Adventuring in a PBEM

[arpig2]

How were adventures handled in any of the PBEM campaigns you have run or played in? What worked and what didn't? What were the problems you encountered? and so on.

[AndrewTall]

Rjurik Winds: Yahoo IM, and later an online tabletop. Worked remarkably well, I was frankly amazed, kudos to Charles Dupin de-St-Cyr the DM.

RoE: Bjorn did a mix, some on the forum in adventure threads which I found slowed play considerably, I started finding them as frustrating but once I got the hang of it warmed to it. He also did emails which worked well as long as you don't want a blow-by-blow battle.

Otherwise they've been email based in games, one game had them as a single action - you set out "your plan" in the domain order and got a descriptive para and outcome back. Quick but, to me, unsatisfying.

I've heard of, but have no experience of skype / google-chat games, with my internet connection issues perhaps for the best.

[arpig2]

OK, I'm REALLY interested in that online tabletop you mentioned, could you elaborate a little, what it was like, how it worked and so on.

I hadn't thought of that in the context of adventuring, but I had considered something like that for fighting battles, using something like Team Viewer to fight them out.

[DarkApple]

Hi Bob,

This is what I could find on the website of the game:

http://www.rjurikwinds.com/rules.php#groupAdventures

Not sure if Charles is still around to explain his stuff.

Alex

[Raesene Andu]

I've found e-mail to be a bit slow in the past.

I've used IRC (assuming that still exists) and that worked ok for a live adventure but it's hard with people across the world in different time zones.

A message board could work, although I've never tried that myself.

[AndrewTall]

charles bought an online tabletop - I could look him up on facebook if people are really interested.

Basically it had a map or other image on the left, a IM-style column on the right, and dice-rolling capability.

In practice moving people around the map slowed things down a lot as it tried to update, but when it was used just for images it was quite good.

I suspect though that something like google hangouts or another skype-based system would probably do a better job nowadays in terms of the communication, though I don't know if it can handle images - that said if you had it open and also your email the DM could mail images around the group as and when you reached an area.

[DarkApple]

I've found e-mail to be a bit slow in the past.

I've used IRC (assuming that still exists) and that worked ok for a live adventure but it's hard with people across the world in different time zones.

A message board could work, although I've never tried that myself.

Apologies for side-tracking the thread - but it is good to see you back around!