RPG: Playing by Post

June 8, 2017

The roleplaying community is typically populated with people who have strong tabletop roots. This isn’t surprising. After all, Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop game. However, using dice and a rules system in meat space around a gaming table isn’t the only way to roleplay. There are a great many people who play-by-post instead.

Play by post is what people do on forums, in chat rooms, and over direct messages. Sometimes games are run using a rules system in play-by-post format, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s more common not to use them. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of play-by-post D&D games, but the number of freeform paragraph roleplays out there are the rest of the iceberg in comparison.

Even if you go into play by post with the understanding that you will be using a tabletop system’s rule set, there are still some key differences between playing at the gaming table and doing a play-by-post game. For instance, you most likely won’t be sitting in the same room as the other people playing, or even necessarily playing at the same time. It isn’t uncommon to write a post and not get a response until days later.

You might want to play by post if you are interested in a looser and less restrictive format. People for whom numbers on a page are just a means to an end instead of the point of the game may find play-by-post roleplay appealing because often it doesn’t have as many rules. If you are more interested in collaborative storytelling than crunch, play by post might be your cup of tea.

If you don’t have the time to schedule a regular session at the tabletop, play by post can be far more forgiving. Your post lingers until the other player can get around to responding. This makes gaming slower and far less immediate, but in most cases some slow roleplay is better than none at all.

If you want to get very detailed with what is going on in your character’s head, play by post allows you more space to do that. You are actually writing out your part of the story, and it leaves you room to dictate your character’s thoughts and the reasoning behind their actions. If you find yourself frequently at the gaming table thinking about something your character would be thinking about, but it isn’t appropriate enough to say, play by post will allow you to work it into your descriptions.

That said, because you are writing out your posts instead of dictating your actions out loud, you are going to have to handle yourself a little bit differently than you would sitting at the gaming table.

You want to find someone who uses the same format you do. Many people participate in chat-based roleplay where posts read like a script, with the character’s name first, then dialogue and potentially actions separated by asterisks or dashes. This is good for you if you prefer a more immediate game without having to wait, or if you are inclined to write less.

Others prefer a paragraph style where your posts are written with quotations around dialogue and usually third-person descriptions, as if you and your partner are writing a book together. There is a whole spectrum of paragraph roleplay, ranging from those who only want to play and get the bare bones of what is going on laid out for the sake of playing faster, to those who want to write several paragraphs of material every post. Neither of these methods is wrong; find what works for you and find other people who want to write the same way.

If you are playing in a play-by-post game that is not using an established rules system or dice, remember that you have to check yourself. There is a certain degree of verisimilitude that is expected in a play-by-post game, and it varies as much as post length. Typically, you don’t want your character to be unstoppable. Let yourself get hit sometimes and never post as if you for sure hit another person’s character, because without armor class to dictate that for you, it is the other player’s choice. In other words, remember that even if you aren’t actually rolling dice, your character should still nat 1 sometimes.

Remember that the quality of your post is generally more important than the quantity of words in it. There are some paragraph roleplayers who will condescendingly refer to their five paragraph posts as “literate,” like the rest of us can’t read. You are under no obligation to write that much if you don’t want to. If you’re not into that, just play with other people who feel the same way.

Always give the other players something to respond to in your post to keep the ball rolling. It can be tempting to just react to things, but typically a play-by-post game won’t have a Dungeon Master to prod the party into action. You have to make your own. It doesn’t have to be physical action, and shouldn’t be 100 percent of the time. Have your character say something interesting. Have them ask questions. Nothing will make a play-by-post game stall out faster than a character sitting in a corner not wanting to talk to anybody.

In a tabletop, metagaming is what happens when you figure out how many hit points the bad guys have and use it to your advantage. In a play by post, metagaming is what happens when another player posts what their character is thinking or something that your character isn’t supposed to be aware of and you react to it anyway, and people are typically far less okay with that than most Dungeon Masters are with the first kind.

Pay attention to what is being said out loud and what is internal, and react accordingly. If you react to something on accident that you weren’t supposed to, most people will be cool about it, just explain that it was a mistake and move on.

Play by posts can be intimidating in a different way from how tabletop games are. If you’re honestly interested, don’t let huge posts and crazy formatting rules scare you off, just find a less picky game to play in. Find a group that has a similar style to what you want, just like you would with a tabletop group. And as always, don’t forget to have fun.