New Pbem idea, interested?

[Question]

The problem with PBEMs is that 1 turn usually takes forever to run.While playing it in real life you might have 1 turn per week or meet several times per week depending on schedules.

PBEMs usually take 1 month to 1 and a half and 1-4 weeks for turn resolution.

You would need to play for years in a PBEM to make your domain/character really powerful.....the original BR was meant this way,you would need to spend 20+ turns to become a serious power.In PBEMs this translates to a few years.

It just moves too slowly IMHO.If it was faster more people would be attracted to the idea of BR.

[Mantyluoto]

play by post (PbP) games are much faster, providing your players can post on time.

[Question]

That seems to be the problem......time.

If the players could devote more time to checking emails,etc turns can easily end in 2 weeks.....maybe even less.

Most of the turn time is taken up by waiting at least 1 day........sometimes more.......for responses to dispatches.

The same of course applies to DM response when interacting with NPcs.

The way i figure it,if people could check emails or PMs several times a day...or just leave a window open to either......you could wrap up a lot of stuff within a few days,max.

Example : Aerenwe(PC) askes for Roesone(PC)'s aid in defending from Osoerde(NPC).

What usually occurs :

Aerewe sends a dispatch asking for assistance,probably pointing out that osoerde would go after roesone next.The next day roesone sees it and agrees.Day 3 Aerenwe sends acknowledgement and thanks.

3 days to wrap up 15 mins of real time conversation,max.

And thats only a very simple matter.

If it goes to alliances.......vassalage agreements......trade agreements.......etc everything usually takes more than 1 week.

Turn sheets dont take much time to do either.If you starting from scratch,rolling characters,checking skill descriptions,etc will take you quite a few hours,but once you have everything settled it takes maybe 2 hours max to write up a turn sheet, and that only shortens as you remember stuff like the skill bonus when you take full regent actions,instead of repeatedly checking the BRCS.

Well of course doing the turn sheet isnt what the entire turn is comprised of.You need to talk with other players,formulate plans,etc but theres only so far current events will let you go......even if you try to secure a vassalage agreement from one realm,a trade agreement with your local guild or talking things over with your court mage about that assassination attempt,it is not going to take 1 month.

My experience in PBEMs so far has been largely spent on waiting.....waiting for PCs to respond,NPCs to respond,waiting for info on something or other,waiting for deadline,waiting for turn processing,etc.

Only a small portion of is actually considered playing the game.

[Benjamin]

That seems to be the problem......time.

You are absolutely right in more ways than you expect.

I once ran a PBEM with only 12 regents. Resolving turns was a horrendous time consumption. It would take me about 10+ hours to resolve 1 turn. Add on top of that all the NPCs responses, planning, plotting, espionage, etc. and it became too much. I shut it down after 6 turns or so.

Then there is the time delay in players checking email, PMs, etc. As can be seen by our membership, players are from all over the world. The most recent game I was in had people from South Korea, Czech Republic, Denmark, Canada and USA. And it only had 6 players! Clearly all those time zone differences cause problems with communication.

[Question]

It would be interesting if someone made some sort of turn processing utility......you just load the turn sheet and it auto-calculates the dice rolls, checks for errors,etc.

Having a way to automate NPC growth would also be nice.

Edit : on 2nd thought it seems someone tried to make one.I have no idea how finished this is though.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/birmail/

[Mathias Morgan]

Honestly, I love the first idea of the limited domains, shops, inns, temples. It would make a good PBEM and an excellent in person game. Lots of adventuring opportunities. Changing it to a Spelljammer campaign however, makes it lose it's appeal. The attraction would be the simple-ness of limited venue of one city. Spelljammer would increase the complexity and negate the appeal.. In my humble opinion. I wish you luck with it in anycase.

I'm just getting ready to start my first PBEM Birthright game, with a few friends. We plan on running the PBEM with their regents, and get together once or twice a month to live play the lieutenants. If I start another game, I may use your idea of centering in one city.

[Swordhelm]

While i understand the time issues, i always liked pbems cause they were more relaxed pace. I didn't have to constantly try to find time to get together with a group of friends, and in a birthright setting, its near impossible to try and run a live game with more then 8 players, no matter how hard they try to work with the schedule. In a pbem you have several weeks to get everything in order, it allows for life to continue and not try to interfere with it. I always liked that, since i didn't want to be spending hours upon hours upon hours doing dispatches and turns on a weekly basis.

As for the setting in spelljammer, its not the setting, its the fact that its not Birthright published material. BR players i've noticed tend to shy away from anything thats new, and you can take examples from all the failed BR campaigns based on unique or different settings. The game i want to run doesn't even take that much reading to catch up. THe key info is all still based upon the city, its up to each individual player if they want to discover and learn more bout the rest of the universe of if they just want to keep it to their district, which is no different then most pbems. So as i said, its mostly because ppl don't want to put in the effort to try something new. If this was based in Aftane or Anuire, and it was sea going ships, no one would question it, even if there was 100 pages of backstory to read and a completely changed world(i am exaggerating mind you, but i think you all get the point).

Sadly, the rate of gaining players for this game is really low, and i had been hoping to aim for a managable amount of players. I think if i try a unique setting again, i will post it as a strategic D&D game instead of birthright, cause i don't think BR is a vibrant system anymore. Which sucks cause it was my favorate system. The base players as one person said are getting older and have less time to play. Thanks for appreciating the concept though, i am still hoping i can get this started, but interest is waning unfortunately :confused:

Thanks for looking in everyone so far. At least the idea is geting out there.

[BrennanHawkwood]

Alternate setting-wise I've fiddled with several ideas:

• Fading Suns Birthright - This has been bounced around a couple of times on the fading suns listserv
• Ancient Greek themed setting with the bloodlines representing the descendants of or chosen of the various greek gods. Lots of little city states and shifting alliances.
• Colonization themed setting with the players as some of the lords involved in a land rush into completly new territory. The territories start at 0 and see what develops...

None of them got much further than some jotted notes unfortunately...kind of a combination of lack of interested players and a lack of time.

As to PBEM vs. PbP...from what I have seen they are effectively equivelent. I think PbP is a little more flexible and may lend itself to be slightly faster, but it is going to have many of the same problems. Having a turn processing application would help a lot I would expect. I have downloaded and looked at BirMail, but never really tried to get it working. The impression I have is that it will work, you've just got to figure it out.

I suspect the best option for an internet based game would probably be a PbP style model supported by a game managing web application that allowed the players to enter their turns and automatically processed everything it could and interfaced smoothly with the forums used for communication between all the people involved.

[Mantyluoto]

I suspect the best option for an internet based game would probably be a PbP style model supported by a game managing web application that allowed the players to enter their turns and automatically processed everything it could and interfaced smoothly with the forums used for communication between all the people involved.

*scratches head* yeah! right!

[Question]

True but i dont think many coders are interested in the BR setting.If we could get one to make such a application it would be a huge boost to BR.