I’ve been thinking about creating a play-by-post game, or maybe a hybrid asynchronous text/live game, for quite a while now, and for some reason looking at the play-by-post option on the StartPlaying drop-down whilst creating another game a few weeks ago really kicked my thinking into high gear again.
I got my start with the concept of roleplaying through massive fandom-based livejournal communities back when I was too young to be legally using the websites I was using (remember when you could just lie about your age online?). So the theory of text-based, asynchronous roleplaying is in some ways more deeply rooted for me than tabletop gaming, which definitely informs how I think about the idea of a play-by-post game.
Namely, I have been thinking about how to retain the community-driven and player-led feel of those games while providing the structure and momentum that they often lacked… and also making a compelling case for what kind of value-added a GM can bring to a set-up that I know from experience can work perfectly fine with only casual leadership and narrative direction. Plus, how you can be the ‘master’ of the storytelling without totally undermining the collective feeling that I think makes this form so powerful and is the reason I’m interested in running it.
Despite what some of the haters said in blog posts I read while in this latest wave of obsession over this idea, I do think online and text-only communities can be very powerful (and I think the type of people who recognise that are also exactly the type of people you need to help keep a PbP game alive, so that’s handy). I’d rather play in-person, and I feel more connected to the games where I’m sitting at a table with people face-to-face… but that’s actually exactly why I’m interested in not trying to replicate that experience with a webcam, and instead trying to find a form of community and type of collective storytelling that’s meant for its medium.
This is sort of the idea at the heart of my entire creative career, I think. I love to think about how stories work, and how to find the right means to tell a story—both within the structure of the narrative itself, but also through its medium. My favourite class I ever got to teach was about adaptation, and in a lot of ways I still find it the most interesting way to look at storytelling. What happens to a story when you transfer it to a new medium? How do you retain its core elements in a new form? What even are its core elements, and how flexible are they?
And it works the other way, too: what’s at the heart of the story I want to tell? What medium will really bring that out? Or, more relevantly for this conversation, what game system? (Digression: This is the question I’d most love to help APs answer as a dramaturg. Why do we always* start with the system? What if we started with the story?)
(*I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t think about it in this order, but it doesn’t always feel that way, though I guess that might be because we treat the system as so core to marketing. Anyway, back to my point.)
In order to be happy with the set-up, I’d need to decide on a few key things to run a PbP game:
1) A setting and story that makes use of the structure.
Ironically, given my digression just now about story coming first, this is the part I’m least certain about, though there’s also a justification for that, which I’ll talk about below. There are a few general features I think would be particularly interesting to explore, though.
Players should be relatively excluded from some kind of centralised power. Crew but not officers on a starship, courtiers but not councillors in a royal court, knights but not rulers—that kind of thing. They can have an impact, they have the power of numbers and also the power to act outside of the eye of authority, but they aren’t the key decision-makers in the world. That would mesh nicely with the collective feel, the idea that there is a central authority (the GM) that they respond to but can’t always directly influence. It would also help keep things manageable if the player base is relatively large: not everyone is out here making world-changing decisions in their scenes. Rather, they have to plan and work to make an impact, or respond to events or orders that come down from above them.
2) A system that gives players autonomy.
I totally get why people hate the idea of play by post, because the idea of taking an entire day to resolve one round of D&D combat sounds agonising. But that’s very much not what I’d want to do with it.
I read some interesting suggestions about using PbtA games or Fiasco as your underlying system, because they’re more conversational, plus there are far fewer rolls and each roll is more impactful. I’m still interested in this idea—related to the first question, I feel like there’s something cool you could do with a game of Monster of the Week in the form of case reports, or Masks but actually set on social media—but I also wanted to push the potential for player autonomy even farther. I wanted a system that would encourage long scenes and conversations with a GM only minimally present, or even available to appear when called upon but not by default.
I’m a little obsessed with Belonging Outside Belonging games. I don’t feel like I’ve ever actually played one ‘correctly,’ but I love the concept and I love continuing to try and learn to play in a way that makes the system sing. So it’s sort of inevitable that my mind eventually drifted to BoB as an underlying system.
If players are empowered to track and spend their own action tokens, then the GM’s interventions can be very as-needed. Players could set up scenes between themselves (or request a scene with a NPC, but I think the default would probably be player to player), and then call in the GM when they have a question, hit an impasse, or want some kind of response from the outside world. BoB’s setting and environment character sheets could be great for this: if you’re having a scene in a forest and decide you want some outside intervention, tag a request for ‘The Haunted Forest’ and the GM can pop in to make a move.
You could divide the time between player-led scenes and GM-led prompts or events, but overall the vibe would probably be pretty interaction-heavy and low on action set-pieces. A very ‘play to find out’ energy, if that’s not too cliché.
3) A reason for the GM to be there.
I’m trying not to call this ‘value-added’ because that’s so commercial, but… well, it’s what I mean. What can the GM provide that would be impossible or just very difficult for players to arrive at as a collective? And how do you provide it without undermining the ‘no dice no masters’ ethos of the system itself?
BoB games do have Facilitators, and some of them even note that the Facilitator might not play any character roles, so it’s not completely invalid to recognise that games just run more smoothly when you have someone to keep track of things. Certainly the text-based games that I was in as a teenager often stalled or people had arguments, or there were various other things either narratively or interpersonally that could have gone better with someone to facilitate.
But I admit I want something more. I’ve realised I’m uncomfortable with ownership and authority in TTRPG spaces: I don’t want my reward for being proactive and kind of a fan of project management to be being seen as an authority at the table I’ve put together. I just want to play with like-minded people, and for all of us to feel ownership and connection to the thing we collectively create. I also don’t want to be other people’s excuse for sitting back, for not being proactive, for not taking ownership, just because they’re content for someone else to do it for them. I don’t want to just sit there pulling the strings and say I’m in charge, I want the community to feel like they have agency, and I’m providing some logistics and setting elements… and something else. Cool maps? Still working on this one, and I think the answer will feed pretty directly into what the specific narrative of the game turns out to be.
I’m experimenting with some of these ideas in a mini-PbP I’m running for a server that I’m in, and I’ve already learned a lot and have a lot of ideas for improvements for next time. When the campaign ends next month, I’m going to return to these ideas and reflect on what the experiment taught me about each of them, and share what I want to try next.