What is What?

First of all it's a game and the word RPG means role playing game. In this kind of game you have a different goal from the others: no one wins or loses, but the point is to have fun and to socialize. A player adopts the role of a character (with abilities and skills)  and then interacts with other characters during the course of the game under the supervision of a referee. The player doesn't make the same actions of his character, but images that he is in the same situation and chooses an appropriate course of movement. Now the referee (better call him/her Master) guides the characters through an adventure and more (a campaign), that usually has a goal as rescue a lost princess (maybe the first adventure played by every RPGer), explore a ruin or what his/her imagination can produce.
Thus a RPG is a game where player imagination is first focus, and as second there is the fun!
On my pages you can have a first contact with a RPG looking for Deadlands or Jovian Chronicles pages, but remember these two games are not the only ones and in Internet world you can find all descriptions about fantasy, cyberpunk, anime (or which other genre you prefer) games.  
 

The term PBM means "play by mail" (PBeM for Play by E-Mail); so this word points to all games that can be played by an exchange of message. At the base of a PBeM (the same for PBM) there is a game that can be divided by turns, so that all players ("client") can send their turns to a master ("server") who computes the turns and sends back the turn results to all clients.
Why do people sometime prefer  a PBeM Game instead of a normal computer games? The answer is simple: in a PBeM you have to confront with other human brains; and not with the sometimes foreseeable computer logic (however I don't want to criticize computer or console games). 
On my pages you can find some PBeM game examples with Dagonland (a soccer simulation) and Vga Planets (the best game in Internet).

©1998 Dagon