Dialog Vignettes in Play-By-Post

It occurs to me that for the longest time I have not been taking much advantage of the play-by-post medium like I could have been. Granted, it can become chaotic, but having multiple threads with ongoing, canonical game conversation can greatly improve the play experience in my opinion. Hear me out – this is more than just having an IC thread and an OOC thread.

One of the things that people like best about play-by-post is the nigh-unlimited ability to develop character. Play-by-posts are expected to be slow, and more narrative-driven than other formats (including VTTs and chat, which can be but not to this extent) and so conversations in them can be enormous and lengthy. It’s fun being able to talk in-character with NPCs and PCs and develop story between them. However, “downtime talk” of this sort (that is to say, dialog outside events which don’t contribute to driving the game directly forward through important encounters) can present an obstacle to the next important plot point. Say the PCs make camp for the night and want to share war stories of their adventuring days or something. As a DM that’s into story, I’m obliged to let them keep talking amongst themselves, but this prevents me from skipping ahead to after the extended rest and getting on with the next day’s events. Or rather, if I do tell them to hurry up, I’m quashing something that could’ve been an amusing scene and develop camaraderie between the PCs.

This was me about a month ago, anyway. Since then, I realized I don’t have to quash anything. I feel rather dumb not having thought of this before, because I know there’s people out there who do this. But rather, what I could have done is to create a new thread in the forum for “Vignettes.” I would have the PCs “datestamp” their posts in the vignette thread to link them to a scene occurring in the main game. The vignette (in this case, the campfire conversation) can occur unmolested in its own parallel thread while in the game, we push the extended rest and march onward.

There are problems with this you have to watch out for. You want the PCs to keep rolling and mechanics to a minimum here, because they could give themselves the benefit of hindsight and foresight by cunningly referring to the future in your main game within the vignette, such as making monster knowledge checks at that particular point in order to not be surprised within the main game, or something else weird. This is easy enough to stamp out – tell them not to do it – but you have to be wary. Vignettes should be canonical the game. Characters should remember these conversations and what they entail, and they should be brought up later on as part of the game’s development. But you have to be careful when and how they are. Unless you don’t mind being taken advantage of in that way, I personally would find it a bit jarring.

It could also become a bit of an organizational mess, where you have multiple threads with a timeline zig-zagging between them. You might not care, or you might design a separate thread specifically for keeping a chronology of this information.

I would not put important things into these (what D&D 4e would call an “encounter”). Those should all be in the main thread to keep them well sorted. But rather, if the PCs are feeling very chatty about nothing of consequence, you can have them do a vignette about it, and continue with the important plot meanwhile.

Finally, you should have a beginning and an end to vignettes. The campfire talk should not be half as long as the total of your current campaign. The longer they go on, the weirder the parallel events of the main thread seem in context, and the greater the chance that foresight could start creeping into the vignette. Know when to wrap it up!