Re: Free vs. Professional PBMs, and how to pick 'em From: silver@phoenyx.net (Karen J. Cravens) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 1997 00:00:00 +0000 In article <19970402161900.LAA13834@ladder01.news.aol.com>, vettranger@aol.com (VettRanger) wrote: >Its been my experience as a participant in the hobby since 1980 that there >is no comparison between the 'best' of the professionaly moderated PBMs, >and the amateur or 'free' efforts. You're lumping all "PBM"'s together, though. There's a world of difference between a true roleplaying game and a sports game, f'rinstance. >5. Make sure there ARE rules! LOL In my opinion, a message stating "New >Game, Free form, We make it up as we go along" is really saying "I almost >have an idea for a New Game, I don't know what I'm doing, I won't take the >time to do even the most basic preparation to moderate a game, Maybe the >players will make it up for me as we go along". LOL Good advice for a sports game, rather poor advice for a roleplaying game. In fact, in PBeM it's usually a *bad* sign if the gamemaster makes much of having a rule system, since the "good part" of an RPG is the text interaction. (Er, does AOL just randomly stick "LOL" into all their users' posts, or do you have a "speech" impediment?) >7. Get a sample turn report. Is it filled up with codes and numbers? Again >offering my opinion, that's a MAJOR sign of an amateur programmer or >inexperienced game designer. Make sure you can read the turn results >without having to learn a unique version of shorthand to understand it. In >a well designed game, any person who can read should be able to pick up a >turn result and understand what happened in that turn, never having read >the rules of the game. Now this is good advice. Your good games will invariably have a permanent presence of some sort, be it a web or ftp site, or a mailing list with requestable archives. >These companies will provide a much higher quality product than ANY >amateur (free) effort. Why? They have the time to work at continuing to >improve their game, and an incentive (meeting their bills!) to do so. I wouldn't be *quite* so definite. Rather, I'd say *on the average* an "outlaw" game (in the paintball sense of the word) is going to be of poorer quality than a game backed by an organization. Whether that organization is being paid for its efforts or not has some influence, but isn't an absolute guarantee. If somebody wanted to mail me a few turns from a "good" commercial RPG, I'd cheerfully post them up next to a few turns from one of the Phoenyx games, and I'd happily bet that you couldn't tell which was the "amateur" and which was the "pro." Part of the problem here is that people do RPG's for the love of it first, and for the money second if at all (Phil will back me on this, and if he doesn't I'll pull out some Dejanews where he did, so there). So you get a large number of gamemasters who would, if there was serious money in it, have no trouble making a living. Sports games and combat simulations and whatnot are a good bit different. You can do them for the love of it too, but the "love" part is usually the design, not the actual play (except in that the play requires further design), and once you've designed it, there *is* money to be made in it with much less ongoing effort... so amateurs are usually amateurs because they *have* to be, rather than because they *want* to be. (Not always... one of the Phoenyx gamemasters (that I know of) is independently wealthy. He could afford to write and give away something as popular as... uh, whatever the most lucrative PBM is out there... and it wouldn't be worth is time to mess with collecting money for it. But that's a special case.) (Then again, I suppose you could argue that the Phoenyx is a special case, in that we're just too stupid to charge for something people would be willing to pay for. I dunno.) -- Karen Cravens | Phoenyx PBeM RPG Listserver: majordomo@phoenyx.net silver@phoenyx.net | http://www2.southwind.net/~phoenyx/ | Home of the RPG Industry Discussion List This gublick contains nonsklarkish English flutzpahs... Referenced By Up