The Forge Archives

Quote from: crowquillI only have a little experience with PBEM games, but one thing I have noticed is that it is easy for players to lose track of what is happening due to the lag between between messages.  Of course, this is exacerbated when there are delays and delays are inevitable (vacations, computer crashes, etc.).  A message archive will help, but what's really important is that the players can easily get the information they need out of the archive.  A good search tool is needed and enforcing some sort of standard subject line structure wouldn't hurt.

Wow. Excellent advice. So true. Happening in my PBeM right now. I have to workon the subject line thing. Doesn't help that Yahoo is only confusing in this manner.

Mike

Quote from: Ron EdwardsHi there,

If it's been mentioned and I missed it, then I apologize, but it seems significant to me that a person engaged in a group emailing activity has full power to exclude some members of the group from a given email, with no "signifiers" to the excluded that he is doing so.

That would seem to be an important aspect of this sort of play, when it's exercised.

Best,
Ron

I found this power to be very useful when running my two PBeMs. It was useful for giving secret information to players that had special senses. For example in one my PBeMs, one player's character had the power to see spirits, so I sent separate emails to that player describing what the character sees, with instructions not to copy this information to the other players; they were free to relate it, in character. This lead to quite interesting and realistic behaviour, when one player keeps making posts about strange things and the other PCs don't see what's wrong, literally! :)

Quote from: Jonathan WaltonTHE TOOLS AT HAND
Did I miss anything?

-- Wiki: A web "place" where anyone can read, write and edit text, and have it shown as HTML in their browser.

This allows players to have multiple independent timelines and locations, and not get confused. I found it a real pain when some PCs go to sleep or went to different areas, and other PCs are still active. In my earlier PBeM, one PC went to sleep early and had to wait months before being able to use their character again!

I've been running a forum game for probably over a year now, with a brief hiatus at one point while there were some player changes. I started with some set piece rules I'd learned from PbEM discussions over at Gaming Outpost.

The critical one lies in the way actions and reactions are described.

I had to encourage players to do long-string contingent moves. That is, entering combat a player might do this:

QuoteI am going to look for cover and draw my revolver. If I can't find cover, I'm going to attempt to retreat while using my gun for cover fire. If I've got cover, I'll target the leader first, moving to others only after he's finished. If I take serious injuries reaching half my damage value without taking out any of them, I'll cut and run. If they close on me, I'll toss a grenade and fall back.

As referee, I can work with this. I can still roll the dice and play it out attack by attack. The player hasn't really had to do anything he wouldn't have done in play, he just had to put his thinking up front, considering his options in the light of the possible outcomes. I now move the game forward based on his post. If something happens that is not anticipated, I stop following his plans at that point and give him the opportunity to respond to this.

The same thing works to some degree in the other direction, particularly if things are proceeding on several fronts at once. That is, the player can give me his plans for the day, or the week, as a sort of errands list. I can go through them in sequence, saying what happens in response to each. He can reply to any of those, extending what he did on Tuesday even if he's also already done something on Friday, provided he doesn't add unrelated events or actions. As referee, I can bump anything he says he wants to do to a later day, in essence saying he didn't get to it then but did come back to it later.

That's the biggest thing we did. Somewhere on the Multiverser forum over there is a post with some other stuff in it, but it's been so long since we started I don't really remember.

--M. J. Young

Interesting MJ.

My only experience with PBeM was participating in a Napoleonic Campaign game.  Engagements large enough to matter were played out in person, but all of the operational level stuff (orders, logistics trains, scouting reports, etc.) were by email.

Point being that the above sort of "long-string contingent moves" (did you invent that, or is that actually what they're called) is how all orders in such a game are written.

eg.  1 battalion of light cavalry will advance ahead of the column towards Belton.  If they encounter resistance at Belton they will not engage fully but seek to ascertain the strength of the enemy.  If that strength is deemed to be light, than they will detach 3 riders to report back to the column.  The column vanguard will advance.  The vanguard commander will surmise the situation with orders to clear the town if possible and continue to our objective.  If the resistance is too strong, the vanguard commander will reconoiter and establish positions while waiting for the full column to arrive an engage the enemy.  If their is no resistance at Belton, 3 riders will detach and report such to the vanguard.  The remaining cavalry will continue north and scout the region around our planned camp site for the night....etc.

I'd be interested in hearing in more detail how this sort of thing plays out in an RPG environment.  In the wargame it is done in the context of the commander (me) giving orders to my subordinates, including various contingencies in my orders.  In an RPG situation its the slightly odd effect of one giving contingent orders to oneself.

A agree with concerns regarding turn time and sequencing, the tendency for a game to "zoom in" to a decision that takes a totally disproportionate amount of real time, and the worries with maintaining continuity.

