Need advice - Play by Mail

[captainjapan]

I want to try out a play-by-mail wargames campaign to get some idea of what Hyboria, or Gary's Great Kingdom would have been like to play in. There is a company, RSI, out of Tempe, AZ that is running variously themed campaigns. The turns are two weeks each, incl. post. Cost is $5/ turn. With a small kingdom, the game will probably play out in about a year, or so. Adjudication is automated.

Will this get me close to how it would have been played back in the day? If there are any better suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Like with Diplomacy, I expect I will be devoting a large share of my mental energies to this, once it gets rolling. I'm also open to non-fantasy themed(historical) pbm, if those still exist. E-pbm is fine, too.

Thanks for any help.

[derv]

Not sure what you mean by, "how it was played back in the day". I think Flying Buffalo was the first company to commercially run games through the mail some time in the 70's. There seemed to be a real surge in this type of game with the advent of D&D prior to the home PC and wide use of the internet. But, prior to that you had wargamers like Bath and Featherstone sharing orders for a campaign in such a fashion and in the 60's many of the Dipzines were a medium for such pbm games and their reports.

[captainjapan]

Sept 29, 2019 19:46:27 GMT -6 derv said:

Not sure what you mean by, "how it was played back in the day". I think Flying Buffalo was the first company to commercially run games through the mail some time in the 70's. There seemed to be a real surge in this type of game with the advent of D&D prior to the home PC and wide use of the internet. But, prior to that you had wargamers like Bath and Featherstone sharing orders for a campaign in such a fashion and in the 60's many of the Dipzines were a medium for such pbm games and their reports.

Another games company out of Tempe! I suppose Flying Buffalo might still be running pbm, although they haven't updated their catalog in about ten years. Rick Loomis passed away last month. I wonder what that means for the future of the company.

I was born in 1976, so even I'm not sure how it was played "back in the day". Here's an early description from Jon Peterson's blog:

"... the planned game was a wargame, of a particular type called a multiple-commander play-by-mail wargame. All of the major "peers" of the Castle & Crusade Society, that is prominent members of the club, would be granted holdings, and each would serve as a commander of their own forces. The final sentence notes that the game should incorporate elements of both Avalon Hill board wargames as well as aspects of Diplomacy. The only hints we see about how the game would be conducted are mentions that the King can reach out via the Society Newsletter (the Domesday Book) or through personal correspondence."

I guess they never actually got around to playing in the Great Kingdom. There is also this Hyborian Campaign as described by Phil Barker in memoriam:

"... Tony’s other great innovation was the campaign. His “Hyboria” postal campaign involved most of the leading ancient wargamers of the day. Thanks to its journal, “The Shadizar Herald”, it incorporated not only tactical and economic factors, but politics, crime, skulduggery, gossip, slander and even some quite respectable epic poetry. It set the standard for all subsequent campaigns... "

Are there any clubs still existing that collect dues and put out a newsletter based on a play-by-mail campaign? I live in the great lakes region of the US. If these don't exist anymore, then yeah, I will go the commercial route.

[countingwizard]

I just finished up a year long team campaign (2-week turns) of Hyborian War with Norm from Troll and Flame. We joined a custom game using the Road of Kings Forum. Our game had all the kingdoms divided up into teams of 3. We played Stygia, Darfur, and Tombalku.

Hyborian war is kind of a strange beast. On one hand it has all these descriptive non-quantifiable stats and mechanics that are a hallmark of OD&D play. On the other hand, the descriptions are repetitive and can be almost entirely ignored for key details found in each report; and certain actions and strategies seem absolutely useless in effect. For example, you could send a spy to foment rebellion in an enemy province, but even when successful you won't see any changes take place even over the course of 3 months of real-life plotting.

When it's good, it's good. But when it's bad it's really bad. Once your territory starts getting ate up by your enemies, the momentum keeps going. The game doesn't have as much attrition as Risk does, where rapid expansion spreads the enemy forces thin. So there are very tiny opportunities to actually be able to turn a war around. Usually the only way you will survive is if someone bigger comes along and starts eating up your enemies so that they have to turn and fight them instead.

Also, there will sometimes be turns where your orders aren't entered correctly and the game will totally f**k you. You can appeal to the company, and they may give you some extra troops or something, but it doesn't really help since momentum is everything.

