Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Don't worry, there's plenty of time

Since we've delved into some of the issues of play by post gaming, let's take a look at some of the positives. The first thing I really like about running pbp is that the slow pace actually works to my advantage: it reduces prep time and allows me to be improvisational (I'm not great at running games on the fly IRL, but am much better in pbp).

I run very sandboxy games, which can be difficult to do in face to face; they either rely on the DM preparing a massive amount of stuff beforehand (which I find difficult to do, because of IRL time constraints) or be an excellent improvisational DM (which I'm not). Because pbp games take an inherently long time -- it might take 24 hours or more for the party to reach a decision on what to do -- it gives me time to work on the game in advance.

For instance, at the beginning of a game I might throw out a half-dozen plot hooks for the players. None of these are fully developed, but are instead just broadly sketched out. If I give them four dungeons, a band of brigands preying on travelers and a fearsome man-eating beast roaming the woods I can get a basic idea of what each entails. I'll determine the size of the dungeons, what each contains, etc., but I don't actually draw them, or place treasure, or anything. I roll to determine the number of bandits, and what kind of beast it is (these two, btw, are placed on the Random Wilderness Encounter table for the nearby areas, and may be encountered independently). Then I let the players loose, and pay attention to what they're talking about. They'll spend a day or two discussing their plans and what to do, and if it seems like they've decided on a specific course of action I'll go ahead and draw up that dungeon, or bandit camp, or whatever.

It's at this point that I start to develop whatever it is they're going after (ignoring the other hooks). You can safely assume that whatever course your players decide on will take at least two to three weeks of real time to play through -- often longer. That gives me plenty of time to develop the dungeon they're exploring as well as work on other aspects of the game.

Since I'm a pretty lazy DM I rely largely upon random encounters to build my world. They're quick to roll-up and they require little thought on my part to drive things forward. I've found that, looking back through the games I've run, some of the best and most memorable encounters and NPCs have been those generated randomly. Again, because I've got time from when an encounter is first made to when the players react to the encounter I can fully write up and develop what the encounter is and how it integrates into the world. From the players' side of the screen they can't tell if I've just made something up or if this is an encounter that has always been there.

Given that it takes time to play out, I'm never caught flat-footed by what the players chose to do, and I never have to worry about them changing course mid-stream and chasing after something else, because I've got the time to figure out what needs to happen. From the players' side of the screen it seems flawlessly integrated. This works well with my personality (slightly lazy) and DMing skills (not that great at improvisation IRL).

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