DM's Advice
DM
After you've been playing PBeMs for a while, chances are that you will one day think that you would love to start one of your own. Good luck to you, but before you go and put up a posting on Irony Games' Message Board to find some players, STOP - you have a LOT to do before you're ready for that stage.
The first question that you need to ask yourself is whether you have sufficient time available to you to run a PBeM. I said above that a player should allocate around half an hour per posting to have sufficient time to play a PBeM. As a DM, you need to spend more time than that on the game - a lot more time. In my experience, I have found that each posting takes between one and two hours in order to read all of the players' postings, compose my posting and to come up with the story and encounters that comprise the game. Even if you are planning to post only once or twice a week, this is still a major time investment. As is the case with being a player, you also need to bear in mind the longevity of the game. Can you see yourself being in a position to carry on with the game a month from now, six months from now, a year from now? If you can't then either don't start a game, or think about running a game that just runs for a limited amount of time, but make sure that your players know this in advance.
If you're positive that you can spare sufficient time to run a PBeM, then do as much of the planning for your campaign as you can before you start to look for players. If you are planning to run your campaign in a commercially available universe, such as AD&D's 'Forgotten Realms' or 'Greyhawk' universe, then a lot of your work will be done for you. If you have decided to start a universe of your own, then you will need to write a great deal of background to the universe so that you can give it to your players. Take a look through this site to see the amount of material that players need in order to understand the background to a world. All of the background was given to players before the game started running. As well as a background, you need to have decided upon the mechanics of the games. Which rules will you be using? Will you be using any optional rules, or rules of your own that you have made up? How do you want players to generate their characters? How often will you be looking for players to post? How many players do you want to take part in your campaign? All of these questions need to be answered before you start to look for players. In addition, you also need to know the basics of the adventure that they will be starting on. You need to know how the players will meet up, and also the starting adventure that they will be going on. While it can be frustrating for players if you railroad them into doing certain actions, it is a lot more frustrating to get them all started in the game and then for the DM to have no idea as to what to do with them! In Bohavia, I came up with a number of goals for the party to achieve. There is a long-term goal, which is to free the country from the tyranny of the bad guys - a goal which should take several years of gaming to achieve, a medium term goal, such as getting the gnome back home, and a series of short term goals, such as getting out of a city, or fighting off an enemy ambush. It is not necessary to plan months of gaming in advance, but it is a good idea to have the first month of the campaign worked out in advance.
Now you should be ready to make a posting on the Irony Games PBeM site. If you have spent a good deal of time on putting your campaign together, then you should be sure not to throw a posting together in a few minutes. Make sure that all of the important information about the game is included in the posting. Here is a check-list of all of the information that should be included in the posting:
- The game system that will be used in the campaign.
- Whether it will be set in a commercially produced world, or one of your own making
- How often you are looking for postings to be made
- What information players should send you for submission
- A starting date for the campaign
- A closing date for submissions
- Any other restrictions i.e. no munchkins, experienced players only, etc.
This is the vital information that should all be included in your posting. Some DM's will add pages of prose about the starting adventure and background in their posting, but personally I don't think that it is necessary to give out all of this information at this stage - just enough to catch potential players' attention.
If you've put together a well prepared posting for a popular game system, then prepare to be bombarded by submissions from interested players. You should acknowledge receipt of all players' submissions with a quick reply. This is also the right time to send players full information about the campaign which you should have prepared earlier. Chances are that, by the closing date, you will have many more people interested in playing in your game than you will be able to accept. You should already know in advance how many players you are going to accept into your campaign. It can be difficult to know in advance how many players is the 'right' number. If you have too many players, then it can get very difficult to keep control of the game. The more players you have, the more work for you there will be, especially if you are planning a game with a lot of combat. Conversely, if you have too few characters to start with, then you run a risk of the campaign falling apart when you begin to see players fall out of the campaign. Personally, I think that 6-8 players is a good number to start the campaign with.
Deciding on which players you accept into the campaign can be a very difficult decision, especially if you get 20-30 applicants, all desperately wanting to be part of the campaign. So as not to have a terribly hard time after the closing date, I tend to judge all of the applicants as the characters are submitted, dividing the entries into 'definitely yes', 'definitely no' and 'maybe'. Hopefully, all of your places will come to be filled with 'definitely yes' characters alone.
