Play-by-post D&D, and the Game Master always answers

Play-by-post is the slowest way to play D&D 5e, and for many people the only one that fits a life. Rolegend keeps the format and removes the wait: post when you can, and the AI Game Master answers you then, not next week.

Why play-by-post works, and why it dies

Play-by-post is the oldest form of online play. Somebody opens a thread, a few players join, and each one posts an action when they have a spare minute. Nobody schedules a session, and a player in Sydney plays with a player in Seattle. The writing is often the best part: with a day to think, people write characters they would never voice at a table.

Ask anybody who has played on a forum, though, and they can tell you how their games ended. It is rarely a dramatic end. The posts just get further apart until nobody posts at all. The causes are always the same few, and each section below takes one of them.

The Game Master goes quiet

This is the big one. One person has to answer every player, describe every room and run every monster, and when their life gets busy the game stops for all of them. A forum game with a slow Game Master moves at the speed of that one person, however keen the players are.

Here, ROWAN, our narrator, has the Game Master's seat, and it answers a post when the post arrives. The reply comes while you wait, not days later. So the only wait in the game is for the players, which is the wait the format was built around.

A fight takes a month

On a forum, one round of combat with five players and six goblins can take two weeks. Each player waits for the post before theirs, the Game Master rolls for the goblins and posts again, and somebody forgets whose turn it is. By the third round nobody remembers why the fight started.

A fight here runs in initiative order, and the engine keeps that order. The Game Master plays every enemy on its own turn, so no player has to post for the goblins. When the turn belongs to your character and you are away, an email tells you, with one link straight to your turn. The fight goes as fast as its slowest player, and no slower.

The fight also has a real map. The Virtual Tabletop shows a token for each creature, and Keystone Engine enforces movement, difficult terrain, cover, line of sight, flanking, opportunity attacks and weapon ranges on it. Every player at the table fights on the same map. Nobody has to describe the room in a paragraph and hope everyone pictures the same one.

Nobody trusts the dice

Forum games roll in many ways: a dice bot in a Discord channel, a roller site with a link in the post, or the honour system. Each one has the same weak point. A roll and the post that uses it are two separate things, and a player who rolls badly can roll again, or forget to roll at all.

Here, Keystone Engine handles every roll, with the modifiers from your sheet, and the result is in the game state before ROWAN writes a word about it. A roll for your character waits for you to make it, and nobody can roll it again. Keystone Engine is a game engine, built apart from the AI, so the narrator cannot change a number.

Nobody can catch up on the thread

After three months a forum thread is hundreds of posts long. A new player cannot read it all, and an old player who took a break cannot find what their character carried, or how many hit points they had left.

That is the other half of the split between the engine and the narrator. Hit points, conditions, spell slots, gold and every item are stored game state, not lines buried in old posts. Your character sheet is always current. Come back after a month away, and your character is exactly where you left them, with the same wounds and the same pack.

A player vanishes

Every play-by-post game loses players, and a forum Game Master then has to write the missing character out of the story or play them badly. Here, a friend who leaves the table gives their character back to the host, who plays it from then on. The host can also free a seat, or pass the host role to a friend who stays. The party keeps its numbers, and the story keeps the character.

Alone, or a full table

Play-by-post here works with one player or with up to 6 at one table, the host included. Alone, you post when you want and get an answer each time. With friends, the same campaign is live when everyone is online together, because the table updates every few seconds, and it is play-by-post when you are not. The guide to playing D&D online with friends explains how a group starts a table.

The format stays what forum players love: time to think, time to write, and a game that fits around a life. What goes is the waiting for one person, and the arguments about whose turn it is.