For Gold and Glory - Actual Play Report #1

This is the first Actual Play report of one of my Play-by-Post games over on the RPG.net forums. For Gold and Glory is a game I'm running using the Dark Dungeons rules and I chose to run an adventure (and maybe some more later) rather than running a sandbox game. I chose to start with my favorite adventure - The Sunless Citadel, originally published for D&D 3.0. I'm basically converting it on the fly, but 95% of the monsters in the adventure are available in the Dark Dungeons book and the traps are pretty much straight out of the adventure. This campaign started back in September and we've got almost 350 posts so far, with no sign of slowing down any time soon. 

In case you missed it, I fucking love this adventure.

So, first up, here's the initial cast of characters:
Anich Larinson - 1st-level Fighter, played by Phil6294
Rowan Porter - 1st-level Thief, played by m111
Quartz Graystrike - 1st-level Dwarf, played by Sabermane
Penlin the Mighty - 1st-level Magic-User, played by thirdkingdom
Father Suril Troar - 1st-level Cleric, played by CaliberX

The adventurers, a mix of locals and roaming folk, met up in a tavern (how original, right?) in Oakhurst. While most were responding to a call for adventurers needed to take care of a local goblin tribe, Father Suril was a local priest, determined to go out to the fabled Sunless Citadel in search of his nephew, one of a band of adventurers who had gone missing in the Citadel.

A merchant approached the party and revealed the full reasons why Oakhurst put out the call for adventurers - a goblin tribe living in the bowels of the fallen fortress would ransom a single perfect apple once a year. The apple would cure any ailments, though occasionally the goblins would attempt to sell a white, sickly apple instead - where the red apple would bolster whoever ate it, the white apple would steal the life from the poor victim. Another party of adventurers, including the merchant's son and Father Suril's nephew, went into the Citadel over a month prior to the party's arrival and never returned.

Long story short, after much promised reward, the party set off for the Citadel the next morning. After a few hours walking out to the ruined Citadel, with no encounters along the way, the party reached a deep ravine surrounded by broken pillars with a rope leading down. After some debate over what to do, Penlin the Mighty grew tired of waiting, cried "Observe my decisive action as I grow bored of standing about!" and swung down on the rope to a ledge down below, only to be promptly attacked by giant rats. The rest of the party quickly followed, with the notable exception of Father Suril (who preferred to use his sling from above), and two rats were slain and the third fled. Fortunately, despite being bitten, Penlin and Quartz managed to avoid contracting a deadly plague from the rats.

After some minor patching up of wounds later, the party continued down a battered set of stairs from the ledge, leading into a ruined courtyard, beyond which laid the Sunless Citadel itself - a blasted keep that had fallen into the ravine centuries before. Deciding to press forward to the entrance, the group nearly had its first death - Rowan tumbled into a pit trap, bashing his head on the ground and dropping to zero hit points. A fortunately-timed critical save vs. death ray later and he was back up to one hit point.

After pulling Rowan out of the pit (and grabbing some loot from a goblin corpse found within), the party moved on, entering the Citadel. Their first sight was a group of slaughtered goblins, one of which was pinned to the wall with a spear. Moving on from that room, the party killed another giant rat and chose to ignore for the moment a stone door carved with an elaborate dragon.

After that, the group of intrepid adventurers made it to another room with a broken cage, a smoky firepit, and a huddled tiny humanoid covered in rags and weeping - a beleaguered kobold known as Meepo, Keeper of Dragons...

More to come soon! That covers about 150 posts up to the first week of October. We've got another two months and 200 posts to go, and hopefully I'll get that covered here in the next few days. If you guys found this at least a little interesting, please let me know - if not, I'd love to know that too and I'll go back to my other gaming content. Thanks!

Online Gaming - Play-by-Post Edition

I do a lot of gaming via forum posts. Right now, I'm playing in a 13th Age game, a Pathfinder game, and a Dark Dungeons game. I'm also running a Dark Dungeons game and an ACKS game. Over the past few years, I've had a tough time getting offline gaming groups together due to moving around, not knowing many gamers in some of the areas I've lived, and scheduling, so most of my gaming has been done online. I've played probably a dozen games over the past three years and run maybe half a dozen (including the ones I'm running now).

