A lot of people are attracted to PBeMs. How do you feel about playing Birthright? As a wargame, or for roleplaying? This poll is to see how you all feel about playing Birthright.
Table top is best, but if I can’t get that for whatever reason (moved a fair bunch in the last decade), then would go for pbem.
I prefer face to face gaming especially when you are playing on an adventuring level. I DM so face to face adventuring is the only option in my opinion for this style.
I have played a couple of PBEM on the tactical/domain side of things and Birthright works great in this format. Diplomacy with other nations is done with emails, which simulates sending messangers. When you have at least a dozen players it is really interesting on how things play out.
I do face-to-face adventuring once a month for 6-8 hours. While some planning amongst the party is done via email as well as private messages to the DM, it wouldn’t work in any other form for me. I don’t have the time to do any PBEM, chatroom, or other form, especially since they don’t all work as well for adventuring.
Regency work is mainly left to the background and used as plot devices, partially influenced by what plots the party manages to start or stop. We are a party, not generals, so the only wargaming is us trying to get away or through armies, not defeat them.
Sorontar
Face-to-face.
I like interactive role-playing vice roll playing.
It is very difficult to role-play in a PBeM game.
A region-wide or Cerilia-wide “To Each His Throne” game can only be effectively played as a PBeM.
I’m currently preparing a “Common Heroes” campaign with possibility to turn into “Collective Rule” or “High King” game for my group. I haven’t tried this before and I hope it will turn out interesting.
Face to Face.
We get together once a week for a couple of hours. Hammer out some details over email during the week.
I like to include in a small adventuring side which can really only be done face to face.
-BB
Both P&P and PbeM.
P&P…been doing that since the mid-90s. Many great games. A mix of domain play and adventure. Common Heroes work very well in this most excellent setting. Domain play also works at the table, although I must say that the most memorable domain play have been in PBeMs.
Both PbEM for the regent-level stuff, over the table for adventuring. So far, my local player-group prefers a non-regent game for FtF gaming.
Hmm…actually, for P&P we have quite a bit of domain play, but it tends to get very abstracted very quickly. Number-crunching isn’t much fun…role-playing is 
Ive played in PBeMs before, but I prefer gaming across a table top. Ive always thought one of the coolest possibilities for BR,
though, was that one could run a PBeM and use the events of that game
as background/framework of a table top campaign at the adventure
level, so if some player out in the world somewhere is playing Diemed
and he invades Medoere then that`s what would happen in the tabletop
game too, and PCs would interact with those events. Similarly, PCs
in the tabletop game might influence the PBeM through their actions,
which would become the equivalent of random events at the domain level.
The only thing that keeps me from actually doing something like that
is the massive amount of time such a dual project would
require. However, one could be a player in a PBeM and use those
events as the basis for a tabletop game one was DMing… Itd still be a lot of work. Ive never actually tried it but I`ve been
intrigued by the potential for a long time.
Gary
I’ve had a similar idea but the main reason I never tried it is because a table top campaign has good chances of running at faster pace than the PBeM campaign. I’ll try to use the events from some past PBeMs I ran and played in my future table top camapaign. If it works well, I might try the PBeM/tabletop combo. Maybe a Living Cerilia wouldn’t be a bad thing if only there were enough DMs to run it
At 07:12 AM 9/27/2008, Nameless One wrote:
>>I`ve always thought one of the coolest possibilities for BR,
though, was that one could run a PBeM and use the events of that game
as background/framework of a table top campaign at the adventure level…I
ve had a similar idea but the main reason I never tried it is >because a table top campaign has good chances of running at faster >pace than the PBeM campaign. Ill try to use the events from some
past PBeMs I ran and played in my future table top camapaign. If it
works well, I might try the PBeM/tabletop combo. Maybe a Living
Cerilia wouldn`t be a bad thing if only there were enough DMs to run it
Coordinating the timeline would definitely be a
challenge. Personally, Id always pictured the tabletop play to be at the adventure level, and just touching on the domain level of play that would be going on in the PBeM. Adventures can happen at a pretty frenetic pace, so its easy to imagine tabletop adventurers
getting quickly left behind by PBeM regents who operate at the 1 move
= 1 month of the domain level. Even if everyone assumes 1
action/week or every other week the way most PBeMs go. So I always
assumed the problem would be that the PBeM would cover months or
years of time much more quickly than I normally conduct the adventure
level of play. Still… it`d be a pretty cool thing to do.
Gary
I’ve always been a fan on long-duration P&P campaigns. BR lends itself well to that. Not every day needs to be filled with adventure and played out round by round. Indeed, after an adventure, it is easy to let moths and years roll by, using the domain system as needed.
Even when I ran a table top only campaign, I always assumed that a day at the table represented an adventure action and thus a month. I admit to being surprised to find out that this was not common.
In my table top I think often one evening does come out to a month, but certainly not always. I have had time where almost 4 nights of 3-4 hours each, turned into one month of game time.
While I tried to view it as such - man of the published adventures took several sessions to complete and each of them was supposed to represent an adventure action (except for that massive one. . . .)
So an adventure took an adventure action - hence roughly 1 month of time in game.
At 01:06 PM 9/27/2008, kgauck wrote:
>Even when I ran a table top only campaign, I always assumed that a
>day at the table represented an adventure action and thus a month. I
>admit to being surprised to find out that this was not common.
One of the things Im always interested in is translating between the adventure and the domain levels of play, so Im curious: How many
other people make this same kind of assumption?
I generally assume time at the adventure level makes one week an
“adventure” (with 4-9 encounters/challenges) so that means one domain
turn is approximately four “adventures.” Its not a hard and fast rule, of course, because at the adventure level things change rapidly and its hard to translate things into the generalized domain level of play, but as a rule of thumb, Ive gone with that kind of rough
guideline as a base, and used it to design adventures and show how
adventures influence the domain. How do other folks do this?
Gary
I’ve always found it more convenient to thing of 1 action as effort spent, not simply time passed. So you have time for 3 actions in a turn, but one particular adventure might last a week, while another stretches out for the entire turn. But both demand 1 action…unless the long adventure is really involved, then it might take more than 1 action to complete (but this would be rare).
In a message dated 9/28/2008 12:56:31 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, brnetboard@BIRTHRIGHT.NET writes:
Green Knight wrote:
I`ve always found it more convenient to thing of 1 action as effort spent, not simply time passed. So you have time for 3 actions in a urn, but one particular adventure might last a week, while another stretches out for the entire turn. But both demand 1 action…unless the long adventure is really involved, then it might take more than 1 action to complete (but this would be rare).
LH: More or less what he said.
Lee.