Rolegate: The New ‘Play By Post’

Recently before Christmas I discovered Rolegate.com, a new platform for playing Role-Playing Games (RPG’s) in a play-by post kind of format. I discovered on a random Geek & Sundry post “PLAY RPGS FROM YOUR PHONE AT YOUR OWN PACE WITH ROLEGATE“

The site has a Discord server where you can chat and learn from the community, and even text with the developers in real-time. And the Developers are busy. Because of the G&S post, the numbers of people accessing the site drastically increased so fast that their hosting service couldn’t keep up, so the site was slow, laggy and unresponsive at times. They’ve moved hosting services and doing SO much better now.

The site facilitates play-by-post games where you can browse current games, to join, or to follow, and there are some great games to follow along. You can also create your own game, for any system or a Homebrew. The hard part being creating the character sheet. It doesn’t take long to figure out, but it takes for-thought.

Aspects of Rolegate

Game Creation

At anytime at game creation and after, you can change the name, Max players, and any other aspects. The only thing you cannot change is the Character Sheet Template NAME. Or load another template. You can load other community templates, but you must load them to view them. If the template doesn’t work for you or what you want or need, and rebuilding it isn’t something you want to do, you have to delete the game and try again.

Helpers

Helpers can be anything you need them to be. You can create multiple choice menu’s of information. They can be private or you can make them public.
For example, I created a Helper “The World of Tékumel” for world information so new player’s in my D&D5e game “EPT5e – The Empire of the Petal Throne” can reference information. Another Helper I created “Palladium Rifts – Combat Rules” is for players and GM reference material, as Rifts combat is more open and varied.

Solutions

I have a few complaints about a few things Rolegate doesn’t do, but most of them would be alleviated by the ability to export and import items as CSV (Comma Separated Value). Being able to create your Templates, export them, modify and adjust them offline and upload them would be great!

Exporting your game to convert into a story-board would also be excellent, but you can always copy and paste… one conversation bubble at a time.

Different Format, Same Issues

The only thing really difficult about Rolegate is the same issues everyone has with getting a game going – finding players and a DM everyone’s compatible with. I have joined a dozen games, had them start out strong and die within days. At least one died quickly of personality conflicts, and several games stagnate or perish because they failed to understand the rules, either the players or the DM (NO, Rifts is not Starfinder, and if you’re thinking your steel shield is saving you from the Wilk’s 320 Laser Pistol)