Good sources for rule/flow ideas

I'm back to thinking about this after a major hiatus. Here are some links to things that might help choose/define a rule-system for my PBEM:

Microscope RPG

Amber RPG

Players and character concepts.

There should be two distinct and traditional roles in my game: player and referee. The referee makes up the story and controls NPCs. The players each control one or more characters in the story. So far, so standard.

Given the fact that a PBEM game allows (and hopefully encourages) players to Get a Bit Literary with their posts, I think that the players should have more creative freedom when it comes to the story. Or perhaps I should say that they'll need and probably take some plot liberties, so why fight against it?

I'm thinking that the currency I mentioned in my previous post might be used to drive plot flexibility. I'm thinking that the referee should take some of the currency from a player when they introduce things into the story. This allows more plot freedom to a player who plays their character(s) well (since they earn more currency for doing that). This throws up a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation though. The player may alter the plot by playing their character 'well'. I'd need to carefully define what sort of embellishments constitute plot changes (which cost currency) and which others are just adding colour (and award currency). Not sure about this...

(The referee will always know how much currency each player has.)

Some thoughts on task resolution:
The main driving force in what a character can accomplish should be their Character Concept. I haven't thought exactly what details should be included or abilities rated in the Character Concept yet. It would contain a list of specialisms perhaps: things that make the character stand out. Perhaps the Character Concept would turn out to be the part that differed wildy depending on the setting. I can imagine that a Dying Earth game would contain a list of styles. It would record the styles of persuasion, rebuff and attack, for example, that a character used.

When I talked about not using dice in a previous post I might have been lying. The players are deemed to be inherently untrustworthy when it comes to die rolls, whereas the referee can be trusted. This seems like a reasonable assertion to me: if the referee wanted to be unfair then fudging a few die-rolls would be just one of many ways to do it.

My idea is this: the player chooses something to represent them in each email sent, and the referee matches the selection against a randomly generated 'something' to determine task resolution. This would be used in cases where the outcome should have some randomness thrown in. The type of something that the player chooses would be based on the setting. For a Glorantha setting it might be a rune, in Dying Earth a picture of a character from the Dying Earth RPG source books?

An image of the something would be added to the end of each player email. That should add a healthy dose of colour (no pun intended) to the proceedings.

I'll try to add some example to my next posting.

Let's tool up.

This here blog is going to be dumping ground for my thoughts on running a PBEM game. Feel free to comment (constructively) on my thoughts!

I'm going to start by trying to describe the sort of game that I would like to see emerge. So that's going to include things like rules, setting and etiquette.

At the moment I think that the rule system should be very simple and that I'll make it up myself. I always got excited about coming up with my own rules: I used to create game after game. Very few of them got played for very long cos once we started using the rules I'd be thinking of so many improvements that I'd want to start over! Also, over the last couple of years I've become more aware of the string link between settings and rules (previously I'd been trying to invent rules that were totally generic). I see now the error of my ways, largely thanks to discussions at The Forge (where I post very occasionally) and the mind-blowing Dying Earth RPG. If you're an fan or fantasy and/or RPGs and you've never seen the latter, you owe it to yourself to investigate further.

Settings-wise then, the ones I'm most interested in at the moment are The Dying Earth, Glorantha or something completely made up by me! :) I feel very strongly that the rules should go hand-in-hand with the setting - the table-top Dying Earth mini-campaign I ran last year really benefitted from the quirky rules. (I did find I was unhappy with certain aspects of the rules though: the amount of book-keeping to keep track of Attribute Tallies during contests, for one.)

Taking this as inspiration, I feel that PBEM rules ought to match the setting. However, I think that they should also match the email medium. With that in mind player die-rolls are out I think (although there's nothing to stop each individual player using dice to determine private things about their character or to help drive decisions). However, I can't quite let go of the idea that each player should have at least some input when it comes to resolving actions. Some kind of optional spend could be involved, effectively allowing the player to attach weight to the outcome of an action. The currency they have available to spend should be based upon what their character is good at as well as how well they are role-playing the situation.

You may notice that I've not talked specifically about the roles of players and referee yet. More on that and more in the next post...