Discussing Play-by-post design, part 1
Play-by-post design is like street art. It’s everywhere if you care to look for it.
Welcome to part 1 of this series. In this installment, I aim to analyze and articulate the unspoken mechanisms of play-by-post and provide a more robust design language and foundation for play-by-post design.
At the time of writing, I have not found any major writings on the play-by-post format. In light of that, I’ve decided to try to write down a lot of my thoughts about play-by-post design so others can learn from our collective trials and experience and hopefully further the development of play-by-post games.
Part and Parcel: Innumerable Siloed Communities
There is a fundamental innocence in the idea that regardless of where you go, people will find a way to play with each other. If someone could leave a mark somewhere, another person can respond and connect beyond the confines of synchronicity or physicality. It transforms into a mural that boldly proclaims to the world that I existed and that you have found me.
Virtual spaces are community spaces. They are places where people can congregate, talk, explore, and play together. Except in a digital space, we can only communicate with each other by altering the very space we navigate. Messages hang in the air for everyone to see. Forum posts don’t leave once their contents are understood. Every bit of communication is an artifact of play, much like the playful writings on a school blackboard before it’s wiped away.
And yet, we can only express through what we are allowed to alter, confined by the architecture of the digital space, its layout, and the tools it provides. One must first learn to navigate the space before learning the rules of the game. It is here where designers and moderators of play-by-post campaigns see beyond what was intended. While they can’t construct new elements, they can design over the virtual space itself, augmenting and reframing its features.
Which leads us to the first thesis: you cannot separate play-by-post design from the medium they’re played on.
Any website can suddenly become a colorful tapestry of collective storytelling. While the basics of play-by-post only require someone to leave a message, the surrounding architecture heavily influences future interactions. Facebook pages transform into character sheets. Discord bots automate prompts and dice rolling. Tumblr hashtags enable almost seamless out-of-character conversations between replies. The list of examples goes on and on.
As time goes on, the differences in features and interactions cultivate different play-by-post cultures. They begin to reimagine how their platform operates in ways that most users may never even realize were possible. These new perspectives emerged from a collective desire to make the hobby more fluid and enjoyable, crystallizing over time to make the most with the tools available.
For example, X (formerly Twitter) doesn’t have any natural means of separating communities, which enabled the idea of ‘multiverses’ and made ‘cross-universe’ roleplaying more culturally accepted.
When I first learned about this, it was a challenging concept to fully digest, but it illustrates the point. This degree of freedom can feel very out of place if you’re used to play-by-post spaces on forums or Discord, where everything tends to be neatly organized. However, the site’s design makes it feel natural to explore the possibility for the same character to exist in spaces beyond their natural ‘universe.’
All play-by-post experiences have unspoken rules and limitations, shaped not by the design of the campaign or roleplay but by the website itself. Solutions and ideas for one platform do not necessarily translate well to another platform, which makes cross-pollination extremely difficult. To guarantee two different play-by-post designers can understand each other, they would both need intimate knowledge of the features and limitations of each other’s platforms.
Despite these dissimilarities, common terms and ideas end up resurfacing in different communities, and we can create a foundation for play-by-post design theory from there.
Unboxing Expectations: The Fragility of the Magic Circle
LARPS have talked extensively about the concept of the magic circle. For those who haven’t heard about it, the magic circle is the boundary between the real world and the shared imagined space. When we enter the game space, we enter the magic circle and adopt a new set of social rules that help separate you from your character. When the time comes for the game or session to end, we leave the magic circle, and we allow ourselves to return to reality.
However, the magic circle is permeable. Whenever the boundaries are dissolved in some way, such as when the emotional state of the player affects the character or vice versa, this is called bleed. I would rather not delve too much into the details of how bleed works, but the article “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character” is a fantastic starting point if you want to look more into the concept.
The difficulty is that play-by-post is not a concentrated format. The experience is never in a single moment or session of play. Instead, you’re free to simply walk away when needed and reply later on. In fact, it’s expected that you do. By default, play-by-post players flit back and forth over the veil between the fictional world and the real world. Play is highly diffused outside the context of the game.
If you were to talk to someone in a play-by-post campaign, they might share that moments outside the game are fertile spaces for them to idly contemplate the experience: what to reply, how to structure it, organizing a mental timeline of events, etc. In epistolary games, the wait and anticipation for the letter is part of the game’s narrative. Forum roleplays often have OOC spaces or chat rooms to idly discuss their lives within the same platform where they roleplay. I know people in Lacie’s Box who read a reply in the morning and use their working hours to passively cultivate a response once they clock out.
However, it means bleed is a bigger risk in play-by-post games. From personal experience, I know interpersonal drama tends to split apart or even destroy whole communities. I’ve heard how much drama has happened in various MUDs and JCINK forums. Those who have run large-scale West Marches campaigns know how often group conflicts can flare up from both in-character and out-of-character decisions.
