I've been running a play-by-post Basic D&D game, which sadly ended in a TPK.

None of the players have made new characters (although I've gotten lots of newly interested players).

If anyone can tell me what the problem is, please do. The game is here.

PBP games end quickly sometimes. It happens. Especially on giantitp, which I hear has a bad reputation for that.

I'm not sure what the recipe for success is, to be honest. I have a PBEM game that's been going for three years and shows no signs of stopping, but other games have really struggled to get going, or else really taken off but then for some reason ground to a halt. PBEM might be better for the long term, because emails come to your inbox which you actually have to reply to - whereas PBP involves actually visiting a site, which is easier to forget about/ignore.

I only read the first 10 pages so I can't speak for the whole game, but dude, you got a distinct set of railroad tracks in your adventure and you concentrate on stuff that is hard to make really fun in pbp, i.e. goal oriented adventuring. Social situations usually do better in pbp because of the way interaction works in that medium.

Really? I was trying not to railroad - what do you think they were stopped from doing?

Disclaimer at the front: I might sound harsh but I don't wish to offend... or sound harsh, just offering advice.

Scaling the walls, noticing the guardians on the wall (the ones which spoke) and  the carriage crash (actually the whole carriage episode was not handled that well: warm, cold, bad air, too much air... that was actually quite ahem... bitchy on your part). No rolls, just declaration of failure or the task being impossible.
And that is only the first five pages.

Out of curiosity... had the characters actually any chance to prepare for the wall? I mean if they go there they have to know something about the place, why didn't they bring magic carpets or a great eagle or something?
If the answer is something like "they had no chance to do that because I withheld information or started in medias res" then there is a huge railroad track right at the beginning.

Quote from: Saphim;252919Disclaimer at the front: I might sound harsh but I don't wish to offend... or sound harsh, just offering advice.

Scaling the walls, noticing the guardians on the wall (the ones which spoke) and  the carriage crash (actually the whole carriage episode was not handled that well: warm, cold, bad air, too much air... that was actually quite ahem... bitchy on your part). No rolls, just declaration of failure or the task being impossible.

And that is only the first five pages.

There were lots of rolls, but I didn't post them. But maybe the players thought they were being railroaded?

Quote from: Age of Fable;252935There were lots of rolls, but I didn't post them. But maybe the players thought they were being railroaded?

Well, if your players don't see the rolls how are they supposed to know that their actions made a difference or could have made if they hadn't failed?

It read like a railroad to me and if your players didn't have more info on behind the scenes stuff than me then they might have read the same.

Haven't read much yet, but the point about the hook and the guards and the wall, I think it's not so much railroading as you're wasting precious time with posts that just go "nope, doesn't work" (a few seconds' delay in person, a few hours' delay on PbP) without creating more leads and continuing to push the scenario forward. When they tried to scale a wall that was set to be unscalable, I would've just said (on failure) the players tried to scale the wall and the guards came out investigating the noise to find several suspicious characters with grappling hooks and ropes, or (on success) the players realized that breaking in was out of the question and dicked around for a while and eventually some guards showed up and offered entry only if they checked in their weapons. Either way, every time the GM posts a response to a player's attempt to solve a problem, the end result should be that the events have moved forward and the player is faced with a new problem.

EDIT: Also, what noisms said. Sometimes there's some out-of-game problems, people being "too busy", procrastinating after a good run because they don't feel like they could live up to it, or just running out of steam or inspiration because it's taking so long.