Ideas for a GURPS play by post? Insight needed!

[Raekai]

Copied from my post on /r/rpg here. There's a pretty good community there, but I knew that I also had to ask you guys!

Hello, all.

I have been running and playing games with the General Universal Role Playing System for a long time, and my GM has been playing for way longer than I have. After running a couple campaigns that died out fairly quickly, I think I am ready to take the reigns once again!

One of my biggest problems was availability. People were out of town, people had to work, people had projects to be doing. The worst times were when I had something planned out, but someone had to cancel last minute.

However, play by post seems to really cut those problems down. Yet, I've never done something like that before. I know that there are different IRCs and different forums and sites to use, but I have no idea of which one(s) might be best for me and my group. The group will be 4-7 people (I haven't approached them all, but I know that several will be willing to play), and, like I said, I'll be running the General Universal Role Playing System. This might sound crazy, but I would really like a site that is simple but robust.

I want to be able to log in and take up whatever names I need to as a GM. This is going to be very story like, so I want to be able to call myself GM when I'm acting as myself or Bob Thunderbutt if I'm role-playing that NPC. Players could also differentiate from being Sam My Friend or Sam the Warrior if need be. A dice roll mechanic would be great. However, I'm really looking for a way to somehow integrate actual dice rolling. Video feeds? I dunno. I thought I heard of a site that had Google Hangouts integration. We all use Google for stuff like that. I really trust my players to roll and tell the truth, and I've always found that virtual dice are really... Bleh. To each their own, of course! Furthermore, I'd like to be able to direct message players or have something appear as scrambled to other players if it's in a language that only a couple characters can understand. Of course, I'm not too worried about that. It seems like a weird feature that not a lot of places would have. Some kind of Excel integration would be nice. Or just charts... Floating charts? I dunno. I write up characters and monsters in Excel since it just seems to work well with the General Universal Role Playing System. Or something with a wiki! I could have sworn that there was a site like that... As a final note, if this play by post system could be accessed across devices, then that would be awesome too. Tablets seem to be the way that people are going these days! Oh ****. That made me sound old.

I don't know too much about this stuff, and that's why I'm coming to you guys. Most of the games that I have played, I have played them around a table. No game has ever been too concerned about a hex board or miniatures for knitty-gritty stuff. We're all creative people and we like to tell a balanced story with rules (hence why we actually use a game system and don't just free style). This time around, I just want it to be fun, and I want everything to work out well.

In advance, thank you all who are willing to help me.

TL;DR - I'm looking for a play by post medium preferably with some or many rich features (video, name change, dice rolling, wiki, whatever) but remains simple, and can also be used across devices.

[Humabout]

As a medium, Myth-Weavers offers a LOT of power to the GM. You can set visibility for any thread, post, or part of a post among any number of players in the game. I successfully (while it lasted) ran an amnesia game with four players, each only seeing their own information as they slowly discovered who they were, encountered each other, and responded to their setting. You can do some extremely immersive stuff there.

The GURPS community there isn't very limited, either, and includes a couple of other forumites, from what I've seen. Personally disliking PbP as a medium, I have stopped being active there, but I'd certainly recommend the site for anyone looking to run such games. Excellent tools for sure.

[Purple Haze]

I have used : http://rpol.net/

It is the best I have found.

[ericthered]

I can't tell you what site gives what. I can give pointers on PbP:

Strict 'you need to go next' situations are your enemy, and will slow down your game like nothing else. Yes, this includes a lot of combat-- use judiciously.

It sounds like while you may have players slow down, you don't plan on random drops... PbP is notorious for players disapearing at any time in the plot.

Don't be stickler for linear action... I often have players posting on three different threads of a conversation that 'in game' happen one after the other, not mixed with each other.

Try to make choices meaningful... each post is costly in terms of time and lag, and taking a 'post cycle' just to say 'well then I look in the chest' gets old fast. Statements of intent can really help to speed things up, and don't be afraid to encourage players telling you their plans (which means not abusing the information!).

[Agent]

Agree with Humabout, here. Myth-Weavers all the way. :-)

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Strict 'you need to go next' situations are your enemy, and will slow down your game like nothing else. Yes, this includes a lot of combat-- use judiciously.

Ask your players to post or send you their combat tactics in detail ahead of time, then perform the rolls yourself and post the results. You should aim for "automating" such scenes from one decision point to another rather than turn-to-turn. Thus, rather than wait for a player to post, "I take an Attack maneuver; I swing my sword at the thing's torso," he should post something like, "I'll hack at the thing with my sword as long as I don't get hurt, but if I do I'll let the second-line fighter in to take over. I'll use the best defense roll available at any given time." Then as long as the situation doesn't change, you go through as many turns of combat as needed and post all the results at once.

Players who really catch on to this style of play can end up giving you very long lists of contingencies to contingencies, and this is a good thing. The more they explain what they want, the more you can do it for them all at once.

This is true not only of combat, but any situation that requires multiple rolls. In general, "What do I need to do X?" "Skill Y" "Roll Z" "Here's what happened" can be condensed down to "I want to do X" "You roll Z against Y and here's what happened." Trusting players won't even need the "you roll Z against Y" part.

[ClayDowling]

I would suggest trying something closer to Google+ hangouts first, if that's possible. It doesn't have all of the cool tools. But it's simple to set up and simple to use. You can do screen sharing, and it allows both video and text chat (great for side conversations).

You can set up a wiki via sites like http://www.rpg-campaign.net or Obsidian Portal to handle your book keeping. If you have some shared webspace you can even set up a wiki on your own (I prefer dokuwiki).