I find that a realistic post rate tends to depend on the group of people you are with and what seems to work for everyone. Often tends to be checking once or twice a day in my experience. I think that is the normal post rate in most games I'm in. Though sometimes I find that you could get into more than that if you find a good time for everyone to post.

At the minimal I would say once a week is reasonable to keep games afloat. Just what I think.

If I were one to post rate requirements, that's what I'd post.

A lot depends on the game system/genre as well. I think an action heavy game like PF or a zombie apocalypse require a faster posting rate. Which, if all your players are not on the same speed, can cause a lot of frustrations. I prefer running sandbox games when I can. Each player can go at their own pace. That being said, a once a month response doesn't keep my interest long.

When I design games for PbP, I am starting to factor in what kind of posting rate I think a game will take to survive. I've decided that if it will need a post a day from everyone to keep it going, I probably won't run it.

In reply to warjoski (msg # 5):

Seconding this, it really depends on the system and the players you are working with.  To put it into context, here are three tiers of post rates:

1. Once a day posting- High action common, pathfinder, possibly D&D 3.5 or 4th or other such systems with taxing combat systems.  If you only post once a week, combat could literally take months

2. Half week to once a week posting- for slower either more strategy oriented games (like god games, nation builders, or the like), or possibly freeforms or less combat oriented systems

3. Anytime posting, or posting at least once every two weeks- slow freeform, or other types of games where the players are aware that they are moving slowly but making progress over long periods of time, for games where story takes precedence over the system

These can be altered depending on players as well, theoretically pathfinder could be played with a once a week posting speed, all the players would just have to be ok with this

I think it has less to do with the system; more the players. I have some 3.5 games where daily posting is expected; others weekly. I try not to slow down any more than that for anything though.

I see those sometimes
Basically I hope that the posting rate fits the GM (first) and then the players. The GM sets the requirement if it is included in the RTJ information.

One should always find another game if you don't agree with the RTJ requirements. That's why it is there.

My preferred posting tempo is about one post every 1-2 days, with exceptions for weekends and holiday slow-downs. Two to three posts per week is not that much to ask, in my opinion.

I would not attempt to join any game with a requirement for multiple posts in a single day. Similarly, a game with an expected daily posting rate would also be cause for concern, especially if it was a game with more than four or five players.

On the flip side, games with maybe one post per week are way too slow for me. I have left games that slowed down to that pace, just because I lose interest at that point.

I think it really depends on the ST/GM and what kind of game they want to run. In the games I run, I prefer once a day posting because I'm on every day here to kill time. I would be a multipost per day player if I wasn't a night owl.

That's sort of what my gut's been telling me, which is probably why this is driving me so crazy. a few times per week is reasonable. This means that every time you post, you have a little bit of reading, prep, and writing, which translates to maybe a few hours of time over the whole week. That's a fair request and a fair investment. It's closer to the time investment on face to face games, even if the pace is slower.

I will agree that heavy crunch games do add a ton of slow down, but I wonder how much of this can be mitigated. Again, PbP isn't face to face, so approaching the game as if it were face to face may be setting it up for failure, long before you get your minimum number of posts in. I've seen games go from a dozen posts per day to a dead stop once a fight broke out, so I know where those comments are coming from. I'm just not sure that requiring hours of daily investment is the way to succeed. But that might all be a topic for another day.

Thanks for all the input. Please keep the thoughts coming.

You are exactly right. PbP is a completely different medium than the traditional, "let's gather round the table and toss some dice" form of roleplaying. Trying to create a facsimile of the tabletop experience is a mistake, in my opinion.

It pays huge dividends to eliminate game mechanics that can eat up a lot of time in an asynchronous PbP environment. For example, interrupting mechanics are not that conducive to PbP.

There is nothing worse than taking the time to compose a post, only to have to go back and edit it later, just because another player has some special ability/power/feat that allows them to force re-rolls, etc. That sort of thing works great around the table, but in PbP, sometimes days can go by between player log-ins, and the whole game can get held up due a trumped post.

