Advice for playing a freeform game?

[Jacob_Orlove]

I'll be starting to play a freeform play-by-post game in a week or so, and I was wondering what advice (general or specific) anyone here had to offer. I have some idea of what the do's and don'ts are for freeform, but if you want to go over the basics, please do! There's probably a lot of simple stuff that I'm not even thinking about.

The game is low-powered golden age Superheroes in a Pulp style, set in the mid-30s. As normal history, but with a lot more Zeppelins.

My character is an aviator with an unfortunate curse: he's stuck in the air, floating a few feet off the ground when he's not actively flying around (or flying a plane around). Other characters include someone with minor telepathy, a super scientist (with a combat-style robot body), a gadgeteer (wings are a key shtick), a hard boiled private eye (who is also an alien), and unknown (didn't post a public character sheet). There are two reserve characters, an acting student (who can stay on his feet after anything short of decapitation), and some kind of weird shapeshifter thing that's very charismatic and poorly written (really hoping this player doesn't make it in).

I'd like to make sure my character is fairly Archetypal, because this is a supers game.

The thread, should anyone feel like reading a lot, is here: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79483

[RandomCasualty2]

The main problems with freeform is that it can turn into either the no-win situation, or the PC cakewalk. In either case, most of the times, PCs tend to get bored or just plain frustrated.

Since there's no randomness and no systems, that means that every encounter should basically be a puzzle encounter. The PC's decisions have to matter. So generally you want to give PCs a lot of individual options and set up some wrong choices and some right choices. Since it's freeform, pretty much if the PC's "lose", they end up getting captured or something, as opposed to killed. Which is really ok for a superheroes game.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Thanks! Those are some of my main concerns, except as a player, not the DM.

So, how can I have my character act that keeps things balanced in between no-win and cakewalk? Obviously, there will be times when the narrative is best served by failure, or by success. But what if it's not clear? I'm tempted to "cheat" and just roll some dice to add randomness back in, but maybe there's a better way.

[RandomCasualty2]

Thanks! Those are some of my main concerns, except as a player, not the DM.

So, how can I have my character act that keeps things balanced in between no-win and cakewalk? Obviously, there will be times when the narrative is best served by failure, or by success. But what if it's not clear? I'm tempted to "cheat" and just roll some dice to add randomness back in, but maybe there's a better way.

I don't really feel that rolling dice is really cheating, because ultimately the result of the roll will be entirely arbitrary anyway.

Generally you just want to establish a high=good, low=bad, and just have the PCs roll. No point having monsters roll here, because you want to keep the players with as much perceived control as possible. You may want to even give them some luck points or something that they can spend to reroll bad results. So long as everything is arbitrary, you pretty much are still playing a freeform game, you're just adding some randomness to it, but there's still no fundamental rules structure.