This is somewhere to keep a note of reflections on the process, and see what we might change it we did this again in the future. It seemed more enjoyable to just start playing and figure out the problems on the move rather than try and work everything out perfectly before starting.
- I'd frequently follow scene setting posts during the early portion of the game with a list of questions. The idea here was to learn more about the characters, and get a view inside their heads. Especially as the first part of the scenario is a little linear. These were questions like 'why is your charactere travelling out here?' or 'what does he think of the first world war?'. If you read the prose for the early sections, a lot of that comes directly from responses to these questions by the players.
- We had a discussion about the revelation of clues, and decided to maximise the potential of playing by email by sending clues found with investigative skills only to the player with the skill, which the character could then share through dialogue if they wanted to. I was concerned this might make the story confusing, and the mystery harder to 'solve' (normally around a table, you'd hear the information other characters got, and I personally hate sending/being sent out of the room) but the players clearly preferred this option. I think it adds a dimension of immersion. The blog is therefore a cohesive record for myself as Keeper, anybody else that wants to follow the game, and for the players to look back on and see the full story when the game ends. This discussion came about after realising that I wasn't being consistent with clue revelation, and probably should be.
- I'd decided to keep sanity and stability losses private from the start. Unless another character was able to use psychoanalysis (possibly reassurance) to figure out something was up with their companion. If a player decided to roleplay out the reaction to the sanity loss, then that was fine (and encouraged). An early example of this is Hal's reaction to the dead body of the bus driver.
- Timing is an important issue. The game moves slower than a tabletop for obvious reasons (we're playing asynchronously through email, rather than all at the same time using chat) so it was important to keep the level of detail high, so that it wasn't boring. I was concerned that the first part of the scenario was a bit linear, and whilst this might have been of little impact in a tabletop, where this section would have maybe taken half an hour, over a few weeks, I was getting a bit nervous about the players feeling railroaded.
- Similarly there was a desire to keep things moving. We set the post-frequency at two a week at the start. We've varied around that a little but generally been ok. At times, I've moved on to the next bit of scene setting before everybody relied to the last because time was getting on and I didn't want things to stagnate. This was most important early on when it was mostly scene-setting and character exposition, and players could always back-fill in their reactions and detail. This might have the side effect of giving us 'scenes' like a film, rather than a continuous rolling focus (see for example, Richard's suggestion that they tie clothes together into a rope to get the others out of the ditch - I assumed that this would work, and we moved on).
- I'm using a spreadsheet to keep track of player stats and abilities and points spends. It's handy, and the idea comes straight from the 'investigator matrix' idea in Trail of Cthulhu
- Time! - time can be interesting, especially when the group becomes split up. This just happened with Roland and Hal going into the library to do some research, this obviously takes a longer amount of in-game time than the conversation going on between the others in the gallery. Given the events that happened in the library, which would make enough noise for the others to hear. I said - in half an hour, something happens, they hear a noise - what are you doing in the intervening 30 min? Now this probably ruled out anything that would take longer than 30 min, unless the player wanted to include the interuption into their fiction. Trying to keep things co-ordinated was a bit tricky, but not too troublesome to start enforcing the group staying together (especially in a horror game like this).
- Conversation log-jams. It appears to be useful to include as much opportunity for people to be acting in parallel as possible. This works well with people in seperate places, or when doing the internal monologue (e.g. everybody is thinking or reacting to the same thing at the same time). The problem comes when you have to do things sequentially - for example, in a conversation, where responses have to follow sequentially, things necessarily slow down. For particularly intense conversations, it might be worth thinking about a setting aside some time for a online chat session (or wave).
- 'Bob says nothing'. I hadn't thought about this until I read a thread on rpg.net about PBeM pacing. I'd been assuming that if a character was going to do nothing, the player would tell me. They might have been making the assumption that a lack of reply signalled doing nothing. My preference is for the former.
- Failure - so yeah, the game dragged to a halt and died some time ago. I think this came down to some of the difficulties of running a game online, which is a bit of a shame. One of the main problems (especially with a 'closed-set' scenario like this) is that if even a single player stops contributing then things can drag and become disjointed. This can then increase as other players become unsure how to respond, and if the game is continuing. I'd introduce some expectation management to respond to this. I think, if starting a new PBEM, I'd say to players 'If you're going to stop playing, or think you can't keep up, or are simply not finding it fun, that's perfectly ok. I don't mind, and won't be hurt or insulted. But it would be incredibly useful if you could clearly tell me that. Your character can always be run as an NPC, or killed off or similar. What kills games is ambiguity."