In my games, I also provide players all the information they need to resolve their own combat posts. That way it's not a case of "Mother May I" when it comes to posting actions. They can roll their own dice and immediately know whether they hit or not, and then compose their posts accordingly. There is no waiting around for days for a GM to tell them whether their attack hits or not. Stuff like that keeps the game moving, but it's a completely different way to handle combat than what you might do around the table.
This message was last edited by the user at 06:49, Thu 24 July 2014.

In reply to pawndream (msg # 12):

I do the same thing Pawn. I have a combat log thread that has all the information players need so they can roll before posting, then know what to post. I also do away with ordered initiative. I let players go first, resolve in order of posting, then act for the NPCs. I give players a day to post their actions. I find that getting rid of a static initiative really speeds up combat.

Yeah. I provide combat stats as well, but I do still use a form of initiative. Basically I have three phases of initiative: Before Enemies, Enemies, and After Enemies. So, players still get to roll, but then they are assigned to a group and can post in any order, within their group. I do it this way because it let's players roll some dice, and it's just fun to say: Roll for Initiative!

:)

I like your method as well though.

I put forewarning in my game rules/RTJ info thread that as a GM I'm unlikely to post more than 2-3 times a week for each player/group. I also ask that no-one posts more than three times in one day, because I don't want to log in and read through a page and a half to catch up. I especially hate that if there are PCs and NPCs in the scene who are standing around in zombie mode because their players didn't happen to be online for 6 consecutive hours. People shouldn't treat other players or the NPCs that way.

I also let players roll for their own initiative.  Then I let them post in whatever order they want.  After the first round of combat, I post the AC of the NPC opponents - figure that after a few seconds of combat a hero would have some idea of his opponent's capabilities.

At the end of each round, I make a summary post, which takes all of the player's actions into account, sorts them into initiative order, and resolves any anomalies (like two people killing the same enemy).

I also post a couple of times a week, barring emergencies, normally on the same days each week.  If an update is due on a Thursday, for example, and a player hasn't posted before then, his character sort of gets "swept along in the action".

My preferred posting rate is probably 3-5 posts per week, especially in games that have longer posts.  Games that require daily posts are often worth it, though, and a fast posting rate can really keep the players' interest up.

I go through seasons as an RPOLian.  Some weeks I check the site like mad, and games with only one post a day seem to drag out.  Other times, when I get busy with real-life responsibilities, it can sometimes be a struggle to post every day.  As others have posted here, it's really a matter of knowing how much you can realistically post and matching that rate to a prospective GM.  Many players do want multiple posts a day.  RPOL had a weekend-only game at one time of players whose schedules prevented them from posting during the week but who had great swathes of free time on the weekend, so they got in a high number of posts each Saturday and Sunday.  And often these multiple-posts-a-day games aren't requiring paragraphs in posts.  Many times, posts in games like that may be only a few lines.

I kind of like that. I've though about handling initative the same way that FFG Star Wars does (everyone rolls init, but they are rolling for PC slots, not when they specifically will act. Anyone can act during any PC slot, and everyone is encouraged to pass the top slots around). But your approach may be a little more elegant, since it addresses different posting rates and different availabilities.

Now, how do people feel about scene resolution as opposed to action resolution? This is an idea I've had, both on and offline. Offline, I've been pondering with the idea of having smaller, less important combats resolved in one or two "mega-rounds" of combat, using a form of mass combat rules to get everything done in one go. It would only be the big fights the break out into round by round fights. Online, of course, this could speed things up like crazy, since fights could be resolved in days instead of weeks.

What they expect:

10+ years of experience in that game system
English professor at an esteemed university level grammar
Prize winning level back ground after a flawlessly created character sheet minmax free
Socialite group pleasing personality EX. Jesus

In reply to Andrew Wilson (msg # 19):

You forgot:
-Prone to hyperbole and passive aggressive Straw Man arguments.

