Re: Lost Forever Games

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote at 00:20 this Saturday (GMT):

On Fri, 13 Jun 2025 21:10:12 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
>
>

also i think i played one on ham radio once?

>
Play-by-Ham-radio? I think you just won the Internet today with that
idea.

It was basically just using the PBM rules anyway.

The idea still fascinates me though, it has the same kind of appeal as
TTRPGS. Being able to control and play a whole videogame by just writing
some words down and sending them off to a gamemaster is such a cool
idea, and I really wish it caught on more.

>
Waaaay way way back, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and
bandwith was measured in characters-per-second, our tabletop group did
something similar. Separated by Life-Events for nearly a year, we kept
gaming through email, passing orders over a slow connection. Well, I
say "email"; really it was just uploading a text file telling me (and
the other players) what they were doing, and my responding (in
excessively long prose, naturally!) the result of those actions. The
players had pretty much freedom to do anything they wanted (or at
least try), and since we'd (mostly) split-the-party, they usually
didn't have to wait to see what the other players were doing (I did
encourage them to email amongst themselves behind my back, though).
>
Alas, I've lost most of the transcripts from those adventures over the
years... which is a shame, because I remember some pretty good writing
in those dialogues (mostly from the players, of course. My responses
were notable only for their length ;-)

Sounds like a fun way to work around real life barriers :D

My experience with "proper" PBM games weren't anything like that. The
RPG I remember playing basically gave me a (very) brief description of
the location (including X-Y coordinates... so I could map where I was,
I guess?) and a handful of commands I could pick from. It was so
barebones and limited that it made "Zork" look futuristic in
comparison. Looking back, I'm guessing the software was some primitive
MUD and the admin just plugged my commands into the computer and
printed out its response. In the few turns I played, I never met
another player. I wasn't impressed and didn't stay with the game very
long. I don't know if that was a typical experience for PBMs
computer-RPGs of the time or if I just picked a really awful one, but
it didn't encourage me to go looking for alternatives.

Surely, with modern technology, someone is running one that is super
high quality (hopefully)
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom