Musings on a Play by Post Campaign: It's Easier Than You Think!
After listening to a great premium episode of Between Two Cairns where Yochai and Brad discussed Play by Post campaigns, I was inspired to start a one with some of my most engaged players of my usual playgroup. I don't want to summarize the entire episode, as it is a great deep dive into the play format and worth subscribing to the Between Two Cairns Patreon, but one essential takeaway for me was to buttress the regular posting schedule with the procedures of the system to track time and keep all the players engaged with the fiction.
With this in mind, I created a point crawl with just 8 locations for my most engaged regular players and set a goal of posting once a day for myself and each player. We are using my hack of Cairn called Wilderlands, an in-progress hack to align Into the Odd style rules to a Tolkien flavor. Being almost two weeks into the campaign, I have 3 "Dos" to starting a PbP campaign that I either lucked into, or learned through this initial experience of getting the campaign off the ground.
The First Do - Through both voice and text establish expectation and scope: I was lucky to begin with a group of real life friends, and I pitched this idea to them in person. Everyone went in with the same expectations of how much to post, and the players have been keeping each other honest if someone has not yet posted without my prodding yet.
The Second Do - Give an evocative premise without boxing in the players: This is another key part of what has made this campaign fire off so strongly. The premise of the campaign is the Company has arrived in a distance corner of the world none of them have yet been to, armed with a journal that leads to a tomb of renown (The Sepulcher of Seven). Furthermore, with the Cairn style Backgrounds during character creation and a a few paragraphs on the situation in this region, the players had multiple ways to anchor their randomly rolled characters to the fiction. In fact, the first prompt I gave them as a GM was to describe their characters appearance and actions as the ship was pulling into port, and this was a great first move to help me and the other players picture the characters.
The Third Do - Format the discord to aid with clarity: There is no one best method to formatting your discord, but I will share my method and why I think it has helped me and the players to post. EDIT Yochai himself was kind enough to point me in the direction of his very own PbP template. You can go with my suggestions below, or simply leverage the template he has already built! https://discord.new/ZcPeg9F7yezd EDIT OVER I have four important channels which have helped with organization -
The gameplay channel is where I post what is happening in the world once during the evening, and each player will respond with their post. In addition, if players have clarification questions on the post, we discuss in a thread off the original post, not as a separate message. The goal is to keep as much clutter out of this channel as possible.
The plan of attack channel is where all the players discuss items like who will be buying supplies or hunting for rumors in town, who will be attacking or distracting in combat, and other actions like this. With all the gameplay coordination in one place, its harder to get lost.
The materials channel is where I post the maps, character sheets, rulebook and other essential information for the players - I am the only one who posts here, and it functions more as a repository than a forum for discussion.
Finally, we have a general chat that is used mainly for campaign related memes - this one is more important than you may think, as all my players love riffing off each other or discussing what whacky things are happening in the game.
My final takeaway for any reader is this - if you want to get more RPG time in with busy schedules but have been nervous to start a play by post campaign, I encourage you to try! With just a bit of initial investment setting up a discord and aligning expectations, I have found it works so much better than I had imagined.