The Digital Toolkit: How I Run My Play-by-Post Games

Tools and Tech I'm Using for Play-by-Post

In the first part of this series, I talked about why I dove headlong into play-by-post. If you haven't read part one yet, head HERE. I talk about the system I chose, which isn’t released yet (Legend in the Mist), and shared how I went about searching for players. All of this is important. But I'm a tech sort of guy, so my next step was figuring out which technology I needed to make this game a reality. So I started researching the origins of play-by-post games.

Where It All Began: A Brief History of Play-by-Post RPGs

Before I get into the tools I’m using now, let’s take a quick look at how play-by-post games evolved.

If we jump in the way-back time machine to the 1980s—a time that to me feels like 15 years ago but is really 40-some years ago—we'll find the early days of both TTRPGs and the internet. Some argue that play-by-post actually began with snail mail. And I'm not saying this isn't true. I mean, back then I was still a youngin learning about the world. But for me, I’m going to focus more on the play-by-post that happened on local bulletin boards and forums. If you want to see what Wikipedia has to say about play-by-post, you can check out the Play-by-post role-playing game wiki page.

One of the things to note is the variety of MUDs (multi-user dungeons) that were available during the early years of the internet. These were the first multiplayer dungeon games. This I do have experience with. My dad at the time had a computer and access to a couple of MUDs. So at the ripe old age of 10, I was playing these. This would have been around 1988ish. And it was the coolest thing ever. If I had been a bit older then, I can imagine myself diving into TTRPGs and PbP games. Instead, I transitioned to Nintendo and Magic: The Gathering in its original state.

So back to the crux of the matter—play-by-post games were done on local bulletin boards and forums. People would post back and forth and create a story. Early versions didn’t use a game system necessarily. And player-versus-player combat was something that occurred more frequently than what I see today. As the internet evolved and AOL and Yahoo Chat became more common, this type of roleplaying became easier to access. So in all of this, we have to understand that play-by-post is not a new thing. Which means I had options for how I wanted to host my game. And in the end, my decision came down to ease of use and what I already had prepared—Discord.

Why I Chose Discord to Host the Game (And How I Set It Up)

(Discord is a free chat and voice communication app often used by gamers and communities.)

Now, I run a Discord server for all things Role for Perception. My wife hosts games from Start Playing, I run podcasts and Twitch streams, and generally have discussions with people about TTRPGs as a whole. So of course I thought this would be the perfect place to host the game. Did I explore other possibilities? Yes. In the past I’ve built phpBB, WordPress, and even some base HTML/CSS type boards. All of these work perfectly fine. And truthfully, there’s a sense of nostalgia when it comes to old bulletin board setups. I was in my prime on my computer in the early 2000s, and bulletin boards were everywhere. And they were awesome. In the end though, I chose Discord due to already being set up, mostly.

My first step was figuring out how to control who could see what. So I set some roles. We have our GM role, as we have four GMs who rotate and help as needed. Then we have our Viewer role. This role is for people who are interested in the game but have no desire to play at this time. This allows them the capability to read everything without being able to type in any of the channels. I know I like reading other people’s roleplay—it can be interesting, funny, or just generally epic. I wanted to make sure that people who wanted to go this route could. And finally, we have our players. They have the capability to chat in any of the channels. That’s why I created easy-to-navigate categories and channels.

My first category contains general type channels that give information and instructions. Game-Info deals with a general overview of the area and backstory—nothing too fancy. Channels-Rules-Expectations covers exactly what it says. I went fairly in-depth here because I wanted to try and cover everything that might come up. Did I do a perfect job? No. And I’ll probably keep adding and subtracting as the game progresses. But I tried my best to cover everything.

Next up is Character-Setup, which focuses on the creation of your character and Tupper. (Tupper is a Discord bot that helps format roleplay posts as characters.) I’ll cover Tupper in a later post, but this channel explains how to go about creating your Tupper so your statements come from your character and not you.

Character-Sheets comes next, where each player links their sheet and then I approve them with a green checkmark. We, of course, have an OOC-Channel for all the out-of-character discussion. This is helpful when things come up in-game and you don’t want to mess with the roleplay channels. Our Tupperbox-Practice channel is for practicing your character commands. And then a hidden channel, GM-Only-Discussions, for all the GMs to chat about things.

The second section contains all the current Roleplay channels. This section will expand or contract as the game progresses. With the infrastructure in place and character sheets ready, we were set to bring our story to life.

Building Characters in a New System (Thanks, Google Sheets!)

This was probably my second most difficult decision. Since I’m using a system that hasn’t been fully released yet, I knew there wouldn’t be much in the way of online character sheets. So I headed over to the City of Mist Discord and did some searching. I found immediately that there had been some modules developed for Foundry VTT. These would work great if I were running a live game. But as we know, this is not a live game.

I kept searching and found a post by Brotha Skeltor (James). He had developed a full character sheet in Google Sheets. But that’s not all he did.

He had created multiple tabs of super-useable sheets. This included two types of Hero Sheets, a Sample PC Sheet, Theme Kits, Tropes, Challenges, and Vignettes. First off, it’s people like this in the community that make tabletop roleplaying groups so wonderful. Someone took the time to create such a complex sheet that we can use in games. And we’ve definitely used it. All my players have quickly taken the character sheet and developed complex and interesting characters for our campaign. So that went way easier than I had thought.

In the next post, I’ll talk about Tupperbox and how I use it to help my players really get into the roleplay!