Steerpike ruminates about running a game...

[LD]

I've had great success running Call of Cthulu on it with five players- since facing and positioning don't really matter with it- and I can trust players on rolls.

I also played in an exalted game that was a little problematic since NO maps were used- but if the GM had drawn at least one map overview of an area we had trouble visualizing, it would have been perfect.

As far as a game in which positioning is more important- MapTools solves that problem- skype for voice- map tools for placement and drawing maps.  DnD 4e and 3.5 ran fine on MapTools/Skype.

[TheMeanestGuest]

I dunno, recently a couple of my friends and I tried playing Star Wars Saga for a couple sessions on Ventrilo, but we stopped when we all agreed it felt fundamentally wrong.

The GM was good, everyone got into their characters pretty well.. but it was just off.

(The GM did put maps up, but we didn't use maptool or whatever)

[Kindling]

I am more than interested in Cadaverous Earth or Planescape, but due to my possibly busy summer schedule I could only really commit to a PbP, precisely for the reason of its slowness - I could afford to not be around to post ALL the time.

[Steerpike]

The reason I put play by post up as an option was precisely because I know a lot of players are in very diverse time-slots and have limited time.  Last time I ran Tempter we had a really hard time accommodating - Nomadic on the west coast of NA, I'm nearer the east coast right now, and Ghostman was in Britain, I think.

I know pbp would be slow as Hell, though... anyone had any positive experiences with play by post?  The only big advantage I can think of would be the benefit of adding illustrations and being able to make the writing very polished... combat would be agonizing, though.

[Nomadic]

I have alot of PbP experience and I can tell you right now that a PbP has about a 98% chance of collapsing on itself from lack of interest (due to slowness) before the first combat finishes. It very quickly stops becoming fun.

[LordVreeg]

I have alot of PbP experience and I can tell you right now that a PbP has about a 98% chance of collapsing on itself from lack of interest (due to slowness) before the first combat finishes. It very quickly stops becoming fun.

Tempter might be the only one that would work here.

I will show my age here and tell you all I ran a PBM (play by mail) game of Tunnells and Trolls back in the early 80s.  You want to talk slow?????

[Nomadic]

I have alot of PbP experience and I can tell you right now that a PbP has about a 98% chance of collapsing on itself from lack of interest (due to slowness) before the first combat finishes. It very quickly stops becoming fun.

Tempter might be the only one that would work here.

I will show my age here and tell you all I ran a PBM (play by mail) game of Tunnells and Trolls back in the early 80s.  You want to talk slow?????

That's nothing, I'm still playing a PbU game. Basically my counterparts are in other realities. We send our actions by changing bits of our universes so as to transmit information. So no, Deja vu doesn't mean you're going crazy, I probably just misencoded something somewhere in the last thousand years or so. I just sent in my last play awhile back (going to cast a magic missile at a gnoll our group is fighting, first encounter of the game still) but it won't get through until the sun runs down in 5 billion years.