Play-by-Post campaigns have an unusually high rate of stalling. Progress is slow, and they get bogged down. I'd like to keep that from happening, so let's set up some guidelines.
Plot posts: These posts move the story forward, and they'll happen Saturday mornings. You have one week to post your actions relative to the plot post. If you miss a week, your character does nothing. If you know in advance that you will miss a week, you can leave standing orders about what you'd like your character to do, or you can designate someone else to play your character for you.
Role-playing posts: These are flavor posts, conversations and communication between party members, character ruminations, and general RP. They can happen at any time, BUT your character cannot be involved in a plot post that would take your character out of audio range. For example, if your character was talking to the mayor of Vintiver, you could not be carrying on a side conversation with someone else without breaking off the conversation with the mayor. Conversely, if you say "I give the mayor the Stink Eye and stomp off to talk to Gretchen," you have completed your turn and can participate in as many RP posts as you like. We're all going to make mistakes here, but awareness of the issue will keep it to a minimum.
Joint posts: Sometimes, two or more player characters may want to participate in a private conversation for role-playing reasons. These joint posts can be written over PM, chat, skype, or whatever, but all participants must approve the content before it becomes official. These can be posted at any time, but they follow the same rules as RP posts. A character cannot be in two places at one time.
Combat posts: This is going to get a little hairy, and updates may go up frequently during combat. Typically, I'll ask each player for an attack plan and a series of rolls in advance. Once you post the rolls, I'll inform you of the results and you can write up your descriptive combat posts as you see fit... or not. Novel-length narrative is fine, but "I hit the wolf for 8 points of damage" works, too.
Narrative length: Not everyone has time to write (or read) a novella every time the character takes a swing or engages an NPC in conversation. Some people like to write descriptive narration, and a lot of people enjoy reading it, so I'm not going to discourage your creativity, but please post the Cliff Notes summary at the top.
Examples? Yes, we'll need them. I'll post some examples in a separate thread within the next day or two.
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