| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If you stick with one game, I don't see any reason it should take "several hours per night." Some days, when you're making maps (if you choose to use them) or setting up complicated encounters with lots of dice rolls or (my personal unfavorite) typing descriptions of locations or other such walls of text, it may take more than an hour, depending on your standards, but those would be the exception rather than the rule.
Think of it like being on-call at a job: Some days you're going to be working really hard, and others you're just sitting around waiting for a call. If it's your intent to post once a day (at night, for example), then just inform your putative players up front that it's a one-post-a-day pace rather than a fast-moving game enjoyed by some groups who have all-day access.
I'll tell you this: if you're running a one-post-a-day game (nothing wrong with it, that's the pace I generally set), it will take you more than a year -- maybe more than several years -- to get through an AP at that rate. I would suggest a scenario or module, if you hope actually to finish and move on to something else.
The mistake I usually see new GMs making is, after a string of days when they don't have maps/complicated encounters/Walls o'Text/etc., getting bored and succumbing to the temptation to start another game to pick up the slack. Then, when all the maps/complicated encounters/Walls o'Text fall at the same time, you will be faced with several hours per night of work and eventual burnout.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Joana knows way more than most about PBPing, so pay attention to her!
Although I’m at best an unsuccessful PBPer, I have a little perspective. For me it’s not so much the time commitment as the mental energy required. I found DMing exacerbates that, since when you hit a slowdown, the lion’s share of digging the group out of the hole generally comes from the DM.
My point being don’t make the mistake I did (of checking how much time I had free before committing) make sure you have enough creative headspace available too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. At higher levels, complicated fights can take a while, but early on? I post daily, and we're talking usually just a few minutes.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, the bigger the fight the longer you will work on posts.
A couple of notes on how to speed up (on the long run):
1) Have your players use an up-to-date stat-line (either in their profile-headers or as a bottom-line after each combat post)
-> These should include (at least):
- Their current AC/Touch/Flat-footed
- Their HP
- Saves and CMD
- Active Spells / Conditions
This will massively speed combat resolution as you do not have to browse through their profiles and look back to what happened three rounds ago.
This also neatly shifts responsibility and work to the players - which is a good thing for overtasked GMs (aka: every GM)
2) Set up and make good use of macros:
Prepare often used stuff, fully formatted in a handy (best: cloud-synchronized) notebook, so you only have to do a copy&paste for things like:
- Party-wide saves (have a complete set of saves of all types for everyone in the party, so if the party is targeted with, say a kill cloud, you just paste the party-fort-save and ... done)
- Party initiative
- Initiative/Round tracking list (if you use it - you likely do)
- attack routines for common enemies (e.g. if you have a fight with many similar enemies or your campaign is heavy on a monster type)
- (...)
For non-combat ... I rarely find myself struggling with finding enough time to bing the party ahead.
Try to stay ahead of the group half a location and write stuff up when you have the time.
E.g. the party is currently fighting to free a town from a horde of Ork bandits. While they do so, start writing up the thank speech of the town major that you know he will hold after the Orks are finished and the party is invited to stay in town for a while by the thankful citizens.
You can do that at small chunks whenever you have the time and as soon as the party 'catches up', you can simply copy-paste your prepared speech/scene description/whatever in.
I guess, those are the things that work quite well for me.
I am running one PBP, which has been ongoing for a few years. It is my first and only PBP, we've had some players come and go, but it is still going, so I guess I'm fairly successful if still relatively inexperienced as a PBP GM. One thing is that while I've sometimes been tempted to start a second game, I've decided to leave myself as GMing only one game. I think that's been critical to be sure I keep going on the one game.
At least for me, it does not take "several hours a night." But there's probably once a week where I do spend a couple hours setting up battlemaps and monster stats or some such. Combats can get complex, especially if they involve fiddly terrain and/or lots of monsters (I try to plan around that, but I'm running an AP so often just go with what the AP calls for... and if what they call for is complicated and/or provides not enough guidance for how to handle, I can find myself floundering). I find if I procrastinate posting, it is around a combat--which of course is the worst time to let a PBP sit, because everyone is waiting on you. If you feel confident with combats and/or start off with some easier ones to get the flow and feel for it, then the rest should come fairly well.
Take notes; one thing I realized recently I should have been doing all along is tracking key posts I make using the "List" feature so I can check back on something I said to be sure I don't contradict myself. :)
one thing I realized recently I should have been doing all along is tracking key posts I make using the "List" feature so I can check back on something I said to be sure I don't contradict myself. :)
That's a great idea! I'll make sure to steal that if I ever get back into running PBPs.
Yeah, the advice to prepare in advance cannot be stressed enough. When there's nothing going on, write up your next big room post. The party might go sideways, but if you're in an AP, you'll get there eventually. It really helps even out the time investment.
I read the entire AP prior to running it. Make notes about key NPCs in a notebook or spreadsheet somewhere that you can refer back to easily. That's what I mess up the most anyway. Note their personalities especially so you can role-play them consistently.
Finally, post every day.
Even if your players aren't doing much, find a little something to say to keep the momentum going. An AP, at once a day, will take 2-3 years. Players (and DMs!) can drift and lose focus, lose track of what's going on, etc. if there isn't consistency in posting rate. That way too, when life gets in the way, you know you're at least caught up up to that point - and might even have some posts 'in the can'.
DMing is great fun, and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors!
one thing I realized recently I should have been doing all along is tracking key posts I make using the "List" feature so I can check back on something I said to be sure I don't contradict myself. :)That's a great idea! I'll make sure to steal that if I ever get back into running PBPs.
:)
I read the entire AP prior to running it. Make notes about key NPCs in a notebook or spreadsheet somewhere that you can refer back to easily. That's what I mess up the most anyway. Note their personalities especially so you can role-play them consistently.
Finally, post every day.
Adding on -- I admit I read the AP, then forgot stuff, and go back and look again and go oh, crap, I forgot about that and realize I may need to change course slightly. Or just adjust accordingly depending on how PCs behave next. Which is to say, it is important to be prepared; at the same time, don't sweat it if you forget or lose track of the details, as that's a human thing to do. Just take note and work toward what you can. Keep your cheat sheets -- one nice thing about PBPs is you can both reread past action and keep everything in GoogleDrive; you don't have to shuffle books around, just have lots of browser tabs open.
Worst case scenario, it is okay to say to the PCs, "I screwed up, here's the info you actually need..." (This is true of GMing anywhere, not just PBP). It's better to fess up and restart than stress out and hope the party doesn't notice.
(And the thing is, a lot of times the players have no idea how much you're winging it unless you come out and say it.)
On the subject of posting daily--exactly how often can depend on the pace of your game of course. But I find it is a good idea to jump in and prod. Sometimes players are waiting for the GM and the GM is waiting for the players, and no one posts. Even if you have nothing to say in character/in the narrative, posting an OOC "what next, folks?" can help remind folks the spotlight's on them.
masochist_, I think it's smart that you're not going with an AP to start off. While the stories are often fantastic, their format doesn't lend themselves well to PbP. But when you are A-OK to GM an AP PbP ASAP (sorry, notsorry), one advantage to reading it first is to know where you can trim the fat.
Most APs are written to dole out experience so that players level at roughly the same rate as the AP advances, but many of the encounters are just filler that don't really add to the story (they just add to the XP). If you decide to do away with XP and just tell the players when to level (recommended), you can cut out any encounters that are less interesting and don't add much beyond XP, which will make the game progress at a better rate and free up your time for the combats and other encounters the PCs do have. Just take the treasure from those skipped encounters and add them to the non-skipped encounters or other places that make sense.