thee liewickeder thing

Play-By-Post: A guide to help friends stick together and play more RPGs

The greatest success I have had holding together a table for playing RPGs since finishing grad school in 2022 has been via play-by-post on a Discord server I created for myself and my friends. Prior to these games, I didn't have any experience reading or participating in play-by-post/forum/letter game formats. I was aware that people could play games like that, and I could imagine the appeal which this style of play might hold for writerly types such as myself. During the quarantine, I had run games for my friends using VTTs like Roll20 and FoundryVTT; popular go-tos for groups of friends challenged by distance and scheduling conflicts, but ultimately too laborious for the GM, I felt. For myself, long resigned to having little hope that my friends and I could get together in person to play games, for the time being, I thought, why not give this play-by-post thing a try?

What I would discover is that I love this format almost, if not exactly as much, as being there in person at a table with my friends. PBP gaming is no replacement for in-person, VTT, over video or voice-chat gaming. It's like anything, a format with unique affordances that should be considered against what you and your players need and what you want. If you can't stand to be bothered doing any more writing than you already do in your day, or anymore reading than usual (don't stop now when your support means so much!!), then this format likely won't work for you.

But after a nearly a year running games in this fashion, learning on the job as we went, for GMs and players who find themselves stranded, I can safely issue one of the greatest recommendations possible: our PBP games have allowed my friends and I to play more games together.

It's taken some effort to reach a point where I can comfortably say that, however. There have been and continue to be plenty of interesting points of friction to learn from. And I do not think we would have found nearly as much success running games with the number of players we currently have in our B/X Dungeons & Dragons game if it weren't for our willingness to establish, revise, and sometimes retire conventions of PBP etiquette. It would have been easy, as well, to veer unfortunately into power-user territory, by over-engineering our Discord and making it more complicated to have intuitive roleplay experiences, rather than simpler.

I think the PBP games that you run using Discord will always be improved by considering all that you can leverage to support whatever specific system you chose. But allow me to share some fundamental things about the way I and my friends run our PBP games. These are learnings from our experience jumping blind into this thing. They may be worth copying outright or else merely just paying some thought when you're looking for ways to get you and your friends playing more games.

1. Channels and Discord Communities threads

First I would recommend making your Discord server a Community server, regardless of how many players you intend to invite to it, or whether you will make it invite-only and private.

Doing so you gain access to the Community Forum channel type. Rather than creating a specific text channel for every game, I recommend staging your games as individual threads within a Forum channel. You can combat channel sprawl like this, as each thread acts basically as its own server, but is contained within the forum, and only appears in the channel list as a child element, and then only if you interact with it.

Threads do auto-archive after a configurable amount of days, which, sadly, is a feature that cannot be entirely disabled. Accounts with higher access permissions can revive these easily by just posting in them again. But, even considering this slight inconvenience, the presentation is much neater this way, especially if you have multiple games running. And the functionality of threads is basically the same as ordinary channels.

And when it comes to creating channels, my general recommendation is to justify each channel with a specific purpose. Overwhelming your players is really something to be avoided at all costs with this format of play. Our server contains only a few channels. And each is dedicated, more or less, to hosting a single kind of information for easy access. A very basic set of channels I can recommend, in addition to the one where your game will playout, are channels dedicated to hosting your player's character sheets for each system, an out-of-character discussion channel, and another for quick access to links for downloading RPG rulebooks and the like.

2. Server roles and permissions

Roles are merely useful, but probably necessary depending on the size of your server. You can assign players roles and create channels that restrict players with those roles to certain features.

The specific use I have for server roles is to help addressing groups of players with one action, as you would addressing a table of players, without bothering everyone in the server. If you have multiple games running, for example, some players may be both Adventurers and Toons (for D&D and Toon respectively), but not all of them. If I were to announce "It is the beginning of a new round of combat @adventurers, let's declare movement and spells," then I can notify everyone involved in our D&D game without bothering our players that are only involved in our Toon game.

I also use role-restricted channels to control access to certain information. In our server we actually hide a good chunk of our roleplaying-specific channels behind these, in hopes of sparing other members who aren't involved in our games any additional clutter in the UI.

You may also find role restrictions useful for creating a private channel where you, as the GM, can write notes to yourself for later reference. In my own hidden channel I do secret dice rolls, track monster health, and pin stat blocks for easy reference later on. It's no more useful than a notepad, but I like having all this stuff together.

3. Posting guidelines and conventions

You're going to be learning a lot about how to run PBP games just within the first few weeks of your very first game. And your players will also progress at the same rate as they learn how to make use of the server you all have built. So, to speedrun some of the earliest stages in your group's development as PBP gamers, my recommendation is to codify the conventions you would like your players to practice in writing, and continuously revise them whenever necessary.

Enshrine these conventions in a pinned post or thread in your community forum. Our own pinned post is called the "Poster's Handguide to the PBP Sessions Forum", and it's the first thing I point to when a friend is curious about playing with us but can't quite imagine how it all works.

