Conducting a play by mail survey. You are invited to participate.

https://us3.list-manage.com/survey?u=1bd...6f2ae232bf

Hi all, my name is Ricky, and I have just joined this forum as I play Galactac, been playing about a year.. I also found that there is a forum for Supernova, which I've been playing for around 6 years now.
I hope to be able to add some useful posts in the near future :-)
Gixxer

How much is it to play Hyborean War? I can't find that information on the website?

Any idea why they haven't gone to email for turns?

TIA

This has been quite a tumultuous year for me so far. I got divorced on Jan 9th, had triple bypass surgery on Jan 10th, and after 12 weeks out on medical leave went back to work last week during the middle of the Black Death of the 21st Century. Whew.

Anyway, during the long break after surgery I got back to work on my web game Project Libertine. I realized I've been working on it for almost 10 years now and still only let my 14 year old son play it at this point. It's not quite ready to go into Alpha testing yet, but I have made a lot of progress and have a definite checklist of items I'm working on that once complete I will allow some people to try it out.

The game is not a PBM, but it is heavily influenced by PBM games and the old BBS Door games from the 80s. It's a persistent 4X Space Exploration game and will be almost all player driven and open-ended. Instead of turns or time units, it will use countdown timers for most actions that you take.

I'm trying to update my blog about it fairly regularly if you'd like to keep up with things:

https://projectlibertine.blogspot.com/

Thanks for your time.

Hatch
Nashville, TN

I have created a Hyborian War Player Aid and it would be great to get feedback from the community on how to improve it. As I am truly a beginner at this stage, I don’t know exactly what the experienced player community would want from a Player Aid. Although the primary goal of this Player Aid is to help new players (including me), it would be ideal if the Player Aid would be of value to all players.

When I learn a new game (board game or PBM), I often will create a Player Aid to help me in the learning process, and then share that creation with the larger community. I have also done this for Middle-earth and SuperNova.

The PDF download link for the Hyborian War Player Aid is:

Hyborian War Player Aid.pdf

Feel free to download and view a copy locally (click the Download link in the upper-right corner of the page), read it directly from the web page as an in-line PDF, or even print it out. Whatever works best for you.

For those interested, Wikipedia has a list of play-by-mail games now that has over 280 games. I think it'll hit 300 before too long. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pl...mail_games

Helm

Ok, I give up on trying to do communal editing for documents - there just isn't anything out there that seems like a good fit.

Instead, I'm going to host a "current plan" page where I keep a public list of the stuff I'm planning on doing.  This plan will change as people come up with better ideas here on the forum, and I'll be the one editing the plans directly.

My planning page currently contains some general information about overall game structure changes, which you may review (and complain about) at your leisure.  In addition, I'm starting a series of tiny documents describing specific aspects that we've hashed out here.  I've started with "The History of Midgard", which is the stuff we've talked about here with some rewording to make it more of a "user guide" flavor.  Next I'll want to add separate documents for each faction as we come up with a consensus description.  Keep an eye on the "last changed date" shown for each document so you'll know if there have been changes that you want to review.

I've started out by providing the documents as MS Word files, which you can download and view on your own machines.  However, if that is awkward I can switch over to providing only PDFs (or some other format) for review.  I figure the Word documents might be handy because they're locally editable and you might want to send me changes to some portions of it that way, but we can handle it in whatever way is most comfortable for you.

So, for now, go visit my new planning page at www.talisman-games.com/midgard/plan and start reviewing my descriptive page and first document.  Feel free to leave comments here on the forum (either this thread or on separate threads for each subject, as seems appropriate).

Once we get a little feedback started on this much we'll start talking about the factional descriptions.

Ok?

We've got many, many subjects going already, but let me throw in another one (just to overload us)...

There was mention of walls (in relation to to the Imps and to reduced city defenses).  However, I'm none too pleased by the old definitions of wall strength and thought we might discuss reorganizing these.


At the low end, earthworks alone (ditch and/or berm) I would think would make an adequate starting point, perhaps leaving stakes (on both) and/or brambles for level 2 work.  I can see people building sod walls in there somewhere, too.  Then I'd like to add in some options for wooden walls, starting with thin picket-like walls just designed for ingress/egress control and moving up to heavy wooden structures designed for a defense against a minor attack.  (I'm thinking of the movie notion of the "American Old West"-type forts that the cavalry set up to defend against Indian attack.)

