This post is excerpted from an email we recently sent to the out-of-character list for our play-by-email game. Credit where credit is due: I wrote most of it, but my spouse and co-GM wrote the rest and revised my writing. We developed the system for when and how to talk to people about posting as we settled on a posting rate, which took us a year or two to work out. One of the things that this email doesn’t address is how we handle players who have to be pressed for posts repeatedly. That’s a drag for the GMs and ultimately those players tend to leave one way or another, but we handle those problems on a case-by-case basis.

We expect players to post about every other day (3x weekly). Everybody misses a posting round due to holidays, emergencies, work, etc. now and then; that’s understandable. It’s only when players miss a lot of posts without letting us know something is up that we worry.

Normally if a player doesn’t respond to a thread in a week (3 posting rounds), we send a note in case the mail has gotten lost or is sitting in the outbox or a reply was sent to another player in the thread and not to the list (all things that have happened!). Also, if we haven’t heard from people in a week, we’re probably a little worried.

Sometimes, circumstances in a post end up blocking a number of other players and we may query earlier or move a player out of the way. This is usually the case if someone was asked a direct question and hasn’t responded or in similar circumstances. We’re not trying to be pushy in that case, but to allow the other players to work around the delay.

If we don’t hear back from the missing player in a second week, we put the player on hiatus and wrap up the current thread(s) with other players so the other characters involved can move on. We don’t do this because we’re upset; we just need to be able to move along if a player is offline/out of contact for an extended period of time.

We’re generally pretty easy about not counting holiday weekends when people are likely to travel against players who miss posting rounds. It’s a lot easier when players tell us and the OOC list in advance they can’t post while they’re camping or under a deadline. We appreciate the help.

For the record, players who have been put on involuntary hiatus are always welcome to return, but we do ask for an explanation of what happened so we can avoid the same problem again. We much prefer it when players tell us in advance that work/school/whatever is going to limit posting so we can work around it. We’re also willing to put characters on long-term hiatus so players can move/take boards/etc. and come back when whatever’s keeping them busy is over.

We do track who has answered what thread when, although we’ve had to revise our system recently with our great mail client change. It’s not perfect, but we’re getting a handle on when we need to ask players about threads.