I’ve been doing Play-by-Post for over 5 years and that makes me completely unqualified to give you advice. But I’ll do it anyway. For those unfamiliar with Play-By-Posting, my series of posts on the Chatty DM about online gaming can help you get up to speed (check my About page at the top). But I wanted to tackle the fine art of the Game Ad once again.
It is an under-appreciated art. I know that, in any given forum, you can gather a bunch of potential players by doing very little work on your own part. But you can snag those people by doing anything. If you put more work and love into your game ad, you can also pick up people above and beyond those poor souls who just crave Keep On The Shadowfell and need it right now.
Like me – unless I am pretty impressed by a game ad, I won’t join a game, or even conceive of humoring that the person running it might actually make for an entertaining time, unless he or she is a personal friend, which shows my bias towards my friends rather than their ad-creation skills.
The game ad, in my view, is where you show strangers how dedicated and creative you are.
Starting The Thread
Do
•Denote which game system you are using in your title. Some PBP places have labels that do this automatically.
•Title your thread like you’d title a novel. Dramatic (or appropriate) names hook people into actually clicking on your topic.
Don’t
•Post the name of the module you’re going to run in your title. In fact, don’t mention it anywhere if at all possible.
•Use exclamation points, emoticons, boldface (if it’s even possible) etc in your title, it looks goofy.
The title is the means by which you get people to actually click on your ad in the first place. No matter how awesome a DM you are, people can quite easily glance over “Need Players For Keep On The Shadowfell.” There’s nothing there to hook me or anybody. There are, in fact, probably a dozen clones of your title gallivanting around ready to duel to see who is the real one.
Especially true for adventure modules. Everyone and their grandma is running, has run or will run these products. You have a lot of rivals for players if you’re running a module, because you and everyone else who is running the module is fundamentally hosting the same thing. So you have to work to distinguish yourself in other ways in the eyes of possible recruits. Not only that, even barring those concerns, telling them what module you’re running is just asking them to metagame. This is a PBP. They could have the module right next to them all the time as they post.
Fattening Up: Thread Content
Do
•Clearly define the rules and etiquette of your game.
•Leave yourself open to questions to cover anything you might have missed.
Don’t
•Forget you’re playing a game that has a setting, plot, and characters, no matter how wafer-thin.
•Come off as a demanding, obsessive nutjob.
The thread ad is not a procedural document that is triple-stamped, signed and turned back into you for review. It is your shot to show your DMing chops outside of the game. You absolutely need something there besides procedures, but let’s go over those first, because it’s important that you know some of the basic things you should ask for as a DM.
1. Post an application form which a player fills out to you. It should have things like their character’s Name, class/build/template/skills/whatever, and some story hooks like why the character would participate in the events that open the campaign, what the character did in the past, any enemies or allies that’d give the DM some fodder for plots, and so on. As much of it as you want or are comfortable with.
2. Demand a character sheet. No ifs, ands, or buts. This is your right. You will have a completed character sheet in your inbox or somewhere else by the end of this. If you don’t have one, don’t accept the player. There is simply no reason in an online game for the DM not to have ready access to every character.
3. Keep your applications reasonable. Regardless of what your formal PBPing education in freeform forums (shudder) taught you, the guy who can write a 6 page single-spaced character backstory in Word is not the superior roleplayer. It also does not guarantee he will be faster or more dedicated than anyone else. In fact, when you’re constantly reading 2000 word posts one after the other, you may just come to regret your decision. If backstory is mandatory, don’t also force it to be massive. It needlessly complicates the recruiting phase and turns away players to have such daunting requirements.
Especially if the DM doesn’t have impressive amounts of story or setting content in the ad to help guide this madness. If you’re going to ask for 6 page backstories, you better be ready to have six pages of your own crap right there and visible to show everyone that you’re putting in just as much effort. Otherwise you just look bad.
4. Include distinguishing content. Setting information, basic starting plots, a short story, a map, something, anything that you made yourself, can make all the difference in the world for a game ad. Like I said, there are people who don’t care about who’s DMing and just really are crapping themselves in anticipation to play Kobold Hall for their own bizarre reasons. But putting in the extra effort can bring in people like myself who want to see something of the DM beforehand. Some modicum of effort and creativity will be what truly distinguishes your thread from all the other ones. This shows that you, as the DM, have invested some effort above and beyond what was required of you. This is a good show. It is appreciated and it starts you off on a good foot with your players, and motivates them to work too.
