Play-By-E-Mail

One of my favorite things to do online is to play by e-mail roleplay Champions -- in some ways, I enjoy this even more than face-to-face gaming, for the depth of roleplaying that it engenders.

I wrote a basic guide to PBEM gaming for the APA Rogues' Gallery that I'm including here, below the links.

Armitage Investigations, Inc.
The PCs are 200 point supernormals in the San Francisco Bay Area and investigators for AI Inc., a private investigative company which "specializes in the extraordinary."

Golden Gate Guardians
The Golden Gate Guardians began as a 400 point PBEM campaign in May 1996, and completed in May 1997. The site includes quite a few lengthy turns (over 50) as well as detailed character backgrounds, art, and sheets.

Tales of the Hudson Hawks: Jade's Story When Jen moved to Las Vegas, I continued to run her in the Hudson Hawks game through e-mail. While this was a very rudimentary style of PBEM for me, many of the defining events of the game took place during these turns.

The Fine Art of Play-By-E-Mail Champions!

Play-by-e-mail, or PBEM, can be the most frustrating gaming experience, or one of the most rewarding. I’ve been doing it for about five years now, in one form or another, and I have to admit that I’m hooked on both running and playing – it’s the best roleplaying I’ve done since I’ve started. My first attempt was a Play-by-Mail (real mail, with stamps and everything!) VIPER game, and I have to admit it’s embarrassing for me to look back at those turns now!

Most of the advice I can give prospective PBEM GMs is the same advice I’d give FTF GMs – but there are a few differences.

Are you sure you want to do this?

I realize that trying to dissuade potential PBEM-ers right off the bat is probably not the best sales technique, but it’s not fair to players or GMs if you bite off more than you can handle, and end up having to drop the game. If you’re not able to check your e-mail several times a day, a PB-IRC or a PB-ICQ or other chat protocol may be a better idea for you! That style of game allows you to run at a designated time each week, just as with FTF, and won’t overwhelm you throughout the week.

The volume of e-mail in a PBEM game depends on two main factors. First, how many players are active participants? I’ve seen games where there were only one or two active players and games where there were twelve. The second consideration should be volume of e-mail. How many posts do you expect per player per day? One? Fifteen? Thirty? In the games I’ve run, I’ve had players who thought one or two messages a day was taxing, and others who eagerly would have written more than thirty if I’d had the time to respond to all of them!

If the idea of a crammed mail box doesn’t terrify you (hey, that’s what filters are for!), you love in-depth roleplaying, and have a masochistic streak, PBEM is a wonderful way to game!

Planning the Game

Start small. This is so important to succeeding in PBEM! I recommend that new PBEM GMs start with only two or three players, because while attrition is typical in a PBEM game, often what seems like a good FTF group size – five or six – can be overwhelming in PBEM. You can always add more players later on, but it’s difficult to drop people just because you’ve overestimated your free time! I’ve run everything from two to eight players at a time, and I’ve found that I much prefer having two players roleplay in great depth than a crowd of six or seven.

Be very clear about what you expect in terms of participation from each player. If you expect players to contribute a minimum of five-ten messages of considerable length every day, and the players think that one or two posts consisting of "yes" or "no" answers are acceptable, someone’s going to be disappointed. The easiest way to handle this is to have potential players lurk in your game when they express interest (see below).

Be clear about what are acceptable guidelines in terms of adult content. There are a number of PBEM games on the ‘net which consist of erotic material – when I was keeping up my links page, I knew of several Champions PBEM games which focussed heavily on adult content. One of the nicest aspects of PBEM, like blue-booking, is that what might be embarrassing to roleplay in front of other players is easily accomplished between the player and the GM. However, if either one feels that sexual material is being forced on them, it can cause problems, or even people leaving the game. The way I handle it is to use movie ratings – PG-13 is what I go by in my games – as well as to discuss the issue with players when a romantic scene is about to take place.

