Written roleplaying: what it is and how to play

Playing by writing, with no schedules to match: how it works, how much to write, what to do about combat and the mistakes that kill a slow campaign.

Written roleplaying means playing a game by writing, without meeting at a set time. Each person replies when they can (at lunch, in the small hours, on Sunday) and the story moves at that pace.

It offers things a voice table cannot give and has problems worth knowing before you start.

Why people end up preferring it

No schedules to match. That is why most people come, and it is what ends the most voice campaigns.

You write better than you speak. At the keyboard you have thirty seconds to think what your character would say; by voice you have two. The roleplaying comes out more careful, with lines you would not have thought of at a table.

Quiet characters exist. By voice, whoever does not interrupt does not play. In writing, the person who is slow to answer writes just as much as everyone else.

Everything is kept. The campaign from two years ago can be reread, and it reads well because it is written.

How it works, in practice

There is a channel (a chat, a forum, a thread) and the GM opens a scene:

The rain has been falling on Longford for three days. The bridge is out and the innkeeper looks at you as if he knew something he is not saying.

From there, each player writes what their character does. There are no strict turns outside combat: you write when you have something to say, respecting what the others have already written.

The GM keeps answering: what happens, what the innkeeper replies, what you can see from the bridge. When a roll is needed, you roll, everyone sees the result and you go on writing.

How much to write

What tends to work: between five and fifteen lines per post. Less and there is nothing to hold on to; more and the rest have to read a chapter before they can play.

A very useful rule: always finish by leaving something open. A question, a gesture, a door opening. If you close everything, the next person does not know what to do with it.

How often to write

Agree on it. The paces that hold up:

Pace	How it goes
Once a day	The most common. It moves at a good speed and fits a normal life.
Two or three a week	Comfortable. The campaign lasts years, but it does not die.
Several a day	Intense while it lasts, but it almost never holds.

More than the frequency, what matters is that it is the same for everyone. A group where one person writes five times a day and another once a week breaks by itself: the fast one gets bored and the slow one feels guilty.

What to settle before starting

Combat

It is the weak point, and you have to decide it in advance. A six-round combat with four players at one message a day is three weeks. Options, from most to least used:

Little combat, and make it count. Two or three fights in the whole campaign, important ones, and the rest is resolved another way.
Grouped turns. The GM resolves the whole enemy round at once, and the players declare in no strict order among themselves.
Combat by voice. You meet for half an hour, fight, and go back to text. This mixed format works very well.
Narrated resolution. One roll decides how the whole fight goes and the GM tells it. You lose tactics and gain pace.

What happens when someone disappears

It will happen. Write it down in session zero: how many days of silence before the GM moves the character in the background, and that this is not a punishment. Without that rule, the whole game ends up waiting for one person.

Who can write what

Two things to say once:

Do not write another character's actions, not even "you grab his arm and he follows you". You propose and the other player decides.
Do not narrate the result of what you attempt. "I throw the knife at him" yes; "I throw the knife at him and hit him in the neck" no. The roll and the GM decide that.

It sounds obvious, but 90% of the friction in written roleplaying comes from here.

How to write so it reads well

Third person, past or present tense, but pick one. The whole group should use the same.

Separate what is said from what is done. Dialogue on its own line, in quotation marks or with a dash. A compact paragraph mixing everything is hard to read at eleven at night on a phone.

Put what your character thinks in italics or mark it. Use it, because at a voice table nobody can read your mind and here they can.

Give the GM something to work with. If you write "I go in and look", the GM has to invent everything. If you write "I go in looking for the back door, because I don't trust the innkeeper", you have given them a scene.

You do not have to write beautifully, just clearly. Whoever starts competing in prose scares off half the group.

What you need to set it up

You need less than for a voice game:

Thing	Why
A place with separate threads or channels	So the forest scene does not mix with the city one.
Dice in plain sight	Same as by voice: everyone should see the result.
Accessible sheets	They are consulted much more than by voice, because there is time to look.
An out-of-character channel	For questions, absences and jokes. Without it, they leak into the scene.

A Discord server with threads or a forum will do, though a place built for this is more comfortable, where the sheet, the dice and the channel are in one place and nothing has to be copied by hand. In Roliando a written campaign is the same kind of campaign as a voice one and has the same tools; only how you play it changes. The campaign channels, and how to play by post at the table itself, are in Channels and campaign chat.

The mistakes that kill a written campaign

Starting with eight characters. In writing, with eight nobody can follow the scene; three or four is better.
One single scene with everyone in it. If all five are in the same room, each waits for the other four. Split the group (two at the market, two in the archive) and it will move twice as fast.
A GM who answers once a week. The pace is set by whoever runs the game, and if they do not write, nobody writes.
Letting the silence die. When the game has been stopped for four days, somebody has to write something, and that is almost always enough.
Never closing a chapter. Mark endings, like "that's the end of the bridge". They give a sense of progress, which is what you miss most in a slow game.

Who it is for

You will like it if you like writing, if you do not have two fixed hours a week, or if at voice tables you never get a turn to speak.

If what you like about roleplaying is the laugh in real time and the chaos of five people talking at once, it is not for you: that does not exist in writing, and expecting it is what disappoints many people.

If you are unsure, try it mixed: voice every two weeks and text in between. Many people who start here end up playing like this.

If you still have no group, go on to how to find a roleplaying group.