Using Roll20 for an email based game

Hi, My group is having a hard time getting everyone together at the same time, so we' decided to try and do a email/forum based run of Dark Heresy. Does Roll20 work well for this? Can someone log into a campaign on here and see changes that were made since their last visit? While there is a "journal" there doesn't seem to be a true "log" of what has happened. I'm imagaing I'd use roll20 to make maps, and then screen cap and send them out in emails or the like, but maybe someone has done this before and has a better way of doing it? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I run a play by post game here and it works great. I have a few tips to offer you if you want them. Let me know and I will toss them to you.

I'd love to hear them, thanks!

I just sent you 3 tips that cover most of the problems I encountered running a play by post game here.

Oh, one other thing I forgot to say. Fog of War (and dynamic lighting if you are a subscriber) is your friend. Use it well.

Thanks for the tips, we'll give it a go and see how it pans out.

Hey Metroknight, Can you share some that wisdom over here please? Considering PbP as well.

First thing is to decide on the pace of your posting and make sure your players are aware of the slowness of it. Some will post daily, others will post once a week. As a GM you have to decide on the speed of the posting. A decent speed would be every other day. Second thing is deciding on how crunchy you want your game to be. That means know when to roll and when not to roll plus letting your players know that decision also. Third thing to think about is how to record any movement the token will make. I use the polyline to map out the path the token will move. The players don't move their tokens, the GM does. The players mark out their path. This allows you to see if they go across any traps and you can gm whisper yourself any trap checks or such then post about it. Those three things and what I said about FoW covers most of what you will need. Anything else you use or do during your normal game is fine to do also. All a pbp game is a very slow text based game. The polyline marking of movement is very important. Everything else will flow like a normal game. You will have to decide on if ooc comments will be posted in the campaign board or in the mini-forum. I let my players asked ooc questions about the game in the chat area as long as they use (ooc: question in here) to show it is ooc. Anything else needs to be posted in the mini-forum. This covers most of it. Anything else is mostly opinions on specifics in my game.

Oh, if you decide to let your players do all the rolls, setup macros for them to roll that whisper any secret results to you. This results could be ones like search for traps, secret doors, or any other roll that you would normal make that you don't want the players to know if they succeed or not. Inline rolls become very important to use also.

I thought of some else but I haven't tried it. Use the mini-forums for the actual posts while the campaign chat is used for all the mechanics of dice rolling and questions about the scene the map represents. If I run another pbp I'm going to try that maybe.

Yeah, I thought about the best place to post plot updates and what not, and I think we going to go with google groups, which creates email threads. This should hopefully allow everyone to have easy access from work where sites like roll20 might be blocked.

Metroknight said: Oh, if you decide to let your players do all the rolls, setup macros for them to roll that whisper any secret results to you. This results could be ones like search for traps, secret doors, or any other roll that you would normal make that you don't want the players to know if they succeed or not. The player rolling still sees his own Whispered roll, though. It's only the other players who wouldn't see it. If that's what you intend, that's Ok, of course. If you want the roll result to be secret from the Player, the Gm would have to whisper-roll it to themselves.

True.Gold. All it really does is reduce the chat archive clutter. I personally like to hope my players are grown up enough to work with the roll and not meta which I think I'm lucky enough to get a few good players for my pbp.

I don't have a play by post or any games at the moment on the dev. I'm working on a text based game but it is not ready to be put on the server. It will be a blend of live text and play by post. That means it might be a 24/7 game.

@Riley thanks for the tip about using space to set way points.

Waypoints are still being tested on the dev server or so I thought.