Once you have made your decision, inform all of the 'winners' that you are offering them a place in the game, if they are still interested. Get them to confirm to you that they are still interested in participating in the game. This is important, as a lot of players apply for places in a number of different games, and may already have taken a position in another game. If this is the case, it is better to find this out before you have told the unsuccessful applicants that they have not got a place.
Then comes the unpleasant job of telling all of those who were not successful that this is the case. As unpleasant a task as it is, it should be done. Thank everyone for taking the time and trouble to submit a character and wish them luck in finding another game to join. It is also well worth inviting all of the unsuccessful applicants to become lurkers in the campaign, with a promise that the original lurkers will get first chance to replace players who fall by the wayside.
As soon as you have selected your players, then you should try to start the game as soon as possible, so as not to lose any players who might start in other games while they are waiting for your game to start. However, even if you follow all of these stages, then it is still quite likely that some players will still not bother to post at all, or will drop out after just a few days or weeks of the game. It is for this reason that it is worth starting with more players than you need, and having a number of people 'lurking' in the campaign. If, however, you do not have enough people to keep the campaign going despite taking these precautions, then the only solution is to put out another posting for more players. If you are just looking for one or two extra players, then I would recommend putting the posting up for just a couple of days, and giving a closing date of just a few days into the future. This should avoid a situation of having to choose between 30 players in order to fill just one or two places in the campaign.
If you follow all of the above advice, then the game should now be going and everyone involved will hopefully be having a good time. However,you still have much to do in order to keep your campaign interesting with new encounters. If you have a great amount of imagination, then you shouldn't have a great deal of trouble in coming up with new and interesting directions for the players to go down. One advantage of the slowness of PBeMs compared with face-to-face games is that you have plenty of time in order to come up with new adventures. If, however, you have trouble in coming up with new ideas, there are plenty of ways of getting assistance. One way is to buy commercially available adventures. However, if you do use this method, then it is usually a good idea to try and make a significant number of changes to each adventure, as there is always a chance that one or more of your players could have read, or even played, the adventure before. Another suggestion is to browse the web in search of ideas. There is a great deal of material available on the web. However, much of it, unfortunately, is not of a very high standard, but if you search for long enough, then the chances are that you will find something that sparks your imagination, enabling you to fill in the details. In my games, I make great use of random encounter generators. These, however, should be handled very carefully, as they can very often generate encounters that don't fit in with the rest of the campaign. If this is the case, then don't be afraid to throw out any encounters that you can't justify, and try to think of reasons for the encounter to happen and ways in which the encounter can form the start of a whole new adventure for the characters.
Sooner or later, you're going to end up with your players being put into a combat situation. This can be one of the hardest parts of a PBeM to control, as PBeMs are ill-suited for swift combat resolution. There are many ways to handle combat. At one extreme, you can use the same method as you would use in a face-to-face game, with each combat round being played as a round of your campaign. While this is the most realistic, even a simple combat can take a very long time to run through, and it can get very boring for the players, whose only interaction will usually take the form of 'I'll strike at the orc with my sword, again' for round after round. At the other extreme, you can work through the combat yourself in one posting, treating each PC as an NPC for the duration of the combat. The downside to this is that players can sometimes feel as if they are being left out of one of the most exciting parts of the game if they are not allowed any interaction at this point. The best thing to do is to ask the players in advance as to how they would like to see combat being handled. I tend to let the players tell me at the start of the combat sequence what their plans will be and then run the combat as far as possible until it gets to a point where something that the players did not anticipate happens, at which time I ask the players for new intentions. I have found that it is best if combat is resolved in three postings or less, or else the players start to get a little bored.
One final word of advice - combat is not the only part of the game that it is worth asking your players for input on. It's usually a good idea to check upon how they think the campaign is going every now and again, particularly if players start to post less than they did at the start of the game. Always remember, you may be the DM, but it's not only 'your game'. The game is the responsibility of everyone involved. As soon as the game stops being enjoyable for either the players or the DM, then that it when the game will start to fall apart.
Finally
That is all of the advice that I can give you based upon my experience of PBeMs to date. If you have any questions about PBeMs that have not been answered here, then please drop me a line and I will be delighted to give you a personalized response to your questions. Additionally, if you have some more advice to give about PBeMs in addition to what I have said here, then I would love to hear from you, so that I can add your comments to this page.