Re: The Future of PBEM & USENET RPGs

From: Jack Vinson <vinson@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>

Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 21:49:33 +0000

I'm not going to bother quoting and replying to this interesting
discourse...

I am currently involved in two PBeM role-playing games.  Both are moving
slowly (surprise, surprise, surprise).  However, one of them I can't wait
to get the latest update and responses from the other players while the
other I am still hoping will get better.

In the one I like, we are operating as a combined "story telling" and
traditional RPG with GM.  Generally, what happens is that the GM writes a
story to include current player actions and what is happening around us.
He will also take basic actions for the characters and generally leaves us
with things like this (from our last update)...

From the forest galloped two riders.   One, a man, bore a
   bloody headed lance.  His tunic was torn and bloody but he readied
   to charge once more.  The other rider was a red haired woman with
   a longsword in either hand.  She was laughing as she manuvered her
   horse for a new attack.

Marlise rose from the ground, still clutching her fragment
   of sword.  "Charles, Lyann, there is help here.   We can still win."

The creature threw back its head and howled, a terrible
   soul chilling sound which tore through the trees.   And then it
   strode down on Marlise.

and maybe a tactical description of the scene, if necessary.  We then
respond to this with as much detail as we can.  Battles are pretty simple,
we provide a few choice words/thoughts for our characters and he takes it
from there.  Other situations are more complex and we respond in kind,
_playing_ out the characters for all we can.  I've also included reactions
of non-player characters at times when I've been fairly sure of their
response.

The resulting updates are always a thrill to read.  The GM is a fine writer
and that combined with our own writing skills brings together a very nice
game.  And our writing helps in that there is less he has to do.

Now, the other game so far has had one or two battles which actually went
fairly quickly, but the GM is very hung up on timing of our actions and
there are just WAY too many speculative actions...
	"I do this."
	"No, you don't, I do."
	"Well okay, I'll do something else instead."

We have gone round and round and round with this stuff.  Now we are on the
side of a mountain and about to get stuck in a blizzard.  Our only hope is
to weather the storm inside a heavily trapped cave, or get into an even
more heavily trapped system of hallways inside the mountain.  Of course we
could all fly through the storm back to our last hiding place (magician
must be getting mighty tired providing all this flying)....

The GM doesn't put out updates which mean much to me - so far usually just
a ticked list of who-does-what and who-is-where.  No sense of "playing" at
all.  I keep hoping it will get better, but I also realize that my poor
little character is getting overwhelmed with the actions of everyone else.

It may also be that there is simply too much detail in the world that this
GM is trying to play.  In this one setting, there was at least one trap in
every room we found.

In sum, it seems that the idea of shared story telling works well in an RPG
environment.

--
Jonathan "Jack" Vinson       vinson@unagi.cis.upenn.edu
Philadelphia, PA             http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~vinson/home.html
"Churchill was a shopping bag" - Fatima Mansions

References

The Future of PBEM & USENET RPGs
afabbro@umich.edu (Andrew Philip Fabbro)
Mon, 28 Nov 1994 21:00:55 +0000