I have some experience with an alternative to the contingent move style, which is the Matrix-style argument.  This just proceeds fomr the principal that you pitch an action as argument, provide 3 supporting reasons, and roll against a probability of this being True arbitrarily assigned by the GM.  The advantage of tihs is twofold: although there are multiple contenders for Truth, often, only one will be decalred True, and secondly that the reasons why given in the argument get woven into subsequent arguments.

Quote from: contracycleA agree with concerns regarding turn time and sequencing, the tendency for a game to "zoom in" to a decision that takes a totally disproportionate amount of real time, and the worries with maintaining continuity.

I have some experience with an alternative to the contingent move style, which is the Matrix-style argument.  

This sounds cool (a bit like FitM in a way), but I'm not getting exactly how it works from your description, Gareth. Could you do an example?

Mike

Slightly off the current thrust of the thread, but in the interest of answering the whol slew of questions about PBeM rpg, here goes.

One additional tool to consider is the WebServer - which with the appropriate software is capable of serving up dynamic content based, usually, on cookies.

A game designed for PBeM could have support for play on the publishers server, in a way that would allow GM's to create custom pop-ups and content based on their players cookies.

Just a thought.

Cheers,

Jason

Quote from: Mike Holmes
This sounds cool (a bit like FitM in a way), but I'm not getting exactly how it works from your description, Gareth. Could you do an example?

Sure.  The best example comes from one of the few full games I played which was about the unification of Korea in the 600's I think, and showed some of both the strengths and weaknesses of this type of game.  Matrix games are the idea of Chris Engle and can be found here http://www.io.com/~hamster/

The setup was the three kingdoms of korea - Kogyuro, Paekche and Silla, and their historical unification.  Part of the interest in Matrix games is sim-oriented because the point is to make plausible arguments; Normally a game would be written, as a product, with a sort of historical text setting the scene, with a map.  The map rules were that you could move anywhere with an argument, or one province for free.  Each side had a number of indistinguishable armies which would so move.  

In a basic matrix game, each player submits an argument to carry out whatever action they want, one argument per player per turn.  The argument must eb supported by reasons; the GM applies their scrutiny and assigns a probability in a 1-6 range, whith 1 being Very Improbable and 6 being Inevitable; you had to roll less than that number on the d6 to have your argument happen.

eg:
The forces of Paekche under the Talented general Sang stage a light cavalry raid which captures the Paekche prince returning from a border inspecting.  Simultaneously a division approaches the forward fortification at [wherever], establishing a strong beachhead.
- because Paekche has a relatively good espionage service
- because relaitves of the prince have betrayed him and revelaed his movements
- because the approval of the king has been granted based on auspicous omens observed by the priests of Temple X

The GM simply assesses this based on... whatever.  Their reading of the text where that accompanied ther map, basically.  The give a number from 1-5, or grants automatic success or failure.  The player rolls, everything which they decribed in their action happens if the succeed.  Nothing happens if they fail.

So the basic play level is that each army moves a province, as directed by the players, and the players roll dice for their arguments which may or may not actually involve the moving armies.  When armies meet and a battle occurs, both side submits their version of events; they roll off until only one succeeds.  That version becomes What Happened.

A good example of how this can ontroduce much more than just moving armies about occurred in this Korea game when I was invited to play the part of the Japanese who had been appealed to by one side.  I agued a fleet into being and off it went, I landed armies in Korea and all we well.  Then, one of the players had my boats beset by pirates, and burned on the docks, which lead to a loss of food supplies and equipment and a crisis of morale.  The interesting thing here is that the fleet had no prior objective existance in the game - it had only been implied by a prior argument.  It did not have a marker like an army, but the other player could still use its implied existance as a reason to justify the weakening of my army, which was represented, was a piece on the board.  

There were other types of "pieces" in the game, notably cities and fortifications.  A hostile fortification would require its own argument to overcome if defended and couldn't be moved through without an argument.  Seas could not be crossed without an argument; esentially the only rules where those that called for arguments under certain circumstances.  There were also personalities, of ehich more below.

Even so, arguments were very freeform, but what tended to happen is that they started to reinforce one another.  Because there are very-few-to-no facts at the start of the game, previous arguments become just about the only source of hard data; they have established as True, while anything else you might call form memory or think up has less support in the game.  So there is advantage to making arguments which build plausibly from previous arguments, and this tends to make the game rather synthetic.  In the example above, of my fleets, the part of my argument which described the fleet and its anchorage added plausibility to the argument later used to weaken my army, because that had been established as True.  All succesful arguments become de facto canon, and manipulating this can give the game a sort of judo-like quality, of using an opponents strengths, the things which their own arguments probable, against them.

