Play-by-mail game
Drawbacks include the price for some PBM games with high setup and/or turn costs, and the lack of the ability for face-to-face roleplaying.
For approximately five years, Flying Buffalo was the single dominant company in the US PBM industry until Schubel & Son entered the field in roughly 1976 with the human-moderated Tribes of Crane.
[7][c] Schubel & Son introduced fee structure innovations which allowed players to pay for additional options or special actions outside of the rules.
[7] Reviewer Jim Townsend asserted that it was "the most complex game system on Earth" with some large position turn results 1,000 pages in length.
Some players, unhappy with their experiences with Schubel & Son and Superior Simulations, launched their own company—Adventures by Mail—with the game, Beyond the Stellar Empire, which became "immensely popular".
[7] In the same way, many people launched PBM companies, trying their hand at finding the right mix of action and strategy for the gaming audience of the period.
Armintrout wrote a 1982 article in The Space Gamer magazine warning those thinking of entering the professional PBM field of the importance of playtesting games to mitigate the risk of failure.
[20] Sam Roads of Harlequin Games similarly assessed the state of the PBM industry in its early days[g] while also noting the existence of few non-English companies.
[22] In 1993, the founder of Flagship magazine, Nick Palmer, stated that "recently there has been a rapid diffusion throughout continental Europe where now there are now thousands of players".
[23] In 1992, Jon Tindall stated that the number of Australian players was growing, but limited by a relatively small market base.
In 1985, Pete Tamlyn stated that most popular games had already been attempted in postal play, noting that none had succeeded as well as Diplomacy.
[30] In the early 1990s, Martin Popp also began publishing a quarterly PBM magazine in Sulzberg, Germany called Postspielbote.
[35] Paul Brown, the president of Reality Simulations, Inc., estimated in 1988 that there were about 20,000 steady play-by-mail gamers, with potentially another 10–20,000 who tried PBM gaming but did not stay.
[50][l] However, in 1994, David Webber, Paper Mayhem's editor in chief expressed concern about disappointing growth in the PBM community and a reduction in play by established gamers.
[52] In early 1997, David Webber stated that multiple PBM game moderators had noted a drop in players over the previous year.
Rick Loomis stated in 1999 that, "With the growth of the Internet, [PBM] seems to have shrunk and a lot of companies dropped out of the business in the last 4 or 5 years.
These include (1) plenty of time—potentially days—to plan a move, (2) never lacking players to face who have "new tactics and ideas", (3) the ability to play an "incredibly complex" game against live opponents, (4) meeting diverse gamers from far-away locations, and (5) relatively low costs.
[73] Other games use digital media or web applications to allow players to make turns at speeds faster than postal mail.
[74] Jim Townsend stated in a 1990 issue of White Wolf Magazine that the complexity of PBM games is much higher than other types on the average.
[82] Chapman notes that "everything is negotiable" and advises players to "Keep your plans flexible, your options open – don't commit yourself, or your forces, to any long term strategy".
[88][r] Loth advises that closer identification with a role increases enjoyment, but prioritizing this aspect requires more time searching for the right PBM game.
[70] A drawback of this type is that mature games have powerful groups that can pose an unmanageable problem for the beginner – although some may see this situation as a challenge of sorts.
[77] Examples of open ended games are Heroic Fantasy,[91] Monster Island,[92] and SuperNova: Rise of the Empire.
According to John Kevin Loth III, one hundred percent computer-moderated games would also kill a player's character or empire emotionlessly, regardless of the effort invested.
[77] Alternatively, Loth noted that those preferring exquisite pages of prose would gravitate toward one hundred percent human moderation.
[77] Borderlands of Khataj is an example of a game where the company transitioned from human- to computer-moderated to mitigate issues related to a growing player base.
[100] PBM magazine Paper Mayhem stated that the average turn processing time in 1987 was two weeks, and Loth noted that this was also the most common.
John Kevin Loth identified that, in 1986, the "three major information sources in PBM" were Paper Mayhem, Flagship, and the Play By Mail Association.
Additional PBM information sources included company-specific publications, although Rick Loomis stated that interest was limited to individual companies".
[113] In the early 1990s, Martin Popp also began publishing a quarterly PBM magazine in Sulzberg, Germany called Postspielbote.
