Designing for a PBeM Format

[M. J. Young]

I neglected to answer this last time; my oversight, and sometime in the middle of the night I woke in a cold sweat realizing that I'd failed to include it in my response--although the "woke" and "cold sweat" are probably from this infirmity that I suspect is now a respiratory infection on top of my allergies:

"long-string contingent moves" (did you invent that, or is that actually what they're called)

Well, I guess I invented that; but I only just invented it. I was trying to think of how I described them a year or so ago when I laid down the ground rules of the forum game, and that was as close as I could get. But you're right--I should remember to call them that in the future, as it is pretty descriptive of what they are and do.

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?

Um--is "no" a sufficient answer?

This may be way off topic, but a long time ago I realized that part of being a good referee involved learning to do a lot of things almost subconsciously that you never ever really recognized you were doing at all. I learned a lot about this when I ran a chatroom game. An example I give is that in a live game I will look at a player and use a voice, and everyone knows that a particular non-player character is speaking directly to that player's character--but in the chatroom I was stripped of both the look and the voice, and had to resort to "the innkeeper says to Bob, in a threatening tone" or something like that. One of the things we learn to do that we never realize we're doing is manipulate the flow of time. When game events slow down, time accelerates; and when events start to focus, time slows.

I've got four guys in three worlds active on the forum at the moment, and it illustrates how this happens. Eric and David, moving from dramatic assault to dramatic assault in trying to bring down the entrenched evil powers of the world they're in, took about a month to move their world calendar forward three days. It took them a week to get out of the aforementioned lawyer's office, and another week to conduct a massive assault on a nightclub which served as one of their strongholds. Meanwhile, Graeme has finished repairing the keel of a wooden cargo ship, managed to design and create prototypes for a steam power system and a zepellin transport, and watched summer fade through fall into winter in the same number  of game sessions--but now at a New Year's Eve party, a pretty girl is flirting with him, and he's already been talking with her for two game sessions going on the third. Shawn just joined us, some time after Eric and David entered the lawyer's office, and has been through fifty days of game time in his world. The first couple were slow, as he was found in the cargo hold of a space ship and had to get his bearings and convince the captain that he was not really a stowaway.  A week sped past and then several days of play covered the outbreak of a contagious disease on the ship. A couple more weeks went by in two postings, and then there was another sick crewman that caused a brief pause, and the next thing you know, it's his forty-ninth day in that world and pirates have boarded the ship, forcing him to work with the crew to repel them--his current situation, which I anticipate will last another couple of days of postings (today was the third, including the announcement that they had been boarded and he was to get kitted up to aid in the effort to repel them).

The point is that even with "long string contingent moves" time expands and contracts to match the action. Sure, conversation gets distorted--"I'm going to ask this, and this, and tell her about that and the other thing"; "She answers this and this, and she's very interested in the other thing, not so much in that, and asks you what gave you the idea for the other thing, and whether in your travels you ran into this"; "I tell her that I was in that area, but not for long; I explain about the idea, and ask her more about the second thing." It's not very like conversation, but it can still be very immersive. I think David has found Cynthia very attractive (of course, I preyed on his weakness--I noticed him flirting with one of the girls in a previous adventure, so I probably set him up for this one). I don't think there's much you can't do to involve the players in the story; you just have to do it all a bit differently, and accept that it's moving more slowly.

As a daring experiment, perhaps, one of my players turned the tables on me, and started running a forum thread in which I am the player character. The pieces of the story are shorter, certainly; but I am as concerned for the adventures of this character as I usually am for my characters, and I put thought to the story between posts and become involved with the lives of those around me and think a lot about how my character feels and reacts.

But then, it is typical for me to think strategically in these games, even while I'm thinking relationally. I play games on several levels even when they aren't RPG's. My characters often have career plans for the future toward which they are working in the present. I often come to the table thinking that I've got a list of things my character needs to do during the game, which may include discussing travel plans with the other characters, making an alliance or business deal with an NPC organization, visiting a temple or shrine to pray or seek wisdom or make contributions, acquiring certain equipment, or talking to a girl in whom he has an interest. It's not unusual for one of my characters to be thinking of plans for three or four future adventures while involved in the current one. When I was twenty-something and working at the radio station, I thought about what I would do in the future. Now I'm approaching fifty, and I'm still thinking about what I'm going to do in the future. I don't find it at all unusual that my characters would have many levels of thought going on at once. So I am an immersive player, in one sense (and not so in another), and my experience may have more to do with me than anything else. Still, when I can hook my players into having seemingly meaningful relationships with the NPC's around them, that usually indicates that they've been drawn into the game. It's rather difficult to get a player character involved in a close friendship or romantic connection with a non-player character unless you can inspire some feeling in the player for that character, and that's a certain degree of immersion.

More than you wanted to know, I expect; but hopefully it answers the question.

--M. J. Young