Secret emails and Intrigue

[Dareoon Dalandrove]

I'm going to be running my first d20 mod game in a couple of weeks. In fact I haven't run anything in a looooong time and I had a thought. I want to keep the players excited so that when we play it's entertaining and fun. So after playing on a weekend there is the whole week to forget about it. I want the players to keep excited about it. I was thinking about setting up an email account (or a couple) and emailing the players with "hints". There is a thread about the X-Men so I'll use them for an example. In the movie Wolverine is looking for information about his past. One day he checks his Hotmail account and finds a strange email. He doesn't know who it's from and the message is kind of cryptic but it scratches at his conscious. I was thinking about giving some useful info and some bad false info (IE setting traps for them). I could just take a player into another room or pass them a note but then everyone knows that something is happening. I wanted to avoid that, besides it slows the game down. So your thoughts please. I suppose that this could be like a poll also. If you want to just put "Yea sounds good”, or "No way, are you a crack pot" that's fine too.

 

[Mr Fidgit]

what's the setting for your modern game?

if the PCs are part of an organization, you could send e-mails that include dossiers or even correspondence from other agents who are in trouble

 

[Mark]

You could get each player to set up a free Email account somewhere, make sure to enable HTML, and have someone in the group design some pretty cool templates for everyone to use. Something where all they have to do is copy and paste it into their Email, then replace text in one or more given areas so that they always turn out nifty.

 

[Dareoon Dalandrove]

The group is part of an organization. Think Archer foundation.

You could get each player to set up a free Email account somewhere, make sure to enable HTML, and have someone in the group design some pretty cool templates for everyone to use. Something where all they have to do is copy and paste it into their Email, then replace text in one or more given areas so that they always turn out nifty.

What?

 

[Mark]

The group is part of an organization. Think Archer foundation.



What?

Most Email accounts have a switch that you can turn on or off to allow for either plain text Emails or Emails with HTML coding.

If you all have accounts at, say, Yahoo, with your game names, you can all turn them on to allow for HTML. Then you have someone who is good with coding to set up some code so they can look like telegrams (with a background and header that says Western Union, or some such), or official (psuedo-)government documents. If each person had that section of code that they could copy and paste in their Email in a format like this-

__________________________________________

codecodecodecodecode

???Replace this with your message text????

codecodecodecodecode

___________________________________________

- you could be sending cool game Emails to one another, and even print them out if you desired a record of the game.

*shrug*

Just a thought, really. Maybe to geeky for some folks.

 

[Dareoon Dalandrove]

ahh that sounds really cool. I'll check to see if anyone in my group can do that. If not you may get an email from me sometime.

 

[Mark]

If you took an afternoon, and went through the easy tutorials on this site-

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/

You'd be able to do it yourself quite easily. And, you'd be able to make many kinds and adjust them as you go along. Be sure to use Google to search around for some cool backgrounds, and maybe check out some images to get inspiration for the types of things you want the Emails to look like.

Once you have the simple code in your head, you could even have the players do the searching and make a group project out of it. Something about setting things up with the group, rather than having just one person do it, helps to get the players more into the game as they will have a personal investment in the quality of the whole process.

 

[darkbard]

sorry to hijack temporarily but i just need to say that, in my experience, mark is a paragon of moderatorship. over a year ago i posted a thread about the difficulty of designing wilderness encounters. mark's response: to post a map of the area i was trying to design an adventure around, plot out encounter regions, and offer all sorts of other useful advice about how to go about designing this type of adventure. i've never forgotten that.

this thread is just another example of mark's magnanimity. thanks mark!

 

[Mark]

sorry to hijack temporarily but i just need to say that, in my experience, mark is a paragon of moderatorship. over a year ago i posted a thread about the difficulty of designing wilderness encounters. mark's response: to post a map of the area i was trying to design an adventure around, plot out encounter regions, and offer all sorts of other useful advice about how to go about designing this type of adventure. i've never forgotten that.

this thread is just another example of mark's magnanimity. thanks mark!

np db You're very kind to remember so long ago and take the time to bring it up and thank me again.

How'd that adventure pan out, anyway?