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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8864804" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 128: February 1998part 3/5The New Face of the Enemy: Play by Mail games have never been the primary focus of Dragon or Polyhedron, but they have been a persistent undercurrent right back to the very earliest days of roleplaying, another offshoot from their wargaming ancestors. Their popularity has always been limited by the time and expense needed to play them, with each turn taking a week or even a month and every action costing money you need quite a particular mindset to persist and derive pleasure from playing. But with the internet, you can exchange letters pretty much as fast as people can write them, and send them to as many people as you want at no extra cost. This has led to a massive boom of new players, particularly at the RPG end of the field rather than the wargamey one, where you can have extended conversations in a naturalistic fashion and don't have to wait for everyone to make a move before you can go to the next turn. There's almost definitely some grognards grumbling about all the storygamers coming in ruining everything, :cough:nisarg:cough: but that just shows the more things change, the more they stay the same. An interesting little article that's quite heavy on links, which unfortunately are all dead now apart from the one to rpg.net, showing just how much technology changes gaming, but also how ephemeral things on the internet can be. Our current forums only stretch back to 2002, so any PbP games that were running back then are now lost to the ages. If you really value the stories you told then, I hope you copied the text and saved it in a local copy.Character Generation Software: Last article had more than a few dead links in it, but this one is even more frustratingly dated, as the downloads of character generation software for various systems they link to would in theory still be useful now if you could get your hands on them. 5 AD&D ones of various quality levels, 3 much better ones for Shadowrun, Earthdawn & GURPS, evidently their creators have more passion for what they do, a purely generic one, and an entirely online one that doesn't work for them, because Java applets aren't particularly reliable. Another interesting example of how the internet is creating communities sharing game material, sometimes selling it even if their legal right to do so is dubious. Which companies embrace the web straight away, which ignore it and which try to stomp on online fanworks and the effect that had on their long-term fortunes is a particularly interesting bit of history that I hope someone was keeping notes on and might make into a book someday. Robots For Dummies: Now there's a series I wasn't expecting them to parody in here. But looking it up, the for dummies books have been going since 1991 and sold well right from the start, so it's an entirely valid cultural reference for the era, although they won’t get around to covering D&D until 2005. Anyway, here's a lighthearted, system free look at how robots work, applicable to games from Paranoia to Star Wars to Shadowrun. They vary widely in size and sophistication, but all are programmed to obey and be helpful … as long as you know how to give orders correctly. Watch out for boot times, bugs, viruses, need for software updates at inconvenient times, overzealous following of one order at the expense of everything else and people who know the emergency override passwords, turning your loyal servant against you. If you're a regular consumer of genre media all of these should be pretty familiar tropes, so this is more a brief refresher than anything hugely educational. But I'm sure there are some younger readers who'll actually learn something from it. They are trying hard to increase their membership at the moment, so they can't aim everything at cynical long-term readers like me who can predict the patterns in stories fairly accurately before they even start.</blockquote>

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