Wolf in White Van [0] is a book written by John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats). It's very dark and is centered around the main character's management of a play-by-mail RPG.
This seems to be a niche that nothing else fills right now. It's much larger scale than tabletop D&D. Much more freeform and literary than MMOs that do have a large scale. And asynchronous except for the monthly deadline.
Unfortunately it also feels like, to do it right would require it to charge significant fees. There would be a lot of effort required reading, collating, adjudicating and responding to each and every player even if groups doing roughly the same thing got shared replies. Probably more than an individual game-runner with a hobby could do.
I wonder if Patreon could be the scaffold upon which this could be built. The basic tier includes receiving the monthly play-by-play, but the highest tier is for the Player Characters, limited to N players.
Or "at monthly income level $$$, we can support up to N players. Higher tiers get first dibs but then it's first come first served. If our income goes up to $$$$, we will be able to expand our operation and support up to M players."
> This seems to be a niche that nothing else fills right now. It's much larger scale than tabletop D&D. Much more freeform and literary than MMOs that do have a large scale. And asynchronous except for the monthly deadline.
I think MUSHs fit all of those except asynchronous, but I think there might be asynchronous ones out there.
MU* isn't very similar at all to PBM. No arc, no plot, no NPCs, no aggregation, no adjudication. Supports far fewer people in any given scene. Generally only has one or two people logged in. Non-freeform "rooms". The scenery may be literary but the players generally are not.
I used to run games like this on forums. Groups of about 30 players doing actions over email 1-3 times a week, mostly in split up subgroups with forum wide responses that explained the complete state of the game whenever they found a means of communicating for a while.
It wasn’t as difficult to manage as I think many assumed, although mandating that the game must go on even if people missed something was tough sometimes.
Each school day we would bring the disk with our turn and hand it in to him and he would hand back our disk from the previous turn. It was a blast and great fun given the limitations of tech at the time.
stars! (old 4x ) had native play by email, it was a blast in the nineties, it wasn't easy to play with actual strangers back then and to have internet friends was something weirdos did here in Italy. cables were unheard of so modem sessions had to be short not to interfere with calls. pbm games where perfect for us who lived in this side of the "digital divide"
I wonder if this could be restarted (alas in English...). Any English-speakers who have experienced the mechanics of these kind of games? It's been so long that I received a 'postcard' that the idea almost is thrilling.
Role Playing Gateway [1] may be the closest thing you'll find online. It has shared universes and players creating their own characters and writing short stories about their journeys and taking actions. It’s not quite an MMO since it’s not real-time and much of the interactions aren’t mediated by programs enforcing rules.
This and the OP's example might actually be closer to a form of literature, but one that is semi-interactive and non-linear. I've been keeping a list of digital examples of this [2] but perhaps I should start an offline list, too!
I remember the back ad for Savage Sword of Conan in the 80s and even 90s was a play by mail RPG called “Hyperborian Wars” or something. I never joined because it was super expensive at about $8/month for monthly mailings with adventures.
The roots of this are probably in Western PBM gaming back in the 1980s. Flying Buffalo ran several popular computer-moderated wargames in this format, but companies like Schubel & Son ran human moderated games such as Tribes of Crane.