This was funny. I laughed.

Now to the OP's question: My games always have a posting requirement of one per day, weekends optional, but i tend to play with a rather small pool of people who know my style decently well and so things usually 'flow' a lot better than that; i've had games where we managed upwards of ten posts for every player. Which brings me to a comment made earlier re: game selection: I realize rpol lists the number of games a person has active and/or deleted below their ad, and this is all well and good; you check the games and see how many posts they have, how long they lasted, etc. to get an idea of the GM's reliability - well this doesn't work all the time.

I recently had a player admit they'd been avoiding my games for years because of that and before that feature was implemented because of perceived GM'ing style before she actually decided to check out a game of mine on a lark and found it was actually exactly what she'd wanted. I do start a lot of games that don't go anywhere; I like to do an experimental phase with a game and see if it has long-term potential. Some do, and they last a long while; some don't, and they die young. Some get resurrected later. I suppose what i'm saying is be careful about judgng people by how long their deleted/low-post games list is. It might just mean they've been around for a while or are very active and not prone to dragging out games that are no longer fun, and that is in my opinion a good thing.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:18, Thu 24 July 2014.

You certainly have to take post counts with a pinch of salt.
I like to try out and tweak free indie rule sets that I find online. Quite a few of my games are playtests for these rules (which I'm upfront about in the game, but if you're just checking post count you won't see that). Quite often, especially if the rule set is crappy, these can be abandoned within a few hundred posts at most, so I'm probably way down the post-count league tables.

You definitely need to make combat flow as quickly as possible, and I think searching for a good ruleset, rather than just using something designed for FtF, is essential. I'm not sure I could go as far as Pawndream in terms of granting player-power, but it's a step in the right direction if players are only waiting for the GM and not waiting for other players as well.

As for RTJs and post frequency, I tend to request daily posting. I find that most games slow down once the novelty wears off, and if it slows to several posts per week, that's usually comfortable.

Another reason for my choice is player-player compatibility. If you have one player who likes to post twice daily, another who posts daily, and a third who posts every second day, the longest anyone has to wait for another player is about 24/48 hours, which most people are willing to do.

If you have one player posting daily, one posting twice a week and one posting once a week, the poor daily poster has to wait a whole week before s/he can post again, and in my experience s/he'll give up and join another game.

Any game tends to run at the pace of the slowest poster, so you need to advertize your game with a posting rate as fast as you can cope with. It's a lot easier to slow players down than to speed them up!

The first thing is that the GM needs to be realistic about who s/he can and will do, and make it clear.  The two long term GMs I've seen most of aim for twice a week or so themselves, as in 'advancing the game' posts.  They usually do post more often, in response to player posts, but the minimum when the game is moving is twice a week, perhaps a little more often in combat, and players can post as often as they wish, for instance if they are having conversations, or planning something.  Both of them have times of hiatus, some planned, some not, but you can expect them to return, though I think the one is about at an end; his game has been running for years, and is now near the end, but his family/personal situation has changed, and he has trouble keeping up now.

I think once a day is unrealistic as a set requirement.  Maybe some games work that way, but it doesn't take much to make it difficult to impossible to post, and frankly the necessity of doing so every single day sounds like work, not fun.  On the other hand once a month is unlikely to keep everyone engaged.

But the main thing, IMO, is to decide what you want, what you can do yourself, and then make it plain, so that people can judge whether they can/want to maintain that pace.

It's useful for determining the sort of pace the GM wants.

I don't tend to use them anymore though.

Obviously, not everyone considers multiple daily posts realistic...but at the same time, some people have trouble staying focused on the game if they DON'T have that many posts flying around.

Realistic RTJ requirements are whatever the GM feels he/she needs to sift through applicants and find players that will fit the style of the game and mesh chemistry.  Some people are much better at that than others...