Take a stab at this, and consider it as just your first draft. A guide like this isn't meant to be set in stone, it should be revisited and revised as frequently as needed. Since you are likely to be the one member of your community who has spent the most time thinking about the logistics of playing a PBP game, and you are familiar with how your server is set up, it only makes sense for you to offer your thoughts as guidance for how you all could have the easiest and most fun time playing together. Your players will inevitably develop opinions about what they like or what they find cumbersome. Because you will have taken the initiative to establish a baseline, the idea of revising your community PBP handguide should seem a quick and simple task that everyone can take part in.

The conventions that your group will find important to codify will differ due to personalities, constraints of ability or time, the games you like to play and the style in which you play them, but I am going to recommend a few basic ones that should be compatible with any group:

Invite players to help maintain a divide between in-character and out-of-character posting. My recommendation to support this goal would be to make an OOC channel to use as the home for any general discussion among your players. Having a channel like this is useful because it will reduce the amount of off-topic or tangential posting in the thread where your games are actually played; and this results in the nice additional benefit that those threads should read pretty cleanly as a tale of your adventure, from the most recent post to the very first.

Just don't make this a totally non-negotiable separation. Allow your players to speak out of character within the game thread, but encourage them to preface their writing with a simple "ooc:" for the sake of clarity, whenever needed.

Establish the expectation that players are in charge of updating their character sheets, not the GM. This comes at the risk of exposing your players to more friction, because it requires them to maintain a digital file or an editable post somewhere within the server, but I think it also helps them to discover a sense of ownership not just over their character but in the functioning of the PBP game as well.

For our B/X Dungeons & Dragons and Toon games we have had no problem formatting our character sheets in plain text posts in our character sheet channel. But I understand other systems may require, or at least suggest at the convenience, something more sophisticated. In the event that you end up hosting your sheets outside of your server, which I think sometimes is a regrettable necessity, I just strongly urge you to have them all be publicly visible to at least the player and the GM.

Suggest a cadence for how quickly or slowly play should proceed, regardless of player activity. By this I mean state clearly that players have so many hours or days they can expect the GM to wait before moving the game forward. This convention serves to emphasize the best aspects of PBP games while reducing some of its worst. If it isn't built into the very premise, the leniency of PBP gaming seems to be a cultural assumption, something that I think attracts people toward the format. Because these games are run asynchronously, it is easier to be forgiving of slower responses when life or other interest take higher priority. But a convention like this functions as a counterbalance so your games can keep moving, which, ultimately, is what everyone participating wants.

But I recommend being lenient about this as well. Because, again, your group dynamics or the system you are playing with should determine how strictly you will need to keep to this cadence.

4. Custom emotes for making quick responses

In the spirit of supporting asynchronous participation, create some custom emotes for basic player reactions. Your group can use these to signal simple things, like an affirmative yes, statements like "I'm ready!", or sympathetic cries of pain when a character is dealt a fatal blow.

Creating ways for players to continue participating in the game without requiring them to write posts is, I think, making PBP games more accessible. A player may be too busy to write a reply when the GM asks the group "are we ready?", but may be able to still participate thanks to these sorts of basic emotes. Besides their practical uses, introducing a collection of emotes like these to your server may have the additional, bonus effect of keeping the game moving, and reducing the amount one or two word replies between the juicier posts of narration and dice rolls.

Our server has a set of emotes for these statements: No, Yes, Ready, I am worried, I have noticed something, I am interested by something, screams of agony, and I just made a horrible mistake and I am loving it.

5. High-tech solutions to meet system-specific needs

My last recommendation should also be seen as a last-resort recommendation. It's worth stating once again at the end here, as a warning, that it is very easy to veer unfortunately into power-user territory by over-engineering a server, and making it more complicated to have intuitive roleplay experiences, rather than simpler.

But it is possible to make use of bots or external services and websites without overcomplicating things. For example, a server bot can help turn the physical actions of playing RPGs in-person into digital actions, thus making your PBP games more intuitive. As a fairly basic systems, our needs as players of GURPS and B/X Dungeons & Dragons are met by using a bot like DiceMaiden to handle our dice rolls. But your system may be more complex with other physical processes or mechanics that may create too much friction for your players without additional support. You will need to consider these individually and likely address them with individual solutions as well. Just take caution to avoid falling into a trap where you find yourself inventing problems just so you can introduce ostensible solutions.

The point of this article has been to offer practical, mostly low-tech methods for building a quick to stand up infrastructure that can support a group of players interested in playing PBP roleplaying games. Everything I have recommended here should, I believe, support the culture and running of your PBP games regardless of the system your group is choosing to play. I have deliberately tried to disentangle what I think has worked for *my* games of Toon and B/X Dungeons & Dragons, as the GM of those games, and attempted to focus my recommendations around what seems to have helped keep my friend group continuously playing together over the span of a year. Thus, I hope that this article can be of practical use to GMs discovering it after doing research into the PBP format, or involved players seeking ways to help their groups accomplish the ultimate goal of sticking together and playing more RPGs.

I hope this helps. And thanks for reading.

—Braden 03.03.2026