I have found out a few things about my style of pbem play. I'm better at one-shot games than I am at campaigns. And, I can only manage one game at a time.
My first effort on the old Action Heroes group was "Destiny of kings" and it went great. Then I tried a long game "Swords of Erisa" and it started out good but ended up dying towards the end.
My second effort "Mal's folly" was pretty good. Then I tried to follow up with a larger adventure dealing with an extra planar invasion of Erisa, and it tanked.
Then came my latest group of players “the Bashers”. "Valley of the Earth mother" was fun. It had it's moments, it was also slow going in some places, but overall I had a good time. When it wrapped up I was ready for a break, but somehow against my better judgment I decided to go on. And it didn’t last, which is where Dono stepped in.
There were other reasons why some of the games died. In Swords of Erisa one of my players had a virtual meltdown and kind of put me in a “funk” about playing in general.
In the “Invasion of Erisa” I was trying to get used to 3rd edition D&D and like it ( I didn’t). And I was soo going through the motions about it, it was like dating someone purely for the sex, and knowing once someone better comes along you are gonna dump them in a heartbeat.
With the basher game I was just too extended, work and life in general were coming at me full bore. I should have stopped when I was ahead instead of running the risk of looking more like a flake.
One of my favorite genres is the Pulp era. On two separate occasions I tried to run a pulp style game. The characters were interesting and the players were enthused, but I was running an Erisa D&D game at the same time and playing in a couple of others. So a really fun game crashed (twice) cause I was unable to handle running more than one game at a time.
I think my answer for this is to one only one game at a time and then for only for a short adventure (which in PBEM terms STILL can last 6 months).
Run one game.
Play one game.
Switch genres after each.
