No. No no no.
I don't care if it provokes attacks of opportunity, lowers your defenses, and fucks your attack, do not walk but RUN from this.
I cannot think of a PBP that has made it out of the first module, many fail by like 3rd or 4th round of combat. The only PBP things I have seen with any longevity are narrative games with few-if-any-rules.
That said, this the TTG games thread and if we were going to good, sensible things that made sense and were a good use of time we wouldn't be in this thread. So time to focus on harm reduction.
First thing is you need a dicebot or similar. There are some websites (or were at least) that would do GUID'd dice rolls, but there are dicebots you can invite your Discord. Of course this comes with the usual caveat of the dicebot is not in your server and by necessity sniffing your packets. You can do things to limit this like make the dice bot a custom role with privileges only on a "roll here" channel, or do what I have done with is just have a separate server with the bot just for dice roles.
I believe the one I most recently used was "Dice Maiden" or something and my bank account if hasn't been stolen.
Anyway, I would also recommend you move to something with THAC0. The reason for this is THAC0 can act as a "save vs. damage" for PBP - this way your players are rolling nearly everything and you're basically just narrating and confirming hit or miss (and IIRC one of the dice bots I was working with could be told what target numbers for rolls and respond hit/miss)
And as others have said, unless you want your first combat to drag for years, you need to have mandatory "respond by X:XX GMT XX/XX/XXXX or your character autobattles"
Do everything possible for combat speed:
Side based initiative, lower HP for PCs and monsters and probably lower attack damage. In fact maybe just use static damage values.
Actually if you want to do a test run to see
if anyone will flake out loljk someone will flake out, so if you want to see WHO will flake out first and how soon, get yourself a digital version of the Castle Ravenloft boardgame (actually maybe do Tomb of Annihilation because it has progession) to run the players through: Its cooperative, most attacks deal 1 damage and most monster have 1 or 2 HP and monsters have open stats and logic.
If your group can't PBP a Ravenloft adventure, they will never get anywhere with something more complex.
The other issue I'm going point out is PBP really kills one of the best things about TTRP, which is the party coordinating. If people are just logging on once a day to do whatever, it limits the options they have to give ideas and get feedback.
If you're doing PBP, I'd recommend something more adversarial in nature where the inability to talk before acting with fellow players is less of a liability.
Diplomacy is popular for this sort of thing - you could just reskin the board to be about orcs and elves or w/e.
