Obsidian Portal

ObsidianPortal is a campaign wiki site. It allows both GMs and players to create writeups for their characters and special magical items, and then GMs can create full wikis for their campaigns to chronicle world history, house rules, and the story as it unfolds. Both GMs and players can modify wiki pages to keep things up to date.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/

I know that one request that's been made on the OP forums is that the site integrate campaign forums to facilitate play-by-post, but it's a very low priority for them. I don't know what the overarching goal of LaughingStick is, but it may be that both sites could be valuable partners to each other.

(Only somewhat related: one neat side effect of how ObsidianPortal lets you store characters and items is that GMs can "borrow" characters and items that other people have created, by inserting the proper wiki slugs. And honestly, that's part of the reason I've archived as many characters over there as I have. Maybe someday someone will steal my work. It'll be awesome. )

Play-by-post? I actually am very interested in doing that. I tried it once before in Gleemax, but got tired of poking the other players to keep participating. I guess I should have started them closer than ten days' journey to the first plot point...

...anyway, I mentioned Gleemax now, so I should link it: http://www.gleemax.com is WotC's "gaming portal" site that I used to hang at but got tired of all the under-construction bugs, plus got a little miffed because the GM in the 2 games I played in, one GM was railroading on an epic level while the other wasn't keeping the battle map straight enough to tell who was still getting bitten by wolves. It MIGHT be better now, but I'm afraid to go look.

Ok, ok, I looked. Turns out they're going to pull that whole area down soon to focus more on MtG Online and D&D Insider. So the above link might not work for very much longer... they never even got the site out of Alpha, or got the first darn patch up, by the looks of things.

Is play by post something that people would want to see more of? We can easily create a section dedicated to it, though to be honest I'm not sure how those things work. If either of you would like to see something like that on this forum get with me on what the details of running a play by post game would entail.

Also, for something like that we may have to reccomend that you BYOG (Bring your own Gamers) as our current community is a little tiny. But then we reccomend you inviting friends to play anyways, that way we can build better games and better gaming communities!
Oh and if you invite friends and they join then you get a custom rank. Default ranks are not very flattering.

Play-By-Post is a great deal like playing in chat, but it moves a bit slower... the average 5 man PbP will generate one post per player per day, and hopefully at least 3 posts from the GM... until combat starts, and then usually the GM has everyone roll initiative, and each player has to post in turn, and usually (to keep things moving) the GM sets a 24 to 48 hour time limit before each PC is assumed to have chosen "Wait." This means combat actually moves a touch slower. Especially since the GM has to post between each of the player's turns to state results, cover NPC actions in the initiative queue, and poke the next player to let them know the clock's started ticking for their turn.

When I play PbP, I get a little "fast and loose" with combat positioning and rules according to who's standing where, most the time. I don't like keeping track of gridded maps, so I'll just say at the start "They're X feet from you and have Y for cover" and kind of ignore the details once they cover X feet of ground successfully. Others that I have seen have actually drawn grid-maps out in MS Paint or GIMP and then shown them to make things clearer... but I'm horrible at artwork so I just occasionally say things like "Are you sure you want to use the wand of scorching ray now? The rat swarms that are still alive are all sharing squares with your teammates."