But if you want to run a game that's solely built around telling a story, and you want it to read like a collegiate-level epic narrative, you're probably going to focus on putting together RTJs that require a lot of writing and delve heavily into character backgrounds, personalities, and motivations.  If you're looking for a game that's going to run pretty much by the numbers and you aren't too worried about how much 'personality' players bring to the game, you're going to focus on stats and completed characters (or at least solid character concepts).  If you're running a casual game, you're probably not going to ask for a whole lot, really, except that people understand that you're going to have a slow posting rate and that they will need to be patient, at times...

If you read the RTJ info on a game and it seems unrealistic to you, I would take that as a strong indicator that you and the GM have very different expectations of what the game should be...and you're probably better off skipping it and finding a closer match.  And, from the flip side, if you, as a GM, have certain expectations of your players and fail to include them in your RTJ info, you've surrendered a certain degree of justification in complaining when your players don't pan out.  That's what the RTJ process if for...trying to match GM 'A' with Players 'B', 'C', and 'D'--who all would enjoy that game--while sorting out Players 'E' and 'F', who would find the GM's style of play off-putting.  Honesty in your RTJs will get you better results than trying to write them in a fashion that tries to appeal to everyone...unless your intention is to try and get a lot of RTJs that aren't really suited to your game...

The original question,

What are realistic RTJ requirements?

The following are my normal requests;

An adult statement regardless if it an adult game or not.
Post or loggin every 24 hours, weekends and holidays does not apply.
Posts should be more then one line.
No mega gamers

Sometimes - experienced players only, knowledge of system, not willing to teach.

About the heavily discussed topic so far,

If you fail to loggin or post for longer then 24 hour GM may NPC the character to keep up with other players and events.

If your not going to be around for long periods, post the time away- so both GM and player know, and follow up about every 2 weeks until your return.

If they do not login for 1 week they get an rmail asking if they will be returning or continuing, if they fail to reply to the rmail in 1 week they are dropped but welcomed to return if they find the time again.
This message was last edited by the user at 11:00, Sat 26 July 2014.

1: Statement of Age and legality to view potentially Adult content (if the game is Adult).

2: Estimated rate of posting.

3: A character idea or at least some general idea of what type of character you'd like to bring to the table. A statement of interest in filling whatever role is necessary should be considered acceptable.

4: One or more questions from the GM looking to clarify what thhe player might be looking for from the game.

5: Level of experience with the system and/or continuity.

5: One or more 'quiz questions' from a 'Read Before RTJ' section, to weed out applicants who cannot follow basic instructions. Bonus points for relevance to the game's themes.

6: A sample post in response to a hypothetical scenario, one generic enough to make the applicant's own. Perhaps, alternatively, a post from another game or setting which the applicant feels represents their writing ability.

-

So honestly, a bit work, but nothing as serious as a fully realized character and a finished sheet.

There are many games that require a full character sheet and an essay of history and personality in the RTJ. I don't apply to those games unless I'm very familiar with the game master. I used to, but I've been consistently disappointed when I have. Many times I've complied with these requests only to watch the games fizzle out shortly due to a disappearing game master. Worse than that, I've been in two games where GM's with such large and strict RTJ requirements have rather spontaneously declared the group's actions inappropriate for their larger plans and cancelled everything in a fit. Of the two destructive fits I've seen on RPOL both have come from Game Masters who require thorough and time consuming RTJ's.

Besides that, one of my favorite tabletop role playing game traditions is going through character generation along with the rest of the group! It helps arrange ties, rivalries, and get a sense of each others personalities before the game actually starts. Even if PbP diminishes this somewhat, I consider it an important part of the character creation process. Making the character under the Game Master's eye also allows for making NPC's more familiar and relevant.

Finally, it's really frustrating going through the process of making a full character knowing that there's a chance of rejection based on the character supplied. I think a general idea of what you're interested in playing is perfectly acceptable.

The process of answering those questions should also give the Game Master an adequate sense of their writing ability.