PBM Gaming: Expanding the Beachhead

[JonO]

Perhaps for you, it is, but not for everyone. We certainly still receive plenty of bills in the mail, here. Plus, it's how my Hyborian War turns arrive to me for Hyborian War game # HW-854. If using the postal system were dead, then how do those turn results arrive in my mailbox? Magic? The Tooth Fairy?

And yet, further down, you say you wish your turns were delivered by the internet. My guess is that if there was enough interest in the game, there would be a mechanism for sending and receiving turns. That there isn't suggests that RSI doesn't believe that an expenditure of time and effort would be worth it.

Bills are received by mail because it provides legal protection for the biller. There is no such reason for gaming.

I could easily envision some kid somewhere getting hit with the brainstorm idea to piddle around with playing a role playing game via the mail, maybe with a group of middle school, high school, or college friends.

He'd be one hundred times more likely to conceive of it happening on line. If it was a totally human moderated game, he'd set it up via texting.

Indeed, my website is online, but it exist because of my interest in postal gaming. Plus, my website attracted you. It attracted a few others, as well. It's not a big website. There's not a lot here. I can even hear my own echo, here, at times.

If you build it they will come. Patience in all things, grasshopper.

But, we're here. Maybe that's nuts, too. I don't know. If every remaining commercial PBM company goes out of business, tomorrow, I'll try to make sure that word of it makes the next PBM News Blurb.

My interest in all of this is not financial gain, Sean. Whether the commercial PBM sector collapses with a deft note of finality, or whether it rises like the proverbial Phoenix, my interest in postal gaming exists independent of the commercial PBM sector. Sure, sometimes I criticize the commercial PBM sector. Hey, there's a lot about it that warrants criticism! But, I don't hate the commercial PBM sector.

The question isn't whether RSI will ever starting running a web game, or whether a kid would play by mail, by tabletop, or by web if he wanted to have a game with 1/2 dozen friends.

PBM was what it was because it did support a fairly large number of commercial games. It was the commercial companies, starting with FBI, that created the excitement, the sense of community, and the plain old fun that existed from 1985 to somewhere in the 90's. In a capitalistic society, if someone is good at designing games, he wants to be paid for it, not give them away for free.

It doesn't matter whether there are 100 or 1000 PBM players still getting turns by mail. What will keep what was great about PBM gaming alive in the 21st century is whether commercial pbw games that are neither MUDs nor MMPOLRPGs can be designed and operated in such a way as to attract more cottage-industry professionals.