I am contemplating refereeing a play-by-post campaign parallel to my real time online campaign of The Vaults of sha-Arthan. My primary reason for doing this is so that I can put the setting and its rules through their paces by exposure to as large a number of people as possible. However, to run a play-by-post campaign properly, I'll need a platform to host it and I have no experience with any of them. Do any readers have any recommendations in this regard? I don't need anything fancy, just a means for myself and players to make posts, both public and private. Some capacity for posting images, like maps, would likely be helpful too.
Thanks in advance!
Discord allows to post images and send private messages, you can add bots that handle dice rolls too (or ambient music if you want)
ReplyDeleteYou can probably do everything you want just with Google Docs, but if you're interested in something a bit fancier Obsidian Portal is pretty good and pretty easy to use. It's not terribly expensive; you can get a lot of use out of it free, but some of the stuff you're looking for like private player content and private/invite only areas are only in the paid version.
ReplyDeleteI use rpgcrossing.com, does everything you want it to, has a dice roller embedded, ability to make parts of posts secret for particular players,, can embed pictures, music, videos, etc. Really friendly and helpful posters there if you have any problems. I've been running a home brew rules version of Masks of Nyarlathotep there for the last year, and having a whale of a time.
ReplyDeleteRpol.net is a pretty good platform for play-by-post games, in my experience. It has a lot of built-in features available but is still easy to use. It's also free.
ReplyDeleteI second this recommendation. I've been GMing play-by-post games continually for over eleven years on rpol.net. Yes, eleven years without pause. All of it on rpol.net. It can handle everything you've inquired about, and it's absolutely free and easy to use.
DeleteIn the play by post realm, I have always liked Unseen Servant over many of the other public ones. Simple forum structure and easy enough to have forums for individual players that no other player can look into.
ReplyDeleteAnother high five for Unseen Servant. Great community.
DeleteIndeed, I am a member there myself. It comes with it's own character sheet repository (AD&D focused) and dice roller too!
DeleteI've actually had the most success in using a blogging platform to play-by-posts:
ReplyDeletehttps://barrierpeaksrpg.wordpress.com/adventure-archive/
Every play-by-post I have participated in used proboards, ala Dragonsfoot and ODD74.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.proboards.com
I even once created my own! Was not hard, but there is a learning curve.
I've been playing on Role Play Online (RPoL) for years. It uses clunky old message board design (they have a new more modern interface but I still use the old one), but has everything you need to run a game, including a really handy die roller.
ReplyDeletehttps://rpol.net/
I second Discord. Have run a couple of games there. Also, Role Gate looked promising.
ReplyDeleteRoleGate is more a play by text environment. I've not seen any private areas unless they have updated the interface.
DeleteOr, if the need of playing in real time , I'd check out Owlbear Rodeo. It's the best free VTT I've found and the closest that feels like a Chessex battle mat.
ReplyDeleteI'm in some PbP games via both RPOL and Discord...and I much prefer Discord. I've also run a PbP game via Discord and it is much better to use as a DM...easier to use on phones and tablets, too.
ReplyDeleteAbout Owlbear Rodeo: it's a pretty cool virtual tabletop, I've used it to run a few sessions of my OSR Frankenstein-clone, the issue I had was that it didn't keep in memory the game's status from one session to the other. But I think you can save to local, or something like that.
ReplyDelete