"Use of emails ahead of a game" Topic

So, further to a suggestion I made to Otto, based on an experience in another game, I'm considering the use of in-character email addresses ahead of some one-day campaigns I'm organising. The first is a Renaissance game for around 50 players and the other will be Very British Civil War, for up to 70.

The first part is the relatively simple. Each state or faction leader gets the details of an email address and associated password two weeks ahead of the game. This is fairly straightforward – bishopoflincoln@yahoo.co.uk or charlesVIII@gmail.com, etc and they are aware that those running the game will be monitoring emails and checking for correct titles and terms of address. They also receive the official email addresses of other leaders in game (probably no more than a dozen to fifteen), as well as personal details of their own team players to have an informal discussion (this would be agreed in advance). I don't envisage problems with consent. The people we have signing up are often with friends for their first game and generally aren't afraid of the internet. There usually is a fair bit of informal emailing ahead of time already too.

Players are allowed to read briefings and conduct as much negotiating ahead of the day as possible (which might encourage people to read rules in advance and check what's possible), with the proviso that any agreement declared on the day, has to have gone through these 'official' channels. This should also allow the umpires responsible for espionage to spend an evening just before the game browsing the accounts for any juicy gossip, which they can collate as a source when feeding back to teams who make use of their spy networks.

Has anyone else done anything like this?

I've never done it where people email each other directly. We always used a listserv to manage who gets what. We also had some filters and remailers so we could send email to an account that would redact or alter parts of it and then forward to simulate partial loss in communication or unreliable sources of intelligence.

It's good to draw a node map of who has what relation to whom to help manage the info you are distributing.

Its nice to prognosticate that it should be simple. When you do this you are speaking in that most popular tense of the English language-- "Future Hopeful."

Play testing and design should always be couched in the past tense.

Better to do it and then come back to the group and say. "This is what I tried and this is the result we had." or "This is what one player did and this is the problem or the benefit.

That's game design and play-testing should be. It's what I'm doing with the 18th Century campaign here. I come back and say "This is what we did. This is how it worked, this is the problem with it. This is what we think might fix it, and this is a problem but we are going to lump it because it's too difficult to fix.

Cheers for that suggestion etotheipi. The mailing list for general briefings etc. will be on the large size, so I'm going to have to start looking at solutions going forward into next year as well as the database of players (which is around 300 now). I'm particularly interested in the use of filters and remailers, if you can offer any more advice.

I decided to look at emailing directly for these games though, partly to help people get into role for the day and build some tension and partly because they already tend to chat on Facebook and occasionally set up groups. This way, they don't have to join FB if they aren't on already, messages can be to as few or as many leaders as they want and we can monitor it as well, to see if it's useful in the future.

Nonsense, Otto. I'm posting in the future tense because I'm interested in seeing if anyone has previous experience to save reinventing the wheel or have any obvious issues highlighting. Part of playtesting and design where I come from is using the suggestions of others before you run a game. Sometimes it complements what I come up with, other times it saves me a heap of work when I realise that my idea was terrible. In the case of etotheipi it's given me something to investigate which may well solve a different issue.

As I don't need to send anything out for at least a month and the work in producing the necessary dozen emails is indeed simple (maybe an hour, including sorting a list and sending it out to the key players), why wouldn't I ask if anyone else has useful contributions before trying it?

Has anyone else done anything like this?

I think Henry Hyde has done exactly that in his 18th century campaigns reported in MWBG (or should I say MW now?).

So in the Mid-19th Cent ImagiNation wars between Slobovia (slow-BOW-vee-ya – roughly an independent Moldavian, Transylvanian and Wallachian Orthodox state) and Jerkwadistan (yher-KWAHD-ih-stahn – a desperately independent sultanate under the begrudging and occasional protection of the Ottoman Empire), the Slobs had aristocratic and local communication nets. So the Lord of the Mountain would get the local Carpathian news and the messenger dispatches from other nobles, so his account would be subscribed to both lists.

The aristocratic listserv had a two-day delay built in (to simulate dudes on horses running all over the place) before it sent out messages.

The Jerkwad spy network was subscribed to a list that was on the Slob aristocratic list. But their linked list (1) delayed delivery by another day, and (2) only passed through one in ten sentences, using a bit of string parsing attached to the listserv.

The referees were subscribed to all lists. Even "private" person to person dispatches were passed through lists, so they could be limited in size (one paragraph per message) and time (one message every other day), again by applying a filter to the emails after receipt before distributing.

While I haven't done this with a non-Unix based system, I have done similar things (parsing messages, list distribution) in Windows/Outlook environments for work, so there's nothing there beyond its capabilities.

Three-hundred?!?!?!! Wow! I've only managed something like that with a local group of 8-12 at any given time. Good luck!

There were probably other things. If I remember something, I will post back here.

Ah, the database is for so those interested in playing in one or more of a number of games. The most at any one game is likely to be around seventy and I'd only be giving emails out to the leaders of teams, so that's manageable.

I do seem to have some googling and speaking to people to do now though, thinking about how to manage the regular admin tasks. Thanks for that.

Major B, like I said, it came to me when recalling players doing this off their own bat as preparation for a single game, so other experiences would be helpful. I don't subscribe to MW though, so can you recall any tips? Many thanks