I've seen this work in a microblog format. DM would describe the scenario and people would respond with what they think the character should do. DM would choose one move (not sure if it was random or the move they found most interesting) and then explain what happened. So the story had a single character controlled by the group. It was light-hearted, low-stakes fun :)

Hope you start the community and give it a shot. Experiment to find the format that works best.

Sounds like play by post. Try searching for that and see if you get some inspiration.

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

>

I don't know if there are any on Lemmy, but people have been doing play-by-post on forums for ages. It is, as you say, a much slower experience. But I did one for a few months once, and it was kind of fun as a combination of both D&D and a chance to flex the creative writing muscles. It's a different kind of roleplaying to take your time with your responses, and for even conversations to have more defined "turns".

You walk in to some one's post. It is made of wood. Take 1D4 damage.

I wish to play. I've never done DnD before, and want to start.

I wanted to make a remindme bot at some point, but haven't gotten around to figuring out how to keep track of all comments an instance receives. Maybe I'll make one in the next few years, and then it would be easy to extend that to dice rolling as well.

You might be better off trying to get people to hop on a discord server or using an online dnd campaign service. Unless your goal is to stretch campaigns out as long as possible. Which is fun in its own right

That being said, I would probably take part in a long form dnd run

I play via discord with a few people throughout Europe and the Americas. But we do VC and some online DnD map/character generator.

Not exactly what you're asking (I guess pretty far away from it), but we've got it to work pretty successfully.

Although if you do make some sort or post-based version, I'd be 100 % down. Feel free to dm me if you have questions/ideas.