Streamlining Mechanics, Part II

I had left two items off my previous post about streamlining mechanics in play by post gaming, and am adding them here:

4. Eliminating Save v. Uselessness. There's a fair amount of complaining in face to face games about effects that remove a player character for all or most of a combat's duration. This is for a combat that might take a half hour to a couple of hours to resolve in real time. Imagine what that would be like in a play by post game, where a large, involved combat might take a week of real time to resolve. Now imagine that your character was, in the first round, targeted by a Hold Person spell, or paralyzed by a ghoul, and they've got to sit around for a few days and wait for everyone else to finish up. For this reason I try to cut back on effects that take player characters totally out of participation: paralysis, fear effects that cause them to flee, etc. Sometimes it is necessary (or when a character dies) for this to happen, but when it does I make my best effort to wrap things up as quickly as possible so that everyone can get back to participating. Additionally, since I'm running OSR games, there are typically some henchmen around, and if it looks like a PC will be out for awhile I'll let the player run a henchman.

5. Fast leveling. Because it is so slow it takes much longer for characters to level, so I typically increase the amount of XP characters receive. My standard is to double the XP from defeating monsters and increase the XP from treasure by 1.5. I ran one game for about two years where the rate of advancement was about 1.5 levels per year.