Help running a FORUM rpg

I'm relatively new to the forum, I wouldn't say my skills as a GM are awful, but they are better otherwise than in online forum gming. I would gm in person, but no one lives near me. I was wondering if any forum game masters had any tips, like what works in a play by post style game thread thing.

Well, for starters, welcome aboard. I'm sure you're going to fit in fine here.

I started posting here about two years ago from very little experience to becoming a confident roleplayer and gm, so I could give you some basic pointers.

The best place to start is your preferred style of forum rp: script or prose?

Script is a simpler, faster way of posting:

This lets the roleplay move at a quick pace, which can be great if you want some punchy action scenes and such, and there's room for a bit of nuance and subtlety if done right.

Prose is a much more comprehensive and detailed posting preference:

This will understandably be slower, which can be great if you only expect to get a few posts from each player per day. Have a think about what you'd prefer for your direction, keeping in mind how intense or manageable you want to keep your rp.

Don't forget that you can always institute posting limits - often in the rp I take part in, with many players, only one post by each player can be made per gm post, to give the gm time to look over each character and react at their own pace, rather than scrambling to catch up with the faster typers.

edited 18th Nov '14 3:47:42 AM by SR3NORMANDY

From personal experience, I'd suggest making sure that you have the time to write at least one post every day. It can be hard to get a rhythm going, posting too much in a day can overwhelm Players and too little can kill a game. Players' posting frequency can vary a lot as well; so like SR 3 NORMANDY said, limiting the number of posts per Player per day can help; and for lower frequency posters, you can let them know that not posting enough might mean their character will be narrated by the GM. Or if you're mean, staring into space and drooling, even in the middle of combat.

There's articles here on Play-by-Post Games and on the Other Wiki that have plenty of examples, as PBP games been around since the '80s and on some of the earliest forums. So there's no shortage of advice and examples available online. If you're trying to get used to not taking face-to-face, a real-time chat room RP can help with the transition. There are plenty on IRC and some that are browser based. And with any RP improv guidelines can be a real help (tl;dr instead of "No." use "Yes, but..." or "Yes, and...")