I know there are a lot of gamers who play online, using forums, Google+ hangouts, Roll20, or IRC/other text chat, so I figured I'd write up a few thoughts on the pros and cons of Play-by-Post (PbP) gaming. I'll also post some advice I have for playing PbP games.

Pros

1. Preparing for a PbP game isn't as intensive on the GM. You may not have less stuff to do as a PbP GM, but due to the pace of most games, you've got more time to do it. Things take more time in PbP, especially when you may only get one post a day from each player, which gives the GM more time to prepare.
2. It's much, much easier to improvise. Because of the time factor, if the PCs do something unexpected, it's usually totally fine for the GM to sleep on it rather than make an immediate decision. This generally leads to decisions and rulings that are more thought out.
3. No more worries about stopping play to look up a rule. The GM (and generally, all the players) have plenty of time between posts to look up a rule or create a suitable house-rule, in contrast to a face-to-face or real-time online game where you'd have to interrupt play to search through books and PDFs.
4. It's much less time-intensive. As a GM, the longest I've ever spent on a post was thirty minutes for a game-opening post, which I consider to be prep rather than active play. The longest I've spent on an active play post (combat, roleplaying, etc.) was about fifteen minutes where I was responding to multiple players at the same time. As a player, even with combat actions, I haven't spend more than five minutes or so on a post.
5. Scheduling isn't a problem. If all the players and GM have time for one post per day, there's almost no time taken out of everyone's daily schedule. It's much easier than setting aside three or four hours every week for five or six people to get together and play.

Cons

1. PbP is slow. Really slow. Like, one combat in Dark Dungeons can take four days to play out. That kind of slow. In a 4E game, one combat can take upwards of a week or so.
2. Player/GM interest can wane rapidly. Between the slow pace and waiting on everyone else to post, it can be really easy for a player or GM to just lose interest in a game. I always take an extra two or so players when I do my game recruiting to combat player drop-out.
3. Games die very easily. Sometimes it's a GM losing interest, sometimes it's multiple players, and sometimes it's something as simple as the GM or a couple players taking a break for a couple days (holidays, vacation, whatever reason) for a game to go on hiatus and just never come back.

Advice

Most of my advice for PbP gaming is similar to what I'd give for a regular game, with a couple PbP-specific additions. Remember, this is what works for me and is mostly focused on OSR games. Take it with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary, etc.

1. As a player, get involved. Offer to help keep the game wiki updated, offer to help map dungeons, whatever you need to do to keep interested. The more you invest in a game, the more you'll want to keep playing.
2. Let the GM make all dice rolls. It speeds the game way up and simplifies things, especially for combat. A three- or four-post back and forth discussion between the GM and a player on what dice need rolled, especially for situations where success or failure will lead to another roll, is much more time-consuming than a player including a request for a die roll in their post and the GM making that roll and any related rolls and including the results of the roll(s) in their next post.
3. Give out XP boosts. For OSR games, give out a lot of XP. Advancement in certain games takes a really long time, and in PbP, that time is even longer. To mitigate that, give out extra XP, either through story awards (The party helped the kobolds achieve a common goal instead of murdering them? Here's some extra XP!) or reaching certain goals (The group survived the dragon attack with no deaths? Everyone gets a 10% bonus on XP for that encounter.).
4. For GMs, either keep your posts short or format details using a list. People generally aren't going to want to read big blocks of text to try to find what's fluff and what's actually relevant detail. Instead of working details into a paragraph, put them in a list to make them immediately stand out and so the players know it's relevant information.
5. Have separate In-Character and Out-of-Character threads. IC threads are used for in-game roleplaying and relevant rolls. Out-of-Character threads are for anything else - metagame discussions, character build advice (if your game has character builds), brainstorming, etc.