My brother lives about a 2.5hr drive away from me. We both love Descent, and he just suggested to me that we could possibly play by e-mail.

Has anyone attempted to do this? What suggestions would you have? Also, what pitfalls are there?

Currently my thought is to take a picture of the map and have a layered Photoshop document to keep track of creatures and heroes' movement. Don't know how practical that would be though. Does anyone think the scenario editor would be of use?

One good thing is that, since we'd be playing RtL, the individual dungeons are smaller and therefore more manageable.

Thanks in advice for any experiences, suggestions, or advice you might be willing to share!

I saw a movie on BoardGameGeek some months back of some guys playing Descent RtL dungeons via video chat - they'd both build the dungeon, both had a set of Descent (and thus could draw treasures and whatnot when necessary), and then use the video chat to synchronize things.

I think with all the stuff going on in the game, PBeM would work way worse than that...

Completely setting aside the issue of communicating game state and staying synchronized, in Descent, there are a number of situations in which you are actually supposed to interrupt an opponent's turn at an arbitrary time:

• Making interrupt attacks with guard orders
• Playing a trap card in response to a hero action
• Overlord playing cards like Dodge in response to a hero's attack
• Heroes playing feat cards in response to monster attacks, if you have Tomb of Ice

This means that, in order to be completely faithful to the game as written, you actually need to give your opponent a chance to respond to every little thing that you do during your turn before you continue and do something else. Which is ridiculously impractical for a PBeM game.

To even have a chance of this working, you'd need to make some major structural changes to the game--basically, get rid of everything that requires you to make a decision during someone else's turn, except possibly in a few highly constrained circumstances (for example, chest traps would probably still work OK--waiting for an email back from the OL every time you open a chest won't render the game unplayable). But that means no guard orders, no Spiked Pit or Dodge cards, etc. That, in turn, will upset game balance and cause severe problems in a variety of highly specific situations (for example, guard orders are kind of important for melee heroes fighting monsters with Soar ), which means you'll need to perform a cascading series of alterations to cope with the first set of changes.

So unless you feel like redesigning Descent to the point where you are arguably not actually playing Descent anymore, I don't think this is going to work.

From: Jim

To: Fred

Subject: Turn #1.0001

Landric spends 1 MP north

_______________________________________________________

From: Fred

To: Jim

Subject: RE: Turn #1.0001

Affirmative!

_______________________________________________________

From: Jim

To: Fred

Subject: Turn #1.0002

Landric spends 1 MP northeast

_______________________________________________________

From: Fred

To: Jim

Subject: RE: Turn #1.0002

Done!

_______________________________________________________

From: Jim

To: Fred

Subject: Turn #1.0003

Landric spends 1 MP north

_______________________________________________________

From: Fred

To: Jim

Subject: RE: Turn #1.0003

Crushing blow!

_______________________________________________________

From: Jim

To: Fred

Subject: Turn #1.0004

Okay, I prevented all damage. Video if the dice roll is attached.

_______________________________________________________

From: Fred

To: Jim

Subject: RE: Turn #1.0004

How do I know you didnt roll them over and over until the rsult came up?

_______________________________________________________

From: Jim

To: Fred

Subject: RE: RE:Turn #1.0004

You think Im cheating?

_______________________________________________________

lol.... no way

Heh, considering they're brothers, I think the cheating thing won't be much of an issue

(Yes, I have a brother, we hated each other until we were 20 or so, but I have no better friend than him now.)

Anyway, I dug up the video chat thing: It's here, complete with time lapse video .

For dice rolling, you could just always first assign Descent values to regular six sided dice (for power dice, for instance, you could decide at the start of the game that 1 is blank, 2-3 surges, 4-6 power enhancements).

Then, you could use an internet dice server.

But as others have said, playing Descent PBeM would require some restructuring of the rules.

Yeah, my brother and I really have no worries about cheating. And since we already own four sets of dice, having one in Kingston and one in Toronto really won't be a big deal ;-)

As for how to handle interruptions, that's really the core of any game you want to PBEM. So here are some thoughts, and I'd love to hear people's opinions on them:

1) We were playing another game over the holidays. Since it's not a FF game, I won't mention the name. ANYWAY, in that game, there are two teams. On my turn, I move all my people, then, when I am done, my opponent has the opportunity to op-fire (read: guard order attack) any of my people that moved within their line of fire. That being said, my brother could plot out his movements, then I would respond if I use "King's crushing press" (our nickname for crushing block) or a pit trap or whatever, then he completes his turn by rolling the dice etc.. Similarly, I plot out all my monster moves, he decides who he's attacking with his guard order(s) (assuming he's not taking the girl who moves when making a guard attack) then I roll my attacks against him.

2) While it would dramatically change the strategy of the game, the heroes' turns (and similarly, the monsters' turns) could be plotted out all at once. This would speed up gameplay by e-mail quite considerably, while making it more challenging to plan your turn. It would mean that certain things wouldn't work out the way you want (like your meelee monster missing on both attacks of his battle action, leaving that beastman to romp through the rest of the party) but in my opinion, that'd be more realistic in some ways, since in "real life" the heroes wouldn't be waiting for their turn to act, but would rather all be acting in concert.

3) If we're working in photoshop, orders can be stacked in layers. The view would be turned off for each layer that plots movement, then could be turned on in sequence, interrupted if an action like guard or trap takes place. After the interruption is over, the player has the opportunity to rethink the rest of his turn. Obviously this option is not for the technology, trust, or bandwidth limited players, but for my brother and I, it might work.

Obviously playing by e-mail isn't a trivial issue, otherwise we'd already be doing it ;-) But I do hope I can count on some problem-solving on the part of the community here to make this work, as I think it could be a lot of fun!

Here are two programs for playing board games via email ( Aid de Camp II , Vassal ). You would need to spend the time to create a virtual version of the game pieces. I'm not sure that it would violate copyright if you didn't distrubute it.