Quote Originally Posted by Redrobes View Post
Thanks for that. I dont have any preplanned ideas about what style to go for. I was looking for experience from others about what works. I would be cool with a free form style tho but I could imagine that others might want a more rigid - by the book approach.

I was estimating making a statement per day or so with a sort of pace of about a room per week kind of thing. Perhaps a touch faster but I cant see how it can be done unless you make statements every few hours. Would be good if you had this sort of thing running in your day job but I doubt that many people could do that. At a max I could make maybe three statements per day so if a player I might be able to move, attack and kill an opponent, choose and move to the next one and attack them in one day. Maybe I could pre plan to search the bodies and room afterward and hint at which exit to take too. All that is assuming the GM can keep up with that. Else as a GM I think that maybe one round of combat per day from the 3 statements to various people. Is this sort of pace normal ? Maybe the whole thing would be too slow. But how did people cope in a play by snail mail set up ?
In the 4E PbPs I'm in, generally a post a day is considered the bare minimum. Most make more posts than that, especially outside of combat. Combat isn't problematic so much as simply slower than other parts of the game usually are. RP between characters can go really quickly if the person you're talking to IC is online. Between NPCs it depends on how often your GM is online.

Combat is slower because, at least for 4e, you're bound by initiative order, so you can't act whenever you wish. Because of this you might find yourself waiting for a player to take their turn, or the GM to complete the combat update (where did the enemies move, what actions did they take, etc.) Many players find that a good way to make sure that combat flows well is to plan out their actions somewhat, a good strategy is to PM your GM the possible actions you wish to undertake, given certain happenings, and include the relevant rolls with that PM (we use Invisible Castle for rolls). The worst thing that can happen, then, is that the situation ends up outside of those predictions and you have to wait for that person like you would have had to anyway. Best case the GM says "so and so takes this action, next..."