To post online, or not to post? I highly recommend that games which are going to be posted on web sites to be written in the third person, by both player and GM. While I started out using second person when I’d write to players (back in the "old" days of my PBEMing), it doesn’t read very well in compilations, and converting to third person was an onerous chore. You can see turns from two of my PBEM games online at http://www.mactyre.net/scm/pbem/pbem.html and http://www.mactyre.net/scm/ai_inc/aiinc.html.

Selecting players

The most important part of any game are the players. But the type of player that’s good at showing up at your house at 6 PM on a Saturday night and roleplaying well isn’t necessarily the same type of player who makes PBEM a joy. In fact, I’ve only had one of my FTF players transition well into PBEM games, in all the time I’ve been running online.

How can you find players? Well, you can post to rec.games.frp.super-heroes or the Hero Mailing List for players – you’ll be inundated with hundreds of requests if you go the Usenet route. There are several web sites that offer listings of players looking for games that you can try as well, but all of these are very anonymous methods.

I am a very demanding PBEM GM. When I first began running games over the ‘net, I wasn’t particularly careful in how I selected players – if they could put a sentence or two together and seemed to get the gist of the campaign world, I would give them a shot. With this method, I had a 50% attrition rate from people who were very interested…until they realized that PBEM also meant work. It only took one or two thoroughly messed-up plots for me to decide to change tactics – and that’s when I started making potential players jump through hoops.

When someone writes to me, interested in playing in a game I’m running – I don’t post openings, but even if the game’s web site very clearly states "Not looking for any new players," would-be players still e-mail, interested in potential openings – I reply with an invitation to lurk in a turn or two. Lurking – having the would-be player receive all the game-related e-mail I send and receive from players – is a really useful tool. I generally have them lurk in turns of my most prolific players, to see if this frightens them off. Another benefit of lurking is that the potential player gets a better feel for how your game is run, as opposed to other PBEM games or, if the player is a complete newbie, how PBEM works, period.

If lurking in a turn or two doesn’t terrify the prospect, I offer them a guest-starring role in a turn, a prelude to introducing the character if the player decides they like it, and nothing so vital that they can’t be dropped and forgotten if the player doesn’t work out.

The next step, of course, is having the player generate a character background and sheet that are compatible with your game. The number of hoops you as a GM would make them hop through at this point is at your discretion; in addition to the character sheet and background, I have players fill out a questionnaire asking even more detailed questions about the characters’ life, as well as what they expect as players to get out of the game. I try to cover plots they’d like to see, plots they really don’t want to see, as well as what their pet peeves in games are.

Well, I did say I was a demanding PBEM GM! What amazes me is that I still have a waiting list a mile long – another reality of PBEM life is that there are a hundred would-be players for every PBEM GM.

In my experience, the best type of PBEM players -- and I do number myself among them --are the frustrated fiction writers – you know, the type who will send you a ten-page character background within twenty-four hours of being told they might have a shot at the game. (I did have that happen – and he is still a wonderful player!) Not only are these players functionally literate (a real consideration), but they also have wonderful ideas to contribute about plots. The longer I run and play in PBEM games, the more I think of them as joint writing projects and the less I think of them as games – this is, I think, a function of the types of games I run and the players I enjoy the most. The average turn for each of these types of players runs a week or two, and, depending on the amount of time we have, runs anywhere from thirty to sixty pages.

Finding a game

It’s something I hear from potential players all the time. The gaming group has disintegrated, work or kids don’t allow it, or the GM has moved out of the area and no one is going to take his or her place – what’s a Champions player to do? A lot of people turn to online gaming, specifically PBEM.

Again, you can try posting to the Usenet or the HML to find a game, although I haven’t heard of anyone getting good results this way. There are also the "classifieds" PBEM web pages, where you can list your name, interests, and e-mail address, for GMs to contact you, but as there are generally so many more players than GMs, this is also hit-or-miss.

