[gurps] PBEM

[Susan Koziel]

Typically PBEM takes significantly longer then real life... I've found a couple of ways to deal with this - but they may not work for your style of GMing.
1) Do more conversation character development stuff rather then combat. Make sure there are enough NPCs for your characters to get into discussions with.
2) Do multiple days events all at one time. If you know sort of how you have things planned to go sometimes you can actually run multiple happenings that occur a few days apart - but you need to document your time well or your players get confused and so do you.
3) Think about your campaign in much smaller chunks of time.... if you think of your face to face games as a series of TV episodes, think of your PBEM as episodes of 24 - where each hour instead of each series of days is an episode.
4)As long as your PCs are mature enough to handle it, you don't need to worry about a dice server - I don't.
5)Be prepared for your players to miss deadlines and try not to get to annal about when they respond but be prepared to continue without them... sometimes they truly don't have an opinion or don't feel that they see something for them to do & they won't respond. 
6) Make sure they understand that you are going to go on if they answer or not.
7) Be prepared to do a significant amount of writing.... be clear with your players if you suddenly get busy and can't reply. That way they aren't waiting for you. Also if things get rolling really well you can end up with 30-100 emails in your mailbox in one day... depends how many players you have, and how active they are with you or with each other.
8) IRC works better, but make sure multiple people keep the log - because inevitably you will forget - and it will be important.

Hope this helps.
-Sue

--- On Tue, 4/22/08, Bryan <brakeb at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Bryan <brakeb at gmail.com>
> Subject: [gurps] PBEM
> To: gurpsnet-l at sjgames.com
> Received: Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 4:45 PM
> I am in a group that plays face to face, but I wanted to run
> a
> play-by-email GURPS 4th Space campaign.  Having never
> GM'ed anything
> more than a few one-shot face to face deals, I was
> wondering how
> difficult it is? I've read that you might have to set
> deadlines for
> replies, and dice rolls can be cagey.  But I planned on
> using a dice
> server (http://dice.evildm.net/) to send/receive rolls. 
> And I'd set
> deadlines for maybe two to three days a week, or more
> depending on how
> quick people reply.  I also thought that meeting via IRC
> might be
> viable if everyone was of a mind...
> 
> I would like to try it, but I want to make sure I'm not
> getting in
> over my head...  Is there anything I haven't thought of
> yet?
> 
> Cheers,
> Bryan
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