COVID-19 turned the world absolutely on its head. Especially for us tabletop gamers, the inability to get together physically with our friends was a real hindrance.

But even pre-and-post COVID, sometimes getting a group together to play a game can be an absolute headache, with conflicting schedules and a lack of enthusiasm.

And God forbid you enjoy one of the smaller, more obscure TTRPGs like World Wide Wrestling.

Ain’t No Feelin’ Like The LFG Blues

I like to call this affliction “the LFG Blues,” it’s that feeling you get when you really want to play a game, but no one wants to play with you.

I had this problem in spades after university, drifting apart from most of my friends as I got married and they got jobs.

To pay my bills, I had to work nights which made things even worse. It’s almost impossible to schedule a game when you’re getting up around the time it should start!

Weaving Myths

One day, when planning for one of the few in-person games I’d had a chance to run, I stumbled across a few little treasure generators hosted on this small website called “Myth-Weavers.” Lo and behold, I saw a page talking about “recruiting for games.”

I was familiar with forum-based asynchronous roleplay from my time on the Hero Machine forums back in Junior High, and I was amazed to see the website had built-in dice rollers so that not only could you do free-form roleplay as I had done in the past, but you could actually play RPGs!

It’s called play-by-post, and Myth-Weavers.com is now one of the biggest play-by-post forums in the world.

It may be shocking to learn, but this kind of asynchronous tabletop gaming originated long before the internet.

The Origins Of Asynchronous Gaming

In 1804, a Dutch lieutenant colonel played chess via correspondence with one of his officers.

Chess, in particular, lends itself well to it with its coordinate boards and regulated moves (Queen to A5 is easy to play on a board of your own to keep track of your opponent's moves and plan your own), and if you don’t care about timed turns it’s a very straightforward way to play the game.

This trend of correspondence gaming was seen among early war games and roleplaying games. In 1959, there was Diplomacy by Games Research Inc., and Hyborian War in 1985.

It only made sense that in the internet age, tabletop roleplaying games would also adopt this format.

But asynchronous gaming isn’t for everyone. It can be challenging to keep up the energy for a game, and still difficult to find a group.

Heading To The PBP Source

In the interest of learning more about play-by-post, I conducted two interviews over chat with a player called Ikul and one of Myth-Weaver’s administrators, Colin.

I asked both of them some questions about the difficulties and advantages of play-by-post over typical gaming methods, such as in-person or chat rooms.

How PbP Changs The Experience

One thing both agreed on is that play-by-post on sites like Myth-Weavers change the player/GM dynamic. Ikul called it “forms first.”

“The GM is always the one who's putting the most work into a game,” He said, “but a play-by-post format brings this to the fore, so the dynamics are different there.

A visible difference in those dynamics is that I see a lot more of the players trying to match the GM's style and expectations than the other way around, and players tend to be more incentivized to have active [buy-in] into the game.

Now Accepting Applicants!

To give a simple example, you can throw together a sheet where the most distinctive thing about your character is 'fighter, level 2' and show up to a tabletop game without much issue, but on Myth-Weavers, nobody would try to submit that as an application.”

The “application” Ikul refers to here is part of the most typical process of applying to games.

I asked Colin what this process usually looks like.

“The most common route GMs take is to have an application period with character creation guidelines, and they select their players from the applicants when the app period is over. We also from time to time see other methods, such as first come, first served,” he said.

It sounds relatively straightforward, but players put a great deal of effort into making their character applications stand out.

While the website does have built-in character sheets for most systems, a lot of players and GMs will forgo using those in favour of richly designed and laid out character sheets made using the website's formatting tools.

The Benefits And Drawbacks of PbP DnD

Both Ikul and Colin mentioned one of the biggest drawbacks to play-by-post over typical real-time gameplay: Game speed.

Games on Myth-Weavers move considerably slower than games played in real- time, or even over text chat.

“Play-by-post has, in my opinion, a notable con and a couple of pros to balance it,” Colin said. “PBP games, by their nature, move far slower than an at-the-table or live online game or something like a Discord-based game.”

“On the flip side, PBP tends to be fantastic for folks that have trouble finding time to play any live games, and posts tend to be more detailed with more roleplaying between characters than is seen in a typical live game.”

Ikul also noted that you could play the same character for many years, despite only a few weeks or days passing in-game.

He also pointed out that asynchronous play is very difficult for things like Reaction moves in games like Dungeons and Dragons by WotC, or Lancer by Massif Press, stating, “These are all things specific to PbP as a concept. They're sort of unavoidable.”

A surprising difference between live play and play-by-post that Ikul noted is that he finds maps to actually be more common in PbP than in person.

“Actually, I think I see more maps in PbP than tabletop,” He said, “partially because taking fifteen minutes to draw a map in tabletop can kill the momentum of a game, but you can take much more than that in play-by-post and not cause a noticeable delay.”

Overall, this can make play-by-post appealing to people with unusual schedules or with little time in the day to sit down with a group.

After all, it’s much easier to sit and take fifteen minutes to write a post once a day than it is to try and organise having five friends come over for a four-hour session.

But play-by-post is, by its nature, not for everyone. Still, I recommend giving it a go and seeing if it works for you!

I had a great time chatting with Ikul and Colin about Myth-Weavers and play-by-post, and hope you found their perspectives helpful.

Why Play By Post DnD Is The Cure To The LFG Blues