Another observable feature was for a players to develop charismatic generals.  This was often opportunist, becuase a charismatic general, for example, could be used as support for generating a new army out of thin air.  Some generals were specified at the start of play, in the briefing - this by way of giving players something kick start arguments from.  But also, as generals achived successes through play, their genius became more and more established and hence arguments from their genius became more plausible.  This tendency to reinforce endlessly can be a bad thing, I suspect, there were times it felt a bit like it was getting out of hand.  Ultimately, the final outcome of the game was to my mind unsatisfying; both China and Japan got called in, agreed a pact to dismember Korea, and did so.  A game set out to portray the unification of Korea ended up portraying its total subjugation by foreign powers; the improvisation got out of hand and derailed it.  I mean there would have been no particular reason that one of us could not have called in a landing ship of Space Ork Marines, it's just that we'd not likely have received an achiveable TN.  The game had a weird sense of both spiralling in on itself and exploding outside of its implicit boundaries at the same time.

I think there was lot of interesting stuff going on there.  It was also noticeable the players like the generals, and did quite of bit of almost-RP.  The freeform actions had many interesting side effects but generally stayed on a sort of reasonable continuity,  Sometimes though you would see several arguments at radically different scales, and this could be a bit confusing. One lucky roll for a dramatic claim could swing the game sudenly, but conversely the whiff factor was high, and significant.  There might be periods of signifcant stasis if nobody rolled any successful arguments.  I think a lot could be made of using more strongly established rules for time and scale, perhaps.

QuoteThe game had a weird sense of both spiralling in on itself and exploding outside of its implicit boundaries at the same time.

That sounds delightful.

I found the whole description fairly impressive. Wow.  I want to play something like this, now please.

-Chris

Quote from: C. Edwards

QuoteThe game had a weird sense of both spiralling in on itself and exploding outside of its implicit boundaries at the same time.

That sounds delightful.

I found the whole description fairly impressive. Wow.  I want to play something like this, now please.

-Chris

There's fairly regular PBeMs on the Hamster list. The relevant URLs and email addresses on the site. Just join up! :)

Quote from: ValamirInteresting MJ....

I'd be interested in hearing in more detail how this sort of thing plays out in an RPG environment.  In the wargame it is done in the context of the commander (me) giving orders to my subordinates, including various contingencies in my orders.  In an RPG situation its the slightly odd effect of one giving contingent orders to oneself.

Well, since you asked, I'll try to recount some recent events.

Yesterday (Monday) I arrived at the forum to find that David and Eric had posted. David and Eric are currently in the same world, working together with several NPC's, one of whom, Cynthia, is staying pretty close to David at the moment. David decided to do something which, frankly, had a very good chance of getting some people pretty angry if it succeeded; Eric tagged along to watch. There were some other things they said they were going to do, somewhat shuffled into the description of a day's activities, and each of them put these in somewhat different orders--that is, Eric, who posted first, said he wanted to go see a particular NPC, talk to another one, and then go with David to this place David had previously suggested; David began with what he was going to do at this place when Eric went with him, and ended with meeting that NPC Eric was going to go see. Recognizing that the NPC meeting wasn't going to be a problem, I put that first in the day, then placed some of the other discussions, and then finished with the field trip. Rolling the dice, I determined that David was successful in his bit of magic, and then rolling for the reaction achieved I got one of the worst possible rolls, and there was an angry mob charging them. Considering Cynthia's personality and current motivations, I reported that she interposed herself between David and the crowd, and threatened them--but that although the front ranks slowed a bit, the crowd was still pushing forward (again, reaction determined by mechanics, die roll). I ended my post here, waiting for their response.

David posted next. He said that he was going to attempt to use psionics to create a barrier (which he has done before) in front of the charging mob, but if he couldn't do it quickly enough he would have Cynthia get them out of there (she and Eric both know how to do a sort of magical hyperspace travel, and she's better at it). As a fixed contingency, Cynthia was to get them to safety by moving them to a nearby rooftop if they couldn't stop the mob. He would then attempt to create a magical protection as well, and call for spirit powers to defend them against the attack. If that worked, he outlined several other actions he would take; if they were forced to retreat to the roof, he would take different actions.

Eric's post followed. He would use his pyrokinesis to try to create a line of fire in the grass, with a gap where Cynthia was standing, and then draw his sword and step beside her. He wrote a brief speech attempting partly to placate and partly to warn off the attackers, and indicated that he muttered something to his companions about who would die first. Otherwise, he would follow David's lead, and flee with them if they chose to go.

I came back to find these posts, and sorted them out, and started rolling. David (whose dice luck tends to run hot and cold) failed the psi shield and the magic shield. Eric did raise a bit of flame, but it was a weak success so didn't get too much. His efforts to persuade them (also rolled) had no impact. Given the contingency, Cynthia successfully opened the gate, pushed Eric through, and followed David.

