On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Karen Cravens wrote:
> It's aimed at the wargame/videogame/CRPG kind of thing (when
> they say RPG, they're not talking about Our Kind Of Games), but
> it's interesting to speculate on whether it applies to PBeM vs.
> Evercrack, and tabletop versus... uh... television or something.
It probably does apply to PBEM vs. EverCrack, or even just chat room
gaming. (Or, heck, even PBEM vs. tabletop.) The difference is that
turn-based computer games tend to have ridigly defined turns, whereas
PBEM games have extremely flexibly sized turns. I've played in some
games where the "turn size" is occasionally no longer than it would be
in a tabletop game, i.e. people send single lines of dialog back and
forth. (This can make for a very slow PBEM, although some of the games
I've played in occasionally generate more than 50 messages in one day--
which can get a bit overwhelming, believe me!)
Of course, rigid structure as compared to complete flexibility is one of
the big differences on one level or another between pretty much any
computer game and "real" RPGs.
-Rob
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