For those who have experience with it, how do you run e-mail games?

These are some more specific questions I have:


Do you do any live-chat sessions, like through an instant-messaging program?
How do you handle die rolls?
How do you handle combat?


Thanks.

I haven't done email based games, but I have done a number of forum based games. Here's what I generally do:

- I make sure I'm on a chat program such as Windows Messenger frequently so that players can get hold of me. For some scenes, this is particularly important. Most of the time, though, it's purely forum based. The rule of thumb that I used was that I'd post again after either 24 hours had elapsed, or after at least half the players had posted. This seemed to mean that things would roll along pretty well.

- Generally, I rolled all the dice. You can give them control over the dice rolls - I'd probably let players roll for their own traits, so they can then reply to say what their responses to things would be.

- Combat, I'd indicate when it was about to start and then give people the 24 hours or at least half posted thing as before. During that time, the players could say if there was anything specific that they would do - for instance, a particular tactic that they wanted to try. I'd then run the entire fight, selecting their exact actions for them, and choosing appropriate actions for anyone who didn't reply. If anything changed, or it was dramatically appropriate, I'd stop the battle to give them time to react or change tactics or whatever during the fight. I found that pausing to run combats round by round simply took far too long and killed the pacing completely.

Overall, I've found that online games have the advantage of players being able to take much more time to roleplay. You can write longer, more descriptive text; you can get inside the heads of characters more; you can describe senses in far more depth. On the other hand, it's a much slower medium, so events have to unfold at a very fast rate to keep players interested; otherwise, their first courtly encounter might take over a month to resolve!

Anyway, I hope that you have a lot of fun with it and let us know how it goes!

I thought this had come up before and someone was gonna run it. Am I wrong? Otherwise we should be pretty close to gettin it on baby!!!!!!!!!! Do I have to run an E-mail based game or what?

If you run it Saracen, you've got at least one player you can count on.

I'd be up for it.

I'd definitely be up for it too!

Ohh sweet justice! My gf might just find a reason to hate me even more!!!! " you never pay attention" " ur always busy" " Ur a Total frikkin nred-o" !!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh well. Lets se what I can come up with. ;)

If you don't want to, I can run it, although I must admit that I've never played or run Pendragon before! :)

I would be interested!

I might do it

I'd like to jump in.

With this many people wanting in, I think it might be best if we have two separate games going! I have two friends who aren't on this board who'd be interested, so if I were to run Pendragon, I'd only be wanting another two or three people. However, I want to wait and see how heavy my next semester's workload is at university before I confirm to anything! (It starts tomorrow, so I should know fairly soon whether I'm running a game or not).

I think this topic is off-topic enough to make an official "sign-up" in the Looking for a game section. I'll start it right now.


All further comments go there.

Clarion.... i would love to play! i too have no experience at running one, but hey, we could all just give it a go and see what happens!