playing a pbE-mail game

[YamItheonly1]

Has anyone ran a play by email game before? I was wondering if you could give me some tips on running a Play be Email game. Any tips are helpful

[gentleman john]

My experience with PBeM games is that they are more of mutual story-telling exercises. If you have a few players who are not interacting with each other, then you will spend a lot of time writing returns. On the other hand, if you have players who are interacting with each other, then it will usually run with the referee giving the situation, the players discussing their response and then the referee writing it up.

Surprisingly, old-school games work better at PBeM than new games. En Garde!, Superhero 2044 and certain Traveller campaigns work very well. D&D dungeon crawls will work well as they work on a turn structure. More modern games that eschew such "artificial devices" don't.

[gray mouser]

I ran a PbEM game for several years that went quite well. I'd suggest having lesser rather than more players to keep things moving along. As someone mentioned before, the turn structire of older games works well. One thing I noticed was that if have a shorter advaneture or two that players can accomplish (relatively) quickly it helps to give them a sense of accomplishment. Instead of trying a mega-dungeon for the first scenario perhaps a short excursion to the old wizard's tower on the outskirts of town to look for a specific item would be better. The PC's get in, get the item, and get out. There's more to explore if they wish or they can go to a different adventure. Have a few hooks ready for the players choose from.