I recommend that if you’re interested in a PBEM you’ve found online, write the GM. Don’t demand a slot in the game – I have had that happen, too, and I don’t answer those messages – but instead ask if it’s OK for you to lurk. Offer to roleplay any NPCs that the GM might allow you to; this will lessen the GM’s work load, while at the same time allowing you a chance to prove yourself. When the time comes for you to play, you’ll already be intimately familiar with the world and the gaming styles of the other players. When I encounter dedicated players like that, I create slots for them in my games!

Running the game

Where to begin? Ready to write your first turn-opener? It’s easy, really! Here’s an example from my PRIMUS game.

When you have more than one player in a scene, simply have them copy each other on their messages, instead of making them filter through you. See, that’s not so bad! And when all else fails, drop them in the middle of a combat scene and watch them panic. J

Pacing PBEM Plots. The most important thing to remember when you start off a PBEM campaign is that plots take months to complete. Even a simple plot can become extraordinarily complex when there are four or five people involved in writing it! The PCs will need to feel as though they’re accomplishing goals, even if the final victory is still out of their reach – it’s crucial to provide that.

Champions Combat in PBEM – It’s not so bad, really. The way I work combat in Champions PBEM requires that the players be on a timeline, but in essence, it’s really an easier workload than a regular turn. I’ll send out a description of the combat scene in the evening, and give all the players until 5 PM (PST) the following day to reply to me – individually, as opposed to them sending their posts to everyone in the scene – describing their actions in prose, then telling me what they’re doing in terms of gaming mechanics. Each of these posts covers one or two segments, and by 9 PM (PST), I’ll reply to the group, having woven their individual descriptions and actions together, along with how they were resolved. They then have until 5 PM the next night to reply, and so on until the combat is resolved. It’s worked very well for me in the past, even with large groups.

Assessing the Game: Talk to your players! Every month or so, I make sure I get a chance to "talk" to my players about what they think is working or what they’d like to change. Is their character developing the way they’d hoped? Is there another direction they’d like to go in? Because PBEM requires a significant time investment, I like to make sure the players are enjoying themselves and the direction of the game – it’s worth it for your ego to take a hit or two if it keeps good players around!

Assigning Experience Points. These are the EP guidelines that I developed for the PRIMUS PBEM game, and are intended to reflect the Super-Agents genre. EPs aren’t as critical in PBEM as they are in FTF gaming environments, but it’s just as crucial to reward good roleplaying in PBEM!

PCs gain experience points by confronting their weaknesses, good roleplaying, and overall character development. Dealing with weaknesses is what I'm most interested in; however, whether you as a player see the character overcoming those weaknesses or not is up to you. Experience points are awarded at the end of each story arc, or in special circumstances during the story as a reward for a particularly good moment of roleplaying.

+1 EP for completing the scenario/investigation
+1 EP for good roleplaying
+1 EP for making useful contacts the GM can utilize later
+2 EPs for great roleplaying
+2 EPs for good roleplaying when confronting a psychological limitation
+2 EPs for noble/heroic actions
+3 EPs for noble/heroic actions in which the character was injured or saved lives

Experience points are subtracted from the total awarded for out of character roleplaying, or use of player information in-game.

-1 EP for failing to complete the scenario/investigation
-1 EP for minor Out of Character (OOC) roleplaying
-2 EPs for bad/nonexistent roleplaying
-2 EPs for ignoring circumstances that should activate a psychological limitation
-2 EPs for cowardly/unheroic actions
-3 EPs for severe OOC roleplaying
-3 EPs for cowardly/unheroic actions which result in injury or death for others

And finally…

PBEM gaming can be one of the most rewarding types of roleplaying, or one of the most frustrating. My rule of thumb is that if it starts to become drudge work, the best thing you can do is take a break from it. I’ve observed games (and unfortunately, played in one) where the GM was tired, bored, but refused to back off for a week or two to recoup, and it was just unpleasant for everyone involved. If you’re playing in a PBEM game and you’re not happy with how things are going, do write the GM and discuss why you’re not having fun. Because fun, of course, is the point of why you’re gaming!

Contents copyright Shelley Chrystal Mactyre, 1999.
All rights reserved.