Federation Commander

Just had my first game over Chat with Sebastian380. It went well.

We each had a copy of the PBEM map and used that to reference our ship positions. We also had copies of the PBEM ship cards with the intent of emailing updates back and forth after damage.

Sebastian380 handled the rolling through a 3rd-party website

I handled the play sequence.

We decided the first person to declare speed could change his mind based on the other's response.

Mostly went with the "me too" concept from the rules...i.e, you can change your answer to "yes, me too" but you couldn't change a yes to a no. In other words, if someone declared fire, then the second person said no fire, the first couldn't change to "no fire"

We went sub-pulse by sub-pulse for movement based on movement precedence. It was just like face to face, except we typed instead of talked.

Recommend that you have a ship card, the weapon charts and sequence of play charts, etc. in hardcopy next to you.

Between Chat, Map, email (for dice rolls), PBEM ship card for damage (x2), that's 5 windows. And the PBEM cards don't have turn mode, marines, EM, etc., info so you need the hardcopy next to you for that info.

Chat does make it easier to go back and trace the movement if any questions come up since it's written down.

Overall, not a bad experience. Kind of a cross between PBEM and face-to-face without the huge wait and uncertainty of PBEM

FCOL (FedComm Online) will handle all of those pesky little details for you...
...just saying...


http://www.sfbonline.com/install4/install.htm

Yeah...I know. I'll sign up someday. I get a promotion in the summer...

How long did the chat game take? And how many turns did it go?

It took about 30 or 40 minutes, but only went 1 turn. I'm not sure exactly how long it was.

We started at range 30 or so and ended up at range 3 on Imp 7. I downed his #6 and got 10 internals so we called the game.

We were going pretty slow, and had some interruptions. Also had to stop to clarify minor things. Might be able to get faster, but most of the time was one of us taking time to think.

I don't think it will ever be exactly as fast as face-to-face, but I don't think it will be too much slower after getting used to it.

Just out of curiosity (I've never played PBEM before) what program did you use for chatting?

We conducted the game over Google Chat. But, just to be clear, this wasn't PBEM. It was a sort of hybrid of PBEM and Over-the-board play. I found the record keeping to be a bit overwhelming. Or maybe that was because of the 'Abandon Ship' klaxon.

It was a bit overwhelming. For that reason if no other, FC Online is probably a better way to go.

I did an article on this method of play in Captain's Log #40. It can occasionally be clumsy, but it does present yet another way of playing this fine game, if other channels are unavailable for whatever reason.

Personally, we found that simultaneous declaration of speeds using IM worked just fine, and we used online dice servers for our dice rolls.

Well done DNordeen for giving it a go