Learns me the D&D: Forum Style

Enc

So here's the deal. I happen to host a tiny forum with about 8 members, all friends and room-mates from back in the day. We all moved away from each other looking for work, but keep in touch heavily via Skype, Steam, and games etc. As we all have internet-based tech jobs and lots of "occasional" free time, the forum is pretty hot during working hours and all of us are usually about 9-5.

The subject recently came up about running a D&D game via the forums. Now, we've done the sort of "Forum Adventure" that you see in SE++ in the past, sometimes with MSpaint drawings, but usually not. These are fun, and usually pretty enjoyable, but the crew is looking for something a bit more structured.

So my question to you, good people of H/A, is what do you know about hosting a D&D game via forums? Do you have any advice as to what to do, what tools could be useful, etc?

Keep in mind that, outside of a few games ran in the late 90s, none of us have actual D&D experience and are pretty much getting into it from scratch.

Any and all advice is appreciated!

Dunadan019

you could look in critical failures which has a couple of D&D games running currently.

most of the info is in the OP for each game.

I'm sure someone who has hosted one of these games will come in with more specific advice.

kuhlmeye

Yes, go check out games currently being run in Critical Failures to get a feel for how the game is actually run. There are plenty currently going on, and should provide a good feel for how a forum version of D&D goes.

As for tools, most people look to Myth-Weavers to host a character sheet, or Infidel's Orokos site for hosting 4th Ed sheets made with the Character Builder. Most games use either Invisible Castle or Orokos again for dice rolling. Infidel's site has a cool dice roller that integrates with sheets made with Character Builder.

Along those lines, you should all subscribe to DnD Insider from Wizards of the Coast if you want to play 4th Edition, so you can have access to the Character Builder.

Sipex

I run one of these myself and I've got some tips that may help.

- Establish posting rules. Often one of the things that will kill a game like this is because a key member just stops posting for whatever reason and nothing gets done about it. Establish minimum amount of posts per week (usually 1 per business day is standard) and establish what happens if a player misses this (his character is taken over until he comes back, he's pushed into the background, etc).

- Get everyone to post their character sheets online, myth weavers is a good place.

- These games move SLOW so things which will speed up play are big pluses.
--Travelling should be fast forward style "Here's an overview of what happened, you're now where you want to be. Feel free to post reactions or actions that happened during the trip".
--Maybe make initiative order be an US vs them type deal. Monsters all roll initiative seperately and then you average their roll and stick them as one group with the average init. That way all your monsters go at once. After the first round players can post in order or out of order if you and they agree.
--You roll initiative for everyone when a battle starts, saves waiting for each player to roll his/her own.

- Establish resources which your players can use. If there are SRDs available, link them, if your players all have books then bonus.

- Run pre-made adventures unless you REALLY REALLY want to do your own thing. Premade adventures (at least for 4e) come with battle maps and such which can be posted online.

- At least two seperate threads for the game, one where the gameplay takes place and one for discussion and questions.

Aegis

You can also check out dndonlinegames.com for a very large online forum community dedicated to PBP games likes what you're looking for, in terms of emulating what they do for your own group.

Similarly, d20srd.org is your resource for anything D&D related on the fly (that isn't copyrighted like the stats for a Beholder).

Edit: Oh, you'll also want some form of online dieroller. If you play on something like dndonlinegames this is built into the forum software. Otherwise you can just google online dieroller for the wizards.com one and ask people post that result to your particular forum.

Terrendos

I know you said you wanted to run something on forums, but if you can all find a good time to play together, I would suggest using Maptools. It's popular both in CF and SE++. It's a little clunky and awkward, but once you get it working it's the next best thing to actually being at the table. In some ways it's actually better, because it's much easier to keep track of defenses, HP, attack bonuses, etc. and you can make custom tokens with Tokentool and never have to purchase a single mini. There's also a pretty versatile macro system that both players and DMs can use really easily.

It's completely free, which is handy, and the 4E thread in CF had (and I assume still has, but it might be a few posts down from the OP) the complete Keep on the Shadowfell campaign (which you can download for free at the WotC site) converted for use in Maptools, all your DM has to do is load it up and it's ready to go.