After wood we can progress to stone and/or masonry walls of various heights and thicknesses, and perhaps reserve some of the "extra features" for some of the "+0.1" levels?


The classic definition of 10.0 walls is massive, and I think they would be more than enough to top off our scale.  Construction of such levels should be really expensive by then and difficult to work up to.


FYI - Did you know that the classic vision of the "Great Wall" is rather misleading?  It was built in many different sections and in some places not even joined together.  It looks like that classic view for only a small part of its length (and I personally think it's kept up like that for the tourism value).  Some parts of the supposed "great wall" were wood or stone "fences" that were barely able to keep livestock from crossing, even before they degraded to mounds of rubble.


As for restarting Midgard's cities, I think it would be a good idea to knock down everything(?) made of stone or masonry so we can get to a balanced position.  The cities would have had time and resources by now to build back up with earth and/or wood, depending on their populations and financial positions.  So I can see cities starting out as pretty much anything appropriate that's less than stone or masonry, which will require further work (particularly by players) to get back in place.


What does everyone think of those ideas?

This Poll is to talk about the Unfair Imperial Preserves - Fortress of Solitude that even Superman would have problems trying to jump over those 25.0 Walls and 25.0 Towers. These huge cities are on the average 200,000+ protected population. Lets look at the games standard wall size that for every other Walls ad Towers can go up to 10.0 in size.



So as you can see a standard City could build up to an 10.0 Wall & Tower is 100 feet tall or equivalent to the Great Wall of China. So my question to everyone is what would be a 25.0 Wall & Tower actually be? Would this be like 250 feet tall and how wide would that actually be. Talk about Fantasy concepts, that is totally unrealistic and darn unfair to say the least. I say Davin - GM "Tear down that wall"!

Realize the GM has stated that every city across Midgard continent will be reduced to almost total rubble. That means they will be almost in not any defences at all 0.0 Walls & Towers and the populations will all be under 10,000 populations. Also each of these cities will have at best 1-2 of each of the city building at best, and mostly no factional offices or temples in them. Next the GM has stated that each faction might have 1-2 declared cities, and the rest will all be Independent declared. It should be pointed out that there were (4) Imperial Preserves. So since the world is recovering from the great ruin from the meteor strike, every city including the Preserves should also have destroyed as well.

I think that it might be ok to give the Imperials (2- 4) of these places but state that they are 20-40,000 population. Roll a d6 and results of 1-3 gives you 20k, 4-5 gives you 30k, and 6 gives you 40k. Next give them maybe 2-4 city buildings of each type within these cities. I would give them only 3.0 Walls and 4.0 Towers, and NO other defences at all. Make them build up these places like the rest of the game. They must find the in game resources and pay to run the clans to actually do it as well too.

Realize every faction gains resources like (Retainers, Crowns, Influence) based off of a number of factors like : Number of Cities, Number of Population, Number of factional Offices/Temples, Number of Active declared clans and other values. I am seeking to make this all fair, but the Imperials have always been defined as a Big Box faction. Also do NOT give them any regiments at game start, make thm also build them as well too.

Poll Question: What should the starting Walls & Towers be for the Preserves be set at?

Should the Guilds faction be allowed as a Live and Open faction for players to play in the game? Under Midgard USA it was opened up by Zan for game play. I had talked to Zan about what they could be and do and there were active player clans at the end of the time of the game in Midgard USA.

Declared Guilds clans skill set:

 Now it the skills are what they do for a city basically. They have all the Naval based skills that are for shipyards, the city based skills, as well as Oratory skill which is related to the Helios communication based ability. Basically they are a city based clan, although I think there should be a Blacksmith or Smithy based  skills added as well too. Maybe drop the ADM skill and add a SMH - Smithy skill instead.  Remember they create "Manufactured Goods" that are needed for everything. So maybe their skill set should be:

 SHP - Shipwright
 SEA - Seamanship
 NAV - Navigation
 SMH - Smithy
 ENG - Engineering
 MER- Merchant
 ORA - Oratory

 Factional benefits:

 1) Can make Manufactured Goods from metal.
 2) Can build ships from resources.
 3) Can make Uniforms/Winter Uniforms from resources.
 4) Can support Construction projects, with some mancycles bonus.
 Defined like this, I think that it could be fun to play one of these clans.