All of this points toward requiring strong community design and management, or at the very least, someone skilled enough to be the heart of the community. This tends to be an underexplored aspect of running play-by-post games. The magic circle needs to be reinforced.
I’ve seen several communities come up with really great and novel ways to patch up the magic circle. A lot of them revolve around transparency and communication. I wish I could provide a link to those ideas, but those communities are gone now, along with the knowledge and experience they’ve accumulated over the years.
Messages in a Bottle: Foundations in Asynchronicity
Time plays a unique role in play-by-post games because the experience is fundamentally asynchronous. Inevitably, play-by-post groups have to answer the question of how to handle and manage time. In all variations that I’ve seen, time is both the fertile field in which creativity blossoms and the slowly approaching reaper that kills all interest and energy.
Play-by-post’s main appeal is that it doesn’t require everyone to be present at the same time or place. Players can reply at their convenience, regardless of time or location. One can say it’s like a typical live tabletop game except actions take much longer to resolve, or that it’s like a solo TRPG except you are playing the same game with multiple people. However, based on my personal experience, you can’t approach play-by-post design in the same way.
Whenever someone makes changes in the shared fiction space in most live-play games (by declaring an action, making banter, resolving mechanics, etc.), all players listening are synchronized in their general understanding of the imagined space. If there are any issues, one can ask in the moment. Synchronization can come quickly. In solo TRPGs, you are the bottleneck for synchronization, since you are the only person inhabiting that fiction space.
However, in play-by-post games, one cannot assume when a player has seen the updated fiction space, nor can anyone assume how often or fast they can respond. A player can read the situation in the morning, then have two of their fellow players reply without that first player knowing. At that point, the first player is now desynchronized from the collective imagination. Their version of the fiction space is not the same as the current fiction space. To resynchronize, the player has to read through all the unread replies before they can make their own.
This phenomenon can be the reason why some play-by-post groups can feel like a gathering of soliloquies. If someone drafts a reply from a desynchronized state, the effort to resynchronize can become disruptive. This aspect is also the reason why long-standing play-by-post communities put in effort to create global moments of synchronization, like newspapers, event announcements, or segregating periods into various eras and chapters.
The specific hurdle that play-by-post communities attempt to clear is finding the balance between synchronicity and latency. The more time allowed between replies, the more likely it is to desynchronize. Naturally, there are exceptions. I know a number of 1-on-1 roleplayers have experienced receiving a massive, well-written reply after half a year has passed.
The reply rate, the time it takes for one person to make a reply, is the key metric for understanding activity. Knowing the group’s default reply rate, or even your desired reply rate, will help in developing systems and procedures that help see what is needed to maintain an acceptable level of synchronicity without putting too much pressure on the players to reply quickly.
The mechanics and systems used to address asynchronicity are ripe for experimentation. Different play-by-post communities have found what works best for them. Some groups impose a time limit for replies before forcing the fiction space to move forward in time. Some schedule a time for a more “live” play because that works for their players. Lacie’s Box makes heavy use of parallel engagement to minimize the number of people who need to be synchronized.
Return to Sender: Passing the Letter Back to You
This whole series is meant to be part archiving, part commentating, and part reflecting on the Lacie’s Box community and the play-by-post format that I have held dear to my heart since I joined in 2019. I doubt this is the first time these ideas have been shared, but I still hope these writings help propel play-by-post design more into general TRPG consciousness and design theory.
In particular, I want to see more people design with play-by-post in mind. Many wonderful games and systems have come out the past decade, but few are well-suited for play-by-post. In fact, a lot of play-by-post communities have to modify the system and structure to accommodate this style of play, something I am intimately aware of since I am in one of them.
I also want to open discussions on more safety tools that can work with play-by-post. The thin permeability of the format’s magic circle and asynchronous nature make play-by-post incompatible with a lot of modern safety tools. Many safety tools rely on immediate action and a soft reset of the fiction space, which can be extremely difficult and disruptive for play-by-post. Preventative measures work fine, but ideally, it would be nice to have a solution that can help during play.
I have my thoughts on each of them, but I’ll reserve them for another post. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you learned something today.
May you be well.
In case you haven’t read it:
In Part 1, I discussed the unspoken mechanisms and challenges of play-by-post gaming, particularly focusing on the difficulties associated with cross-cultural discussions, the fragility of the magic circle, and the unique role that time plays in our games.
In Part 2, I discussed four essential concepts related to play-by-posts: synchronization, liquid time, anticipation, and parallel timelines.
For Part 3, I plan to explore the factors that contribute to a system’s adaptability for play-by-post games, as well as various techniques I have encountered for modifying these systems.
Interested in learning or discussing more about play-by-post design? Feel free to contact us at [email protected].
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