0 for 6

[Manzanita]

I've been playing a little over a year now and have seen many games close, of course. At this point, though, I have 5 PCs who've advanced to 2nd level, and one who's advanced to 3rd. It's a great feeling, I'll tell you.

If you stick it out awhile, you'll seive out the short lived games, & end up with some that really last. That's what happened to me, @least.

I'd like to again say 'Thank You' to Creamsteak, for shutting down "Retrieval of Fallon's Key" and freeing up our PCs to further adventure. This aspect makes LEW very appealing to me as a player. It is looking for appealing to me as a DM, as well. I've been running a campaign for 9 months or so now, and I do run out of steam sometimes. I would say, for what its worth, that no one should criticize a PbP DM until he/she runs one himself for a year or so. It's hard to keep it fresh & good. With LEW, it would seem possible to run an adventure for 6 months or so, then have it done with, and take a break from DMing. Sometimes you have epic designs, but other times, I think a short shot at DMing would be healthy.

 

[Velmont]

Well, same here, just too much game that are dying. Since I began to play, I think only one game I have the feeling it will lastm it is the EPIC mutant and masterman game run by Calinon. Pretty good and running reasonnably fast. And there is Killer in Kalidnay who is very slow, but seems it don't want to die.

Many are dying, others are death. There is one or two other which I hope will last for long, but it is very hard to make it live long, as there may always be something to make it stop for a while (someone leaving for a trip, or a bay is coming) and it end with the death of the game. Well, I hope to fall on the good one. A great game that will last.

 

[Creamsteak]

In my (long) experience here, the MAIN reason that PbP's fail (other than DM flaking syndrome) is because they are too dependant on having almost ALL of the original group continue to play.

I was looking over LHHS to see where we stopped the other day. Seems like everything stopped because I had the group split in 3 and one of the groups never got around to posting... and damnit, right before I wanted to have you fight a series of really hard encounters in the abyss. Brawn would have torn it up, most definitely.

 

[Manzanita]

Let me make one further comment on this. We don't want to make it too stressful to DM. I know I've enjoyed all the games that have failed. They're fun while they last. And if those DMs had been too trepidatious to even start, then Storminator might have been 0 for 0 instead of 0 for 6.

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

Let me make one further comment on this. We don't want to make it too stressful to DM. I know I've enjoyed all the games that have failed. They're fun while they last. And if those DMs had been too trepidatious to even start, then Storminator might have been 0 for 0 instead of 0 for 6.

Oh I can't agree more with this if I tried. Every game I've been in has been fun, and to be honest I miss them all.

Even though I know of the issues that go into PbP I have two campaign I wouldn't mind running when time likes me again. One is a GI Joe campaign and another is well I guess a homebrew, not that it really would be D&D but nothing special other than new to the players and a chance for me to use books that I haven’t been able to. (The players too.)

 

[Uriel]

When I first came to ENWorld, it was because I had tried to play on another site (Dragons Lodge,or some such) and the game died. It was free form and not even strictly D20, a quirk that bugged me. I found this place and made a character...


...Froderick Ostrandir didn't last very long, DM flakiness et al.
I almost left the Boards in disgust, but instead ,I stuck it out and here I am.

I guess that I have played in about a dozen games that have gone the way of the Dodo, play on/off inanother 8 or 10,depending on DM input and currently run 5 + the LEW games (1 right now, a 2nd coming soon).

I work full time at a Night Club (well, Th-Sun ,leaving M-W for sleep) and I find time to post between doinf the musician thing,chasing girls and trying to play in RL here in San Francisco.

I see no reason for someone who DMs a game to not be able to devote 20 minutes a day (or every other day) to posting.

Fankly, most of mine are Improved as well, I don't have floorplans and Outlines for them, i just flip to a page in the MM or a map in my 'Book of maps (canibalized from every game module that I ever owned) and say 'That looks fun.

It isn't hard to throw together an adventure/encounter,really.

The flakes have no excuse.

 

[reapersaurus]

I was looking over LHHS to see where we stopped the other day. Seems like everything stopped because I had the group split in 3 and one of the groups never got around to posting... and damnit, right before I wanted to have you fight a series of really hard encounters in the abyss. Brawn would have torn it up, most definitely.

dude, Brawn would have pwn3d you ALL.



Ya, I was having fun throwing his naive weight around in combat. There's SO much you can do with a Large character... even MORE now with 3.5 and all.

I liked the combat-heavy nature. Most people take the approach that combat ruinds PbP games, but if it's done well, it;s some of the most memorable parts of it.
I remember BARELY surviving the final encounter in Heavy G's Non-Iconic Adventure. Only survived due to moving 1 5' square different, and blocked the emeny's escape without an AoO.

 

[Kalanyr]

I've seen many games die to, they largely seem to happen when for some reason people don't post for a while, or only 1 person does, (since I DM) I prefer to have at least a couple of posts before going on, so the thread just tends to die. RIP HotW. . Now to go find the other game of mine thats in the process of dying.

 

[Mithreander]

And I'm off to go close another DMs game , so the characters can continue onto another adventure :sigh:.

That game was mine, and it would have been good. Two of the players disappeared, and to be honest, I did not feel like taking the effort (and it does require an effort) to post another one hour post to have very few of the characters reply with more then one line responces. No, I'm not blaming the playeres, for the longer it took me to post, the more guilt I felt about posting, so I put it off even longer. This kept occuring until I had not posted for a little over a month. The result: The games I was playing in dropped me, and most of the games I DMed dies as well, except for those mentioned below.

At the time I was DMing 5 adventures. Only two of them are still going. One of them, I'm the second DM of, and 3 of the players have been replaced. One of those players has hardly posted since he joined.

My other game, I'm glad to say, has continued with the same players for over 4 months now with about 377 post so far. I'd like to see it move faster, but ey, this IS a pbp game!

The game that Creamsteak killed had about 350 posts itself, and I feel a greeat amount of sorrow in not seeing it to completion, but the players did need to move on. It SHOULD have been done about 2 months ago. I was pushing it forward for the first couple of weeks, moving through several days worth of game time, but then I lost my momentum, and my players lost theirs as well (probably do to my loss). It finnally ended right when I had sucked in my belly to give it a go again. I could not exactly force the players to stay, since I could not tell myself or them that the same thing would not happen again.

Needless to say, I'm now contenting myself with the two games I'm DMing and the ones that I'm playing in, a wopping 2 games from the 11 I had started in.

 

[Creamsteak]

Less is more sometimes... At one time I was playing in something like 8 games. I've reduced that to a list I can actually name:

Psionicle
Emerald's Play by Post
LEW

and I just enlisted in a new game (of the dragon hunting variety).

Could you have chosen a word other than "killed?" I didn't "want" to do it, it just came to passing that I had to take what was left alive out of the adventure so it could grow somewhere else...