Getting On With The Game
Do
•Have an in-character and out-of-character thread ready when recruitment is over. Link your players to them.
•Check out other posts or games in which your player participated for research.
Don’t
•Be lackadaisical – you have to keep the energy levels up at all times.
Before you choose your players, e-stalk them. Check other posts by them, because your player might be a saint in the play-by-post forum, but he might be the legendary troll of the general forums, and you don’t want that kind of time bomb on your hands. Ask people you trust on the same forum if they’ve heard of player X. Take what you hear with a grain of salt (e-grudges are all too common) but don’t dismiss it outright. All this is stuff to keep in mind. I’ve done most of the precautions before and then still recruited some horrible players because I didn’t ask my bros on the forums about the player beforehand, and they would have told me everything I painfully came to discover on my own.
Above all else, you need to keep the energy levels up. Don’t miss your deadlines. Don’t put off the game start until three weeks later. Don’t start off the game without there being any threads up anywhere. You need to be faster than everyone else. You need to be the example, the pillar. Transfer that energy to your players in the form of prompt posts, being ready for them when they’re ready, and being stern. If a player is slow to send you a sheet, nag at them. Not in a mean-spirited way. But because you have to be the electricity of your game, because nobody’s going to be that for you.
The game starts with recruitment – recruit right, and you save yourself headaches later!
You had better be sending links to this toward the folks at Mythweavers Wyatt. I’m tired of my mandatory 6 page backstories for Keep on the Shadowfell apps.
And yeah folks, seek the council of your bros for possible problem players. Make all the difference sometimes.
Don’t put off the game start until three weeks later. Don’t start off the game without there being any threads up anywhere.
ahhh crap… I have failed sensei! I must now die without honor, SEPPUKU!!!
Bookmarked, for great justice!
“Especially true for adventure modules. Everyone and their grandma is running, has run or will run these products.”
This might depend on the forum, though. I’m sure it’s true on Myth-Weavers or wherever you play, but RPGnet has pretty few D&D 4E games. There’s one guy running Demon Queen’s Enclave, one running (fleshed out) Dungeon Delve, one running 4E Village of Hommlet (meeee) and one who’s homebrewing. That’s it. Not much competition.
Playing on a forum where you’re familiar with the clientele probably helps with researching players too. RPGnet has its share of people who only post in PbP, but most will be known from the d20 subforum at least (for 4E games).
Just my 5 cents about running on RPGnet. May or may not apply to similar sites such as EnWorld.
I tend to assume the most challenging conditions possible when talking about gaming online (the position that it’s you vs the internet) because that gives motivation to do your best work. If the article started from a position that there is little competition, there’s also little incentive to do anything beyond personal satisfaction. You’d be the only game in town.
Plus I just think announcing the module you’re running to everyone just gets them to judge the module before judging you. I want to be judged first. For some people, this is a bad thing – they don’t want to handle being judged first and having the module there deflects that, people want to play for the product, not you. But I put in a lot of effort into my games, so I don’t want that overshadowed by a product name.
Advertising the module is certainly part of it. The guy that runs DQE on RPGnet is a great DM (yes, I’m playing), but he’s also running what is generally considered the best of the official WOTC modules. He’ll have a good rep if he wants to run something else later.
Me, I suppose I could have declined to mention that I was running Village of Hommlet. OTOH, when the players start out in a village called “Hommlet” and go track down a missing shipment which takes them to a “Moathouse”…
“If the article started from a position that there is little competition, there’s also little incentive to do anything beyond personal satisfaction.”
Writing an article with the assumption that it should be useful? Madness. (But you’re right. I think the difference is in that RPGnet PbP is largely a DM:s market, while players may have more options on a dedicated forum.)
[...] read a post on writing a successful PbP game ad that got me thinking about what a well-organized PbP game looks like. It’s one thing to write [...]
If you don’t mind me being completely late to the party, how do you run a published module without it becoming blatantly obvious to everyone on the internet? Or are you just saying avoid letting the name of the module be the name of the recruitment thread?
That, but also try to distinguish your run of the module from others. A lot of people buy these things and read them even if they’ve never played them. If you make a bit of effort you can file some of the serial numbers off a module’s characters and places so you don’t instantly lose people who’ve read it before. Nowadays unless you’re playing weird 3PP stuff, you can’t count on the module to have any sort of mystique because they’re so easy to research or acquire.