On 10 Feb 2002 at 1:28, Dave Zumwalt wrote:

> I would like to run a PBEM 3rd Edition D&D adventure. But I do not wish for 
> the game mechanics, especially rolling dice for each combat action, to slow 
> the game down. In face-to-face pen and paper, battles can sometimes take an 
> hour. If the players and I have to roll dice and email the results back and 
> forth, or use one those dice server things, battles will probably take 
> weeks. I need help coming up with a solution.

That's one of the great unsolved problems of using FTF-designed rules 
in a PBeM game.
 
> What other tricks do you know of that speed play? I suppose I could do all 
> the rolling myself as DM, but the temptation to fudge the results would be 
> high.

What it generally comes down to, in most cases, is scrapping a lot of 
the detail and going to a more "freeform" system.  If you really 
*like* the rules, that's obviously not going to be an ideal solution 
for you, so you end up having to find a compromise that works for 
you, which can take some experimentation.

There are several D&D games, with varying levels of rules 
"visibility," on the Phoenyx, so you might poke around in their 
archives and look at what their combats look like.

The main list of games is available at , and each home page should 
have a navbar from which "Web Read" should take you to their 
respective message archives.  In particular, Bohavia and The Realms 
are a couple I can think off of the top of my head that use in-group 
dice mechanics.  (The Phoenyx has an automatic dice-roller, so 
anywhere you see a "roll" folled by "Results of rolling..." the 
second line was inserted by the software.)

-- 
Karen J. Cravens (silver@phoenyx.net)

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