I've played RPG or role playing games since High School. In college it was a great way to get friends together and laugh and have fun. Since then, friends have grown up and gotten lives and moved farther and farther away. Attempts at weekend games turn out to have less playing sessions in a year than months. Thus, the play-by-email game idea.

I've tried a few times to get play-by-email games going (2 AD&D, 1 Star Trek) and I've supplemented game sessions with email for quite a while. All of my AD&D games have been set in the world of Greyhawk, which TSR cut off a while back. Each of the games suffered bog downs. The worst part is combat. In one game that I play in a combat against some frost giants took 7 months.

Now Wizards of the Coast, new owners of TSR, have revived Greyhawk, and I have revived my efforts. In an attempt to repair the problems of previous games:

• Turns will come out regularly on Thursdays
  Exceptions might occur. The GM might vanish to a deserted island for a few months. We sincerely hope these things don't happen too often.
• Combat takes place offline. Players can send their strategies or tactics, but the DM will run all combat. See below for a combat key.
• Most dungeon exploration will also be offline. I'll stop the episode if we come to a major decision point, if party members die, or other decisions need to be made.
• Face to face gaming sessions (planned dungeon crawl perhaps?) are still possible, and will be written up in a special edition episode. Half of the players still live in the Seattle area, and all have expressed interest in the occasional game session.
• In addition, we are playing out some sequences online on a custom RPG Chat Page, which I don't want to link to at this time.
• The campaign is set in Greyhawk, just after the Greyhawk Wars (the first of my campaigns to be set after the wars) but quite a bit prior to the current WOTC timeframe of 591. The current date can be easily found on the timeline page.
• I encourage each player to come up with web pages for their characters - history, portrait, diary, what have you. This is your campaign!

Combat

How to reflect combat perfectly? Players like to know two things, their final status and how they rolled. In an attempt to fill that niche, the combat line. All the information on one, somewhat readable, line. All die rolls done by the Ivory Games die-rolling server. Let's take a sample from a recent combat:

13 [10-2+5] Jaron L.Sword :20-|6+2|:20: crit(17) 3x1d12+4=37 (killed Gnoll)

The left-most section is the initiative. Within the brackets, the first number is a Die 10 roll, followed by dex and weapon speed modifiers. Low roll goes first. Next is the name and weapon. The next section is the to hit. First the THAC0, then subtract the quantity of opponents AC plus/minus any modifiers (strength, magic, etc.). I use the old first edition combat rule that modifiers are added to opponents Armor Class, with a maximum of 10. Between the second colons is the actual die roll. Next comes the result, hit, miss, critical, fumble, etc. The last section is the damage, followed by any notes that are necessary.

Some characters (specialized fighters, high level fighters) get multiple attacks, and I roll for those (or use d10 rolls from the initiative list) offline. Each AD&D combat round is separated with a blank line, so if your character has two "attacks" in a round then I must have rolled well.

The rest of the combat differences (like the crit above) and some of the other house rules are detailed on the House Rules page.

Experience Points

Since each turn is supposed to take up to a week and at the very least cover lots of stuff, I will award a base 100 xp per turn as long as the turn accomplishes something. A bonus award of 100xp per will be given for the first player to identify the movie quote that I put into each turn (only the one I intended as a quote, of course). If the bonus has been given (or there is none) you will note a small tag text at the bottom of the episode, or you can look here.

Characters will also receive experience during weeks that they do not even appear in the episode. As long as the character is alive, they will continue to grow.

Thank yous

All web page editing is done with a text editor, and thanks to Brief, from Underware. All spell checking is done with my two eyes, so let me know if I miss something...