Play By Post

I have recently begun dabbling in Play-By-Post gaming instead of my usual in-person games, or my other fairly recent foray into Webcam gaming.

I find myself enjoying Play-By-Post, or PbP, very much. I have opted for a variety where I have 24 hours between posts, and the players can read the post and leave a comment saying what they're going to do at any point within those 24 hours. It means I can play with people all around the world without needing to sync up timezones. It means that I have time to consider how to continue the story if something changes. It also means I can accommodate many more players than normal.

I was recently introduced to the West Marches style of play, where a group of 5 to 50 players break up into individual parties and leave town, questing as they do, and then meeting back up in town, rearranging themselves into new parties, and heading out again. All mapping and information is shared between players instead of having an overall master document. This encourages players to keep their own records, and also allows a version of what would really happen, such as players tricking each other, or false information spreading if someone makes a mistake.

In my PbP game, I currently have around a dozen players in two parts of the game world. It's my own setting and I take full advantage of my experience with older game books to help inform some of my decisions. My favourite is my alternative to wizard spellbooks. In the second edition AD&D Player's Handbook, there are some very interesting passage. One that sticks with me is the idea of alternatives to spellbooks for wizards. The concept is meant to reflect that a wizard has their spells stored somewhere, and they simply need to access this thing once a day in order to memorise the spells. This thing needs to be able to be accessed by other wizards if they get around your defenses, or you choose to share, so a voice in your head or a personal vision won't do. It also needs to be something you can improve upon over time. To this end, one of the suggestions is a huge stone wall or carving, much like the Elder Scrolls franchise proposed for their game Skyrim, where you learn special abilities that function similar to spells by finding them engraved in stone shrines. I loved this idea since I read it years ago, a wizard deep in a cave inscribing spell after spell on a massive wall, this monument to magical ability being left for the ages after they're gone. It's an epic-scale spell book, and with it being immovable it becomes something that you can have dotted around the landscape, enticing adventurers and villains to seek them out.

There's nothing to stop you changing this again to something like a sentient flying stone, like the Ioun Stones Psionicists use; it could speak to you every morning in a special code, something a fellow wizard can decode over time and use just as you do, just like a spell book. Instead it could be built into the familiar, and so capturing another wizard's familiar (and keeping them alive) becomes a whole thing.

The mechanics of the game are so versatile in this way, but modern gamers, I find, rarely take advantage of it in this way. I do strongly believe that part of this is the commodification of D&D for a wider audience; in trying to simplify things, they cut the extraneous options and verbage that explained how it's the bare naked mechanics that are the kernal of the thing. Everything else is filler, narrative and preference. Don't like the Monks having magic punches? Well, make it special Ki that disrupts normal resistances. The mechanics are the same, but the description changes.

In my PbP game, I have large crystal Monoliths that act as stationary spellbooks, naturally occuring that are waiting to be discovered. It creates a goldrush whenever one is discovered, explorers among the most powerful and sought-after individuals, it makes castles more robust in a magical setting since most wizards can't travel too far from their power source without losing efficacy and thus can't be as devastating to large stone fortifications. It's a small change that alters how my world works. And I love it.

Feel more free to make changes like this. It will make your game more "you".