While in this hyperspace realm, Cynthia explained to David that she could not move them to the roof, because she could only open an exit to a place she could clearly visualize in her own mind--and never having seen the roof, she could end up on any of a million roofs anywhere in the world. Thus I left our heroes standing in this gray mist while I awaited some decision from them as to what they would do next. Actions which were predicated on early successes were not run because of the failures, and actions which were contingent on reaching the roof were not run because they didn't reach the roof. In their next posts, they'll make decisions about what to do next; if they exit near the mob, they may choose to continue with the actions already mentioned, or replace these with other actions. Had the early rolls been successful, I'd have continued running actions until I needed another statement of intentions or the situation had changed in a manner I thought required an update (e.g., if the mob forced down the psionic shield such that physical combat again became imminent, I would alert the players to the change in situation so they could make new statements of their plans).

Clear as mud? You're welcome to browse the threads on the forum. It doesn't always work smoothly, particularly in very tense situations--these two spent about a week in a lawyer's office trying to get information from him that he didn't actually have, and then trying to escape when their security responded, but that was largely because everything they tried either didn't work or was wasted effort (they wouldn't accept that he neither knew what they wanted to know nor had records thereof in the office, so they kept trying other ways to get it). But generally it lets play move forward at a good pace for the current situation, whether that means a week's worth of posts for an hour of intense combat or a three-line post to slide through the winter when nothing is happening.

--M. J. Young

Quote from: C. Edwards
I found the whole description fairly impressive. Wow.  I want to play something like this, now please.

Well, the rules are availabe on the site I referenced, and there are links there to the Matrix gaming yahoo group, which runs live experimental games.  Things seem to have solidified a bit since I was last directly involved - a recent game seems to have run with 4 arguments per side.  Matrix gaming is very much a Work In Progress.

Gareth:  In reading the description of the Korea game, I'm amazed by how much it sounds like a play example from a game of Universalis.

From starting with just a rough outline of a conflict between 3 historical kingdoms the world was built up through a series of facts which served as precident for later facts; to summoning a Japenese fleet into existance where previously there had been none, to gaining advantages from having charismatic leaders, to the system of arguements which are very much akin to the sort of things you spend a Coin to be able to say in Uni; the similarities are striking.  Even the map and the moving of armies would be an easy rules gimmick to add.

I'm going to add that link to the list of things I want to read over and see what I might be able to do along those lines with Universalis.  If "Matrix Gaming" is currently a work in progress, I'd love to have you look at Uni and see if there is something there you can use.


MJ: Thats interesting.  Thats very much the way my experience worked, only with military units rather than characters.  Do you find that instead of reacting to events as they happen, that the pre planning of contigencies makes the game feel more like a board game...makes the characters more pawn stance like?

Quote from: ValamirGareth:  In reading the description of the Korea game, I'm amazed by how much it sounds like a play example from a game of Universalis.

From starting with just a rough outline of a conflict between 3 historical kingdoms the world was built up through a series of facts which served as precident for later facts; to summoning a Japenese fleet into existance where previously there had been none, to gaining advantages from having charismatic leaders, to the system of arguements which are very much akin to the sort of things you spend a Coin to be able to say in Uni; the similarities are striking.  Even the map and the moving of armies would be an easy rules gimmick to add.

I'm going to add that link to the list of things I want to read over and see what I might be able to do along those lines with Universalis.  If "Matrix Gaming" is currently a work in progress, I'd love to have you look at Uni and see if there is something there you can use.


MJ: Thats interesting.  Thats very much the way my experience worked, only with military units rather than characters.  Do you find that instead of reacting to events as they happen, that the pre planning of contigencies makes the game feel more like a board game...makes the characters more pawn stance like?

Just a couple of comments from playing several Matrix PBeM games and reading the Universalis playtest rules. Matrix games are simpler than the Universalis. There's no need for the accountancy. :)

A Matrix easily incorporates existing information, for example: maps, military units and generals; historical information and so on. The existing historical information is just like any fact established by arguments in the game play.

In the Matrix game, there's a great deal of subtle play in building one's own forces as opposed to destroying an opponent's forces; one can do either but it's difficult to do both in the one "argument" (or action). A Matrix game is easily played in "immersive" style, particular when one's side consists of a leader and their followers; yet it can also be played pawn style as well. The best play (for me at least) comes from immersive play (freaking the other players!) and having a strong vision of the desirable outcome for one's side. With a wishywashy vision, one is easily defeated.

One currently disappointing part of Matrix games (as of about a year ago) is that if the dice roll for an argument (or action) results in a failure, nothing happens for one's side. This can be a crippling problem. After reading about Fortune in the Middle in Forge RPGs and for playing a face to face Matrix game, I'd allow arguments (actions) to be modified negatively in order to succeed. (perhaps +1 to the D6 result for each negative modifier to the argument's (action's) supporting reasons. I'm uncertain how well this would play in a PBeM.