less discovery in pbm? From: spatz@bernstein.com (Adam Spatz) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 00:00:00 +0000 There is no doubt in my mind that electronic PBM games, whether by bulletin board or by e-mail, are a good thing for the hobby. However I do believe that the increased ease of communication the format allows does destroy some aspects of a game. It is possible for a group of people to exchange hidden information about the game at a very fast rate. Let's take the game Warriors & Wizards. When it was run by RTG you could play via their bulletin board or by mail. In this game there were hundreds of unit types and magic items of unknown capabilities. You could only get the full stats on one monster and one magic item per turn assuming there was something new within spell range. Between all the on-line players in several games, we managed to come up with a fairly extensive list of all the units/items. All we had to do was cut the unit/item description from our results and e-mail it to one player who would sort the results and set us an updated list each month. If we had to snail mail it to him and he had to snail mail it back, I'm not sure if we would have bothered. The people who were playing by snail mail didn't have access to the info and so were at a tremendous disadvantage from the rest of us. Furthermore, if I ever play this game again I will have a major advantage. I have seen this phenomenon in some other games as well, Lords Of Destiny (I hope I have the name right) from Maelstrom Games suffered from a similar problem. There were 99 artifacts and "power plays" that were always the same from game to game. You could sometimes see what number artifact or power play your enemy had but unless you had the master list that some players had compiled, you did not know what they did. Again, an unfair advantage to those electronically disadvantaged. As a final note, I am not saying that this problem did not exist before e-mail. I do believe that now the problem is a lot more prevalent. Referenced By Up