I guess my question is two fold.. first for the one not as directly related to this post and forum: If anyone happens to be running a FFG Star Wars PbP game that incorporates all of the systems and could handle a new Force-Sensitive character using the FaD beta rules I'd love to hear about your game. However, I am resigning myself to the fact that, if I want to play in such a game I may have to just pony up and GM it myself.. which leads to the part of this post that may be of more interest to the readers of this forum.

I am a relatively inexperienced GM in general. I've been gaming for MANY years but mostly as a player and am not an adept and accomplished GM. I've tried running a couple Pathfinder and 5e games more recently through RPOL and find that in general it doesn't take very long for almost all the players to drop out of existence except maybe one or two.. so, what I am hoping this thread might be able to do is pull together tips and suggestions from those more experienced than me about starting and running a Play by Post game successfully.. keeping players and keeping the game going.

Personally, I am hoping to have a group go through much of the existing premade content together. Using the beginner game adventures to provide some interesting resources that might be of interest or value to players from each branch of the game as well as seeing how the different interests shape how the group might advance through these and which adventures it might cause them to show the most interest in or have the most fun with.

This game is just starting up, you might still be able to get in.

1) Regularity , not speed, of posting seems to be the thing I find that keeps people in PbP games. As a PbP GM, I've had the most luck with games where I say up front "I'm going put up a post every {unit of time}. If you don't post in that window, I'll assume you're going along with the plot." This helps people plan and work with it, rather than feeling like they have to check constantly, or like they're missing things.

2) Be descriptive, You have all the time in the world (or at least several minutes) to construct your post, particularly as GM. Plus, your players can't interrupt you because it's posted all at once. Take advantage of this write out full and atmospheric descriptions in your posts. Don't be afraid to cover a fair amount of time as well - There is definitely more Storytelling in PbP than live gaming. Plus descriptive, intriguing post keep people interested, because they want to read what's next.

3) Keep combats short. Combat can get boring very quickly in PbP, because there's not much you can do or lead with it. Thankfully FFG's star wars tends to be fairly quick anyway. Consider shifting to 1 check resolution once it's clear the heroes are going to win.

4) Accept that your probably going to lose someone. I've been in very few PbPs where we didn't have at least one member disappear within the first month or so. I have one game that's had two parties worth of characters join and drop. Just roll with it.

Regularity and Descriptive are definitely excellent suggestions.

And I fully expect people are going to drop out, it always happens.. what is disheartening is when you have 2 or 3 weeks of 6 players posting regularly, the game is moving along nicely and then suddenly you have 1 person posting.. everyone else vanishes without a word. 1 or 2 sure.. but 4 almost all at once makes one wonder why.

Are there any rules adjustments people have used for trying to help PbP run more smoothly? Or to keep it more interesting like players roll their positive dice and the GM rolls the negative dice plus any additional dice they might award as circumstantial bonuses? Or potentially the GM doing all the rolling so the players need only focus on informing the GM of what they want to try doing. But I know for me as a player I like feeling 'in control' as it were by rolling for myself.

Has anyone played in a PbP game they thought was exceptional? Does that game still have an archive up somewhere that might serve as an example to other wouldbe and starting out GMs to draw inspiration from?

For this game. Have players suggest threats/despairs/advantage/triumph results in the same post that they share their results.

Come up with how you want to handle checks being upgraded by way of Destiny points. In order to save a few back-and-forth posts, I'll sometimes include in one of my posts:

"I'm going to flip a destiny point.The next person who attacks will have their difficulty upgraded"

Rather than..

PC: "Okay I run and swing at him with my vibrosword

<6 hours later...>

GM: "All right. I'm flipping a destiny point to upgrade the difficulty of your attack"

<2 days later..>

PC: "Okay, I got 2 successes and 1 threat"

At least for our games, I avoid super complex adventures. The PCs get analysis paralysis or spend a month figuring out what to do. In the end they never come up with a solid plan so half the group takes the direct approach and the other half facepalm.

Be the sponsor of the game. Bump threads. Poke players. Send messages. Just keep the game moving. After a noticeable period of inactivity, I'll post a notice that I will move things along in a number of days unless a PC posts (I assume that the inactivity is a sign that the player or character is done with the current scene)

On a similar note, any suggestions for sites for PbP games. So far I'm kind of partial to RPOL mostly because I am familiar with it and it seems to have pretty expansive feature set but I'm not really all that well versed in what options are out there. Either for PbP or any other non-realtime method of gaming. That is, IRC and Fantasy Grounds and the like are awesome if you can get everyone online at the same time but unfortunately my availability is sporadic so I like methods where people can post/act/contribute on their own time.

I have one game being played directly on Obsidian Portal, which is convenient for checking resources/characters/etc. The rest are on independent boards on free forum sites, or self hosted sites. I've never tried RPOL, but I like the free sites for the lower number of unrelated threads, and therefore easier to see if I need to put any responses up.

RPOL has a kind of dashboard view where it shows the games you are playing in and color-codes the post count depending on if you have new posts or PMs on the game. It offers the option to have wiki pages tied to the game. It has a dice roller that is tied to each game and maintains a history that the players and GM can view with a lot of options including Star Wars EOTE dice, rolling exploding dice, rerolling certain numbers, etc... basically the mechanics of most any system can be accomplished with their roller. On each game you have one or more characters that can have text based character sheets in the profiles for easy reference. And it offers in-line private messages and messages to defined groups that can be used kind of like languages.

It really is a quite robust platform for forum gaming. If you haven't tried it I'd recommend giving it a go at least once to see what it's like.

I have one game being played directly on Obsidian Portal, which is convenient for checking resources/characters/etc. The rest are on independent boards on free forum sites, or self hosted sites. I've never tried RPOL, but I like the free sites for the lower number of unrelated threads, and therefore easier to see if I need to put any responses up.

I ran a Saga (d20) game on Obsidian several years ago. I found that while Obsidian is good for showing players game-related info, it's not a particularly good choice for actual PbP posting, compared to a dedicated forum. Using BBcode tags is easier for most players than them having to learn HTML to create pages on Obsidian.

I've been using freeforums.org for basic game posting, and Google sites (like my old Saga site ) if I need a more flexible HTML page for displaying GM-provided info than what I can do using BBcode on a phpBB-based board hosted by freeforums.org. I just provide links to a Google site from posts on a freeforums board.

Obsidian tries to provide a one-stop solution to everything a GM may need (sort of like RPOL), but I prefer to use better tools for each GMing task: good forum software for posts (phpBB in the form of freeforums.org), a place that allows for custom, powerful HTML-coded pages (Google sites), and a powerful online die roller (Orokos.com).

I'm lucky in that my players and I all came from a really dramatic and intense freeform, diceless and GM-less PbP Star Wars game (it ran for seven years!). So, we all know and like each other, and no one is likely to just disappear. That's not something you can tell someone to have, but is a wonderful basis, if you've got it.

What I'm learning is that the tone of an adventure can change drastically from what you intended if they're not there to see your face or hear your voice. In our diceless game, we were all writing a novel together. In EotE, your players might just be logging in, pastrami sandwich in one hand, to take a swing at the baddie he's fighting. So, the mood can get pretty flip. I was a bit horrified by this at first (I wrote peril , dammit!), but I now see that if players are cracking jokes in-combat or somesuch, it's because they want to... and who am I to deprive them of the game they want to play?

So if you're lucky enough to have a steady-posting player group, I'd advise leaning back and not demanding your players feel like you want them to feel.