Does anyone know if it's possible to play Hackmaster 5th edition in a play-by-post environment? (Given the 'in extremis' of the detail in combat.)

If so, what modifications/changes/house rules do you make to the game to make it work?

How do you run your PbP game to make it all happen?
This message was last updated by a moderator, as it was the wrong forum, at 21:07, Tue 29 Apr 2014.

Yeah. Very fiddly game system that seems like it would be extremely difficult to run via PbP. I know of a few PbP games running on the Kenzerco forums. You might take a look at those threads to get a feel for how they handle the Count Up initiative tracker, as an example. I just took a quick look, and it looks like they have made it work.

http://www.kenzerco.com/forums...r-Play-by-Post-Games

I think Hackmaster 5e is a poor fit for PbP, but that does not mean it can't be done. :)

Good luck

Yeah, unfortunately I roamed around there - little to nothing in terms of usable data.  Certainly no discussion of the matter - people handle PbP very differently over there and the forums themselves are not built for it.

Yeah. I popped in on the Kenzer forums myself, a few years ago, asking the same question and was told by several posters that HM 5e was perfectly suited to PbP and that they had several successful games running there.

So, I looked in to see, and all I saw was a succession of one-liner "games mechanic" posts when it came to resolving combat. It was not my idea of a very fun PbP style, so my efforts to run a game using it as a system pretty much stopped right there.

In reply to pawndream (msg # 4):

Hmm, say impression that I received (though I did not take the time to actually post the question) - I just scanned a few of the open games.  I'm not a fan personally, and waiting in line for one liners would drive me batty.

I've been pondering this very question for over a year now. In short, no. There is too much detail in the rules for play by post, and most games would just grind to a Hauptmann as soon as a fight broke out.

Now, like many games, if everyone knew the rules, was on board with the game, and was capable of handling themselves, you'd stand a good chances. If you never had to stop the explain the rules or ask what the players wanted to do in any given second, things could probably run pretty well. If the players were proactive about the game, I see no reason why it couldn't be a success. But the moment the GM has to hold someone's hand, the game is going to die in flames.

To be fair, I wouldn't say that this has anything to do with rules heavy vs rules light. I had a similar experience with Edge of the Empire, and that's pretty light. The issue is more to do with babysitting and the constant need to go back and forth on things. Any game that requires such a degree of back and forth or interjection is going to be very hard to run, regardless of the weight of the rules.

You can always run a more PbP friendly system in the spirit of Hackmaster.

That's probably the way I would go if I wanted to run a "Hackmaster" style game. I would take a very basic D&D ruleset (maybe even use Basic D&D) and then add on a few House Rule elements to get the feel, i.e., critical hit/fumble tables, armor/weapon breakage chances, an Honor mechanic, penetration dice, etc. and then just play up the goofy over-the-top sort of stuff that one might see in the comic.

That should get you pretty close without having to get into one-second initiative counts and other elements that probably won't work very well for most PbP groups.