A month ago, a few of you told me PbP tools are all built for the GM and leave the player as a spectator. I took that seriously and here's what came out of it.
A few weeks ago I posted here about RoleKey, the play-by-post platform I'm building. A few threads raised a point that turned out to be pretty important to me:
- u/Maleficent-Rain7119 rightly pointed out that a good chunk of play-by-post people are just players, not necessarily GMs, so the platform should also host something for players, something like "what happened in the games I play in while I was away?"
- u/Deep_Ad1959 raised an important point: a GM uses a given tool to make their own work easier, but a player chooses it for a single, narrative purpose. And a world doesn't survive unless players come back to visit it on their own, without you having to keep prompting them.
So, with those ideas in mind, here's what I built:
1. A player identity: I'll be straight about the limit first: a character does not travel between worlds, and if a world gets deleted, its characters go with it. You know, a character built on one world's races, rules and setting is meaningless in another. What I built instead is one level up, where portability actually makes sense: you, the player. You get a real profile (avatar, bio, interests, the characters you're currently playing across different worlds, your history on the forum and so on) so instead of being an anonymous handle inside someone else's server, you're a person a GM can actually look at: how you write, what you've played, whether you'd fit their table. The character still belongs to its world. But you stop being disposable the second you walk out of one. And every profile has its own visibility controls: you decide whether to show all of it, part of it, or nothing at all.
2. A home that opens on your games: When you log in you land on your own worlds, the ones you run and the ones you just play in, together on one page instead of a global directory. And above them sits a "what's new while you were away" digest: not a generic unread dot, but the actual changes per world (like new threads, new lore, new characters) so you can see what moved without opening each game to check. That last part is the one thing Discord can't give you
3. The gamification I killed, and the kind I kept: My instinct was classic gamification: word-count streaks, "you wrote 12k words this month," currencies you earn just by writing. Some of you told me not to, and you were right: rewarding volume punishes the player who writes 200 brilliant words a week and keeps a whole scene alive. So that whole idea is gone. What's left is not tied to how much you write: a few cosmetics and milestone-style achievements ("played in a world," "ran your first game," "been around a while"), nothing that touches the actual scene
Anyway, I'm not posting a feature list to show off. This is where the player side stands right now: it works, but there's more coming and I'm still filling in corners. So I've got a question for the players here:
What's the one thing that would make a player's home page actually worth opening between sessions?
Not whether you'd open it, but what would have to be on it. I built this whole side on the bet that a player should have a reason to come back that isn't just "the GM posted." I'd rather hear from people who've played this way for years what that reason actually looks like, before I keep building on a guess.