in-person game.

I agree that you sign up for the DM doing that in a PBP game. But it still feels you need to cut off some aspects of TTRPGs when doing PBP. You gain others, so it's a tradeoff.
TaiLiu will guide us in the ways of pbp!

I think some of it likely comes down to the players going in with the understanding that it's a completely different environment. Also communication and several other details listed here, not that I have any experience. I'm open to it though, just wouldn't really know where to begin. (The recruitment subforum, ya silly nugget).

[Thunder999]

Most of the definitely fail.

I've yet to see one of the big high level custom rule games survive, though usually it's the GM that just gives up there rather than the players just vanishing.

In fairness it usually takes a fair few tries to get a good group for a real time online game, but combined with the slow pace of the game, the slow pace of recruitment threads, and perhaps a general feeling of less commitment, PBP games tend to just die rather than replacing people.

[DigoDragon]

Part of it depends on your player base. Never mind party balance, give me at least one or two players heavily active in the OOC thread and that sucker has good odds of surviving as long as the DM chooses to stay committed to it.

I'll agree here. The pbp games that have survived to the end for me had players who keep active in the OOC side. We'll start up little "Side threads" where we can role play a scenario with just a few players while waiting for the IC to update, or discuss future downtime/sandbox plans with each other. Sometimes fanart gets made. It keeps us invested in our characters and in turn invested in the game.

[TaiLiu]

TaiLiu will guide us in the ways of pbp!

I think some of it likely comes down to the players going in with the understanding that it's a completely different environment. Also communication and several other details listed here, not that I have any experience. I'm open to it though, just wouldn't really know where to begin. (The recruitment subforum, ya silly nugget).
That's very kind. Honestly, I'm just generalizing from my experiences, and my experiences may be very particular.

Yeah, I think that's right.

[animorte]

That's very kind. Honestly, I'm just generalizing from my experiences, and my experiences may be very particular.

Yeah, I think that's right.
I'm actively seeking to partake in this venture of pbp, such that I have been stalking through the many options under "finding players." I'm not sure that I'll commit to anything, but this thread has opened up the perspective a great deal.

I don't know that it should be particularly difficult to maintain as I'm on here nearly every day anyway. It just seems like it can become a lot more to keep up with the more people there are involved and how verbose they tend to be.

[TaiLiu]

I'm actively seeking to partake in this venture of pbp, such that I have been stalking through the many options under "finding players." I'm not sure that I'll commit to anything, but this thread has opened up the perspective a great deal.

I don't know that it should be particularly difficult to maintain as I'm on here nearly every day anyway. It just seems like it can become a lot more to keep up with the more people there are involved and how verbose they tend to be.
Oh, good luck on your PBP adventures. Hope you get a game that finishes.