anahata's page

A good show of faith would be offering wrongly fired employees their old jobs back. With pay raises, bonuses, extended paid time off, and paid counseling to address the emotional trauma you've willingly and knowingly inflicted.

This sounds a lot like Golden Sky Stories in some ways. How combat-oriented is it? I was going to be in a Golden Sky Stories game but that didn't work out, so I'd love to play something like it that's not as combat-oriented.

(would edit my post but don't seem to be able to... another feature request...)

Adding on to my previous post, RSS is a really poor solution for following a lot of threads due to the maintenance onus on the user doing the subscribing. If I'm following several threads, then it makes sense to make it easier for me to see which ones have been updated all in one place. Most other forums provide this, it's an obviously valuable feature.

This spam post has been standing for a week at this point. I flagged it but it's still there. Is there anything else we can do to be more helpful with pointing out spam?

Are there still no plans to support following a thread? I'd like something that works on a faster basis than RSS (unless you're okay with me hitting your site every 10-20 minutes...). Additionally, have you reconsidered email notifications? It could be a lot of email, but there are services these days that make that kind of thing feasible.

Steve Geddes wrote:

For me it’s not so much the time commitment as the mental energy required.

This. My first attempt at a PbP on these boards failed after a couple of years. My second one passed 2 years a couple months back, mainly because I learned some lessons.

Yep, I can absolutely see how that's a thing. I can see the mental effort becoming something one procrastinates and then it becomes too much to manage. Yep, definitely something to keep in mind, thank you both!

Here's a good one for PbP: PDFs and cut-and-paste are your friends. BIG time-savers, whether for a room's description or a complicated monster/NPC's special abilities.

I've used PDFs before with roll20 and found them helpful (aside from lining things up on their grid, I wonder if that's any better these days). I was running a RotRL campaign on roll20 and used a program to extract all the images all at once. Pretty handy. Something I'll keep in mind for PbP.

Another tip: Prepare and organize before starting the game. I try to put stuff I know I'll use over and over again (macros for PC Initiative rolls, Initiative Order tables, etc.) into a Word document and then cut-and-paste (and edit) as needed. A Standard Operating Procedure (who does what at a door, Appraise and Knowledge checks, etc.) document with macros likewise can save time.

I made a document with blank stat blocks with imbedded macros for stuff like Initiative, Saving Throws, Attacks, Skill Checks, and more; at the top I inserted an empty table. When I had free time, I filled those in with the information for the AP adventure I was running, added the monster/NPC name to the table, and linked them with bookmarks and inter-document hyperlinks. When I had free time, I worked on these stat blocks, concentrating on the ones I'd likely need first. Now, with the PCs facing the dreaded Nox, I just click her name in the table and am taken to her statblock, where all the necessary macros needed to roll her attacks, saves, and whatnot are waiting to be cut-and-pasted into my post.

Anyhow, long story short, it was a time-consuming process but done on my schedule. I'm finishing up the first book of the Hell's Rebels AP now, but I've already got all the stat blocks for the second book in my macro-ready document, all set to go. I'm feeling very little pressure in my GM's seat, and as a result, very little worry of burnout.

This is lovely advice, thank you! I'll do my best to incorporate all of that. I can see that it would take time, but yes, as you said, done on your time. That definitely helps. Doing as much as I can ahead will certainly help.

it probably depends on whether you're running a published adventure or homebrewing your own. Just like in person games, those require different levels of preparation and work.

Either way, my suggestion is, do as much work up front as you can muster, before even posting a recruitment thread. You'll likely go several moths before you need to do any more heavy planning again.

I can see a pattern in all these replies... definitely seems like I was letting my anxiety get the best of me.

Thank you all for all of your advice, and I'll keep it in mind as I do more with PbPs.

Thank you for the advice and the reassurance. It sounds like we may have very different unfavorites: typing descriptions seems like it would be less time consuming than all the fiddly map stuff. And, as I sit here trying to identify for myself *what, specifically* would take all this time, I'm having trouble identifying something specific.

I've done on-call rotations before, so I can absolutely understand the comparison there. That's a really good way to think about it, thank you. :) I definitely would be doing one post per day, at least until I'm confident that I can do more (and I imagine a good way to measure that would be seeing if I'm actually doing it before guaranteeing that I can).

I absolutely don't intend to start with an AP, even though that is my ultimate goal. I've absorbed what I've read from the guides enough, and seen things fail enough myself, to know that doing an AP as PbP is a serious commitment, and if I'm being honest with myself is definitely beyond what I can commit to right now, at least before I know how long things will take me.

That last point is quite insightful, and definitely speaks to my personality type. I know that I can be the procrastinator who finishes things all at once, so I'm going to need to temper that if I want to do something PbP, or any other kind of GMing.

Another bit of advice I saw, which I'm definitely going to take, is to play in several games before even attempting to GM so I can reacquaint myself with everything and get comfortable with how it all works, again, before taking on the added pressure of GMing.

In sum, thank you for the reassurances, and thank you for helping me realize that, yes, I was anxietying myself into a corner.

On an entirely unrelated nerd note, I had to look up putative. I think I knew it once upon a time, but had to refresh my memory. Thank you for that. :D

Trying to get back into PbP after a while away from it, reading through the sticky threads here makes me think that it's going to take several hours per night to do everything suggested if I want to be a really good PbP GM. Am I really misjudging the amount of time it will take? Will it actually be like that for a while until I'm able to become comfortable with it? How do I get to the point that it takes less time? I can never find the kind of game I want to play, so that leaves running it, but I can't have something that takes hours per night to run. Thoughts? Am I just anxietying myself into a corner here?