Sunday, October 2, 2011

Adventure by Email

As most of you know, my job prevents me from being able to game every weekend. For two weeks out of every six, we have to take a break. I have discussed the difficulty of this before, but this break we have found a way to keep excitement up while we are not playing.

During this break, I am allowing a number of weeks to pass in game time. To let the party know what is going during this break, I have been sending out emails through our group Yahoo site. This has allowed the players to respond to the changing events and keep them interested and focused on the game, even though we have not been able to play for two weeks. I am not running any combats during this time, as the break is primarily a time for the PCs to get some things done in town, and prep for their next adventures, but it is allowing them to have some very interesting roleplaying opportunities that they would not have had otherwise.

Running things like this through email also allows me a rare treat, the ability to give information to certain players without everyone hearing about it. Now, most of my players are very good about not metagaming, but when everyone is sitting around and hearing the information out of character, it does take some of the punch out of it when it is shared in character. By sending the email to only the player who uncovers the information, you get to avoid that. Now it does take one thing away from secrets kept at the table: the paranoia. There is nothing that can make a player more nervous than writing something on a slip of paper and handing it to one of the players. It is an old evil DM's trick, but one that still works amazingly well.

Another thing that it allows me to do, is to have more time to think about the player characters actions before responding. Being able to see what the PCs say in an email before I react to it, gives me an amount of time that I am unaccustomed to. This can be both a benefit and a curse, as it can lead to over thinking things before reacting. Such over thinking can lead to contrived and unrealistic responses, if the DM is not careful.

All in all, the Internet is a fantastic tool to aid your games, when used in moderation. Purely Play be Email games, lose a great deal of the face to face interactions that make tabletop RPGs the unique form of entertainment that they are, but when used as support that tabletop experience, email can aid in providing a richer and fuller experience to both DMs and PCs.