I did enjoy the adventuring stories that are intertwined throughout the game. You can send your adventurers off on adventure, and the game will regale you with stories of their exploits (or death) and tell you how much treasure they bring back.

Also the game took up a tremendous amount of time. Even running a small kingdom such as Tombalku, I was spending about 3 or 4 hours at a time reading the results and submitting each turn. It's not like you can spread that time out either. You've got to keep track of where your forces are, what your characters can do and how good they can do it, and then coordinate your actions so that everyone is doing the most optimal thing. I set up a Roll20 page and imported the Hyborian War map, and imported images of different colored pushpins to keep track of forces/ownership and coordinate with my team mates.

I myself would consider trying a different PBM game, but I would want something that was less frequent and needed less time to submit turns.

In my opinion, there is enough material in the Hyborian War game to turn it into an actually fun custom war/board game or setting. All the military units, characters, and provinces are detailed enough to give guidance on building a good framework of a game. It definitely inspired me to start learning D&D back when I first ordered a copy of the rules and map back in 2012. I got into OD&D precisely so I could learn how to make a good Conan adventure game in the same format as D&D. My Conan project eventually took a back seat to creating actual OD&D content though. 

[captainjapan]

Sept 30, 2019 7:21:00 GMT -6 countingwizard said:

I just finished up a year long team campaign (2-week turns) of Hyborian War... 

countingwizard,

That's exactly the game I was looking at.

It sounds like you were waiting for a chance to play Hyborian for a long while, unless this wasn't your first go. I've signed up at the RoK forums and I'm just waiting for the registration to be approved. I don't have anyone in mind to play with. Did you already know your teammates when you joined or did you meet them on the forums? How did you contact your enemies (or was it just gunboat diplomacy)?

derv mentioned Flying Buffalo. They had an option for a slowww turn resolution. I'll see if RSI has that option. I can do 3-4 hours of plotting, but not all in one sitting. Thanks for the warning.

It sounds like the real hinderence was the automated adjudicator. You were sweatin' the details of moves, and the computer was only programmed with just so many canned responses. That you still remember sending the spy out of all the turns you played says to me that you must have been pretty disappointed.

The craziest thing in all this, to me, is that you went from ordering the play-by-mail wargame to then learning to play OD&D. It's exactly backwards of how I'd think anyone would be exposed to such things. Was it your idea to play Hyborian War in the first place or did someone else turn you on to it?

[countingwizard]

I have no idea how I found Hyborian War. I think I was just starting to do serious research on Conan and collecting REH works about that time and I came across it somehow while googling more scholarly questions. I signed up for a few turns around then, but dropped the game after feeling like I was the only player. I had sent off three our four hand-written letters to my neighboring kingdoms (they give you address on request), trying to roleplay my faction, but got no responses to my diplomatic advances.

I may have played a game or two of OD&D with Austinjimm at that point, but I hadn't yet landed on a preferred system since I was brand new to playing D&D with actual people and not just computer games. Hyborian War sent me on the path to looking at game mechanics and learning how things work, why modern rules are the way they are, and learning about the history of the game. That meant playing lots of OD&D because it was more of a blackbox of obscurity, and then working my way through the rule systems from there, examining differences and why things were changed in each iteration.

Best answers I've been able to come up with in my 8 years of research are:
1. Gotta sell books and supplements to make money, and new rules are a way to kickstart a new purchase cycle.
2. Rules changed focus to sell more of a particular type of product; i.e. modules and then stories and books as TSR changed from a gaming company to a book publisher.
3. Rules needed to be codified exactly so that the publisher could sell more computer games.
4. Rules were changed to appeal to computer games of the time (MMOs).
5. Rules were simply forgotten during the transition back to a focus on at-the-table play.

[derv]

Try Here: Suspense & Decision Magazine. It's a digital magazine published infrequently that is free and put together by die hards. They use to have a forum also, but I'm not sure how active it is.

Ho! look at that! a brand new issue was put out.

[captainjapan]

Sept 30, 2019 16:27:08 GMT -6 derv said:

Try Here: Suspense & Decision Magazine. It's a digital magazine published infrequently that is free and put together by die hards. They use to have a forum also, but I'm not sure how active it is.

Ho! look at that! a brand new issue was put out.

'Ask and you shall receive.'
derv, you rock! I will devour this zine.