Hello,

I never actually played pbms back in their hey day, so the only thing I have taken part in was some RPGs over email. But during my excursions into old hobbyist magazines from the 70s and 80s there are these mentions about postal games that just seem to
be huge and sprawling.
Is there any good resource how those big postal games were played and how turns looked like? A book, or some website that goes into this?
Does anyone know some play by mail rulesets that are available somewhere so I could have a look?

John

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Hiya,

In article <[email protected]>,
John Geoffrey <[email protected]> wrote:

I never actually played pbms back in their hey day, so the only thing I hav= >e taken part in was some RPGs over email. But during my excursions into old=
hobbyist magazines from the 70s and 80s there are these mentions about pos=
tal games that just seem to be huge and sprawling. =20
Is there any good resource how those big postal games were played and how t= >urns looked like? A book, or some website that goes into this?
Does anyone know some play by mail rulesets that are available somewhere so=
I could have a look?=20
John

You could start here:
http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/pbm.htm

FBI ran many of the early and most popular games. When email became more widely available a lot of games moved to email and a new crop showed up. You could ake a look here:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbm_list/all4.html

No promises as to how many of those are still active.
I used to play this and enjoyed it:
http://explorer.sourceforge.net/


JB
------------
Jeff Berry - http://www.aspiringluddite.com - food, musings, etc.
"I don't need TV when I got T-Rex" - Mott the Hoople

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Hi John,

I don't know how much you know about this, so I'm just giving a personal perspective. I haven't done any of this for a few years and I've forgotten some of the names of various campaigns and/or services. But maybe you can eek out a few search terms.

When I ran a PBM it was for Shadowrun and AD&D.
Turns had to be received every [other] Friday or the person lost their action. It was slow but kept an existing group together over the summer.
Some of the people could meet up and do roleplay conversations and would co-write the letter to make things go faster.

When I did PBEM, for Vampire the Masquerade, I encouraged people to write at least weekly. I didn't have to assemble the story for everyone to see. We used Ironygames dice roller, which I'm not sure if it is still up.

There are some spaces on Facebook and other forums where people do a play by post. Rules vary for frequency of posting and some are system agnostic or diceless.

What I'm seeing now is a lot of people turning to IRC, Skype, and a service called Discord. Discord is audio and chat.

There's also Virtual Table Top (VTT) services, Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 are two I hear a lot about.

I hope this helps you out.

Neb

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Legends PBM and Middle Earth PBM are both still Running. You can get info on both from harlequingames.com

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