Pacing, the main drawback of pbp gaming

I'll start of by discussing the main, in my mind, drawback to pbp gaming: pace. Play by post gaming is, in the best conditions, slow. In the worst conditions it can be sloooooooooooow. When it starts to get really slow, people start to disengage, which means they post less frequently or even at all, and it becomes this sort of giant snowball that eventually kills a game. There are several aspects that drive the slow pace of the game, but what it basically boils down to is the medium itself: someone makes a post, and people respond to it. This can take time. People in a single game can be across an entire country, or even on different continents, and don't respond right away once a post is made. It can take a week or more to resolve a single combat, and months to clear a standard size dungeon.

I've learned some strategies for dealing with the slow pace of pbp gaming, which can be broken down into the following three "M"s (I just thought of that):

1. Momentum. The first two months of a pbp game are critical. If you can keep up a good, engaging pace for that time the players will become invested in their characters, you'll become invested in the world, and it makes it much easier to maintain that pace.

2. Mechanics. This is two-fold. Play by post games work best, I think, when using games that have simple, straightforward mechanics, that don't rely on a lot of back and forth (such as opposed rolls). It also helps if the DM is the one making all the rolls. This removes some player agency (at least, it does for some folks), but really streamlines action. The players post what they want to attempt, the GM makes a bunch of rolls, then posts the results.

3. Missions. As I've been running games I've been leaning gradually towards smaller and smaller dungeons. The pace of pbp gaming is just too slow, I think, to realistically tackle megadungeons, without losing momentum. Because I roll all the dice, and because large combats can get overwhelming to run, I've been adapting some stuff from newer games, chiefly 5e. Giving solo monsters lair or legendary actions allow you to run encounters with fewer numbers, which helps keep the DM workload down.

In my next post I'll explore the specific issues of slow game play and how the three Ms can be used to speed things up.