Does anyone have experience with epistolary games?

#21

Yeah, that is another thing that helps, is if every letter made requires an active response from the other player(s). In my epistolary game and this other recent epistolary game, every letter has a body where you advance the story, but it also ends with a specific question for the other player to answer. So the other player has a clear prompt to write from, and the other player is waiting for their answer. The series of answering then asking questions keeps the story moving forward.

That works partly because they’re 2 player epistolary games. The answer-and-question format would require some tinkering to make it work with 3 or more players.

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#22

Yes. Interesting.

Maybe something like… If all the players are doing some kind of investigations, but they need assistance from each other?

Player A writes to players B and C (and D and so on, depending on how many of you there are), describing how they’ve advanced in their own investigation, but also append a specific question to one or more of the others. So if player B is the designated expert in ancient languages then player A sends them a piece of text they can’t translate, and when player B determines it relates to an extinct religion they pass their findings on to player C who is the expert in that area, and so on.

Something Gumshoe-like, it seems? There’s a certain number of areas of expertise and the players divide them up before the game begins (or during play - “as it happens, I’ve dabbled a bit in this” - and the expert gets to make up the answer when the other players come to them for help?

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#23

The game I’m designing is a two player game (although you could easily have two people playing it in parallel), so happily it dodges some of the multiplayer complexity issues. There is an emphasis on short letters and simultaneous writing, to make it more amenable to play at a table rather than purely asynchronous play.

Cheers

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#24

There’s a 200 word game called Dear Elizabeth… about friends exchanging letters in Regency times. It’s super simple but so effective. Here’s an actual play from the One Shot Podcast

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#25

@BeckyA has recently written some really excellent stuff in this space.

Also relevant (though not quite the same) is her amazing agony aunt column game.

#26

Thanks - interestingly Dear Elizabeth has also appeared on the She’s A Super Geek podcast recently too. I’ll see how One Shot did it in comparison.

http://sasgeek.com/podcasts/125-dear-elizabeth/

#27

I thought the Agony Aunt game was fun when I read one iteration of it :slight_smile: