Whats your opinion on Concurrent Groups in PbP - Page 2 - OG Myth-Weavers

Notices


GM Workshop

A community-created and maintained place for Game Masters of all systems to bounce ideas around. It's a place for inspiration and sharing tips.


Whats your opinion on Concurrent Groups in PbP

   
My own game, The Sunken Stones, just hit its two year anniversary, and we've been running concurrent groups for about half that time. We implemented it about one year ago, making the second group, and it has worked out well.

There's a catch in this one, though: The players remain the same. Five players, two PCs each. We switch between the parties every other 'chapter', and though they certainly do and can interact together, they are generally so far apart in the game world that overlap has rarely occurred. However, just recently, two PCs from group two just broke off from their party and stumbled upon the original group, so we'll see how that plays out.

I don't see it as an issue with respect to complications as the tools are here to do it right (private thread and tags mostly).

What is a monstrous issue I have found is that people's eyes or brains bite off more than their discipline can chew. Invariably, rather than be unfair to one group, the GM, when they are inevitably overwhelmed, shuts down everything instead of just 1 group or the other.

In truth pbp is an unforgivably slow medium already (my opinion) and most players and sadly GMs lack the discipline to meet even meager continuity standards. Without such standards there is very little flow to a story and the entire purpose of roleplaying is defeated, that being immersion and escapist fantasy.

There is a very simple comparison I did with an incident at a very simple dungeon, a bridge tower recently. The whole of that set of encounters, a supposed blip in a story meant as 1 chapter in a book if you will at most took 6 months of pbp effort and the party did not explore half the tower, missed most of the treasure, suffered player attrition and gain mid-stride, and for the most part is only moderately able to remember details that will be relevant in the next 3 chapters for their success.

That is a hideous track record and it simply does not approach table roleplay where I had a stable group thoroughly explore the tower and most of its mysteries (they still missed 2 small items) within a classic noon to midnight Saturday session.

I am categorically NOT disrespecting my players here. It is a fault of the medium and the time it takes to do anything meaningful without truly inspirational discipline. Several posts a day is almost minimal for any degree of continuity and fun (im my opinion). That is why, although the medium is perfect for downtime (no-combat) roleplay, I have created a hybrid game using virtual table tech via Rol20 as a test to see if I can better approach anything more than wounded turtle speed.

Yoiks and Away!

I agree that running concurrent groups is less work than running two separate games, don't forget it is still more work than just running one game. Clearly it can be done successfully, but you will have twice the amount of replies to deal with, and while you might be able to copy paste descriptions and characters for identical encounters for each group there may still be times when things diverge and you're having to write up separate encounters, much as you would if you were running two games.

My advice to you is don't underestimate the amount of work you could face, and don't fall into the trap of thinking a concurrent game won't add significantly to your workload, because it can do so more than you were expecting. Keep this in mind when considering how much RL free time you have and how much it gets squeezed if you have extra workloads.

Well right now I'm in a game (on another forum) where there is actually an ongoing timeline, and there are different threads where you start off in those regions, character's can travel from point A to point B, but it requires getting on a ship to get there (which is basically a summation of your short journey so others know how you got there, and while you're there you can't be in another region at the same time as you are in another place, unless the dates are different :D), so for the most part there are concurrent groups who are simultaneously going through their own plots, and even some side stories too between individual players. It's a nice niche group of players, and I like that because it gives the feel of the world being vast. Though not sure if this is what you are referring to here. My opinion is that I like it.

I started a game over a year ago where 9 (It was originally supposed to be 10) players started the game at roughly the same time, but in different locations of the same underground science facility. Slowly, painstakingly slowly, they began to gather and have eventually (almost) all gotten together.

It was a major, major commitment, but great fun. I try to adhere to the TSC as much as possible but sometimes you have to let that sumbitch bend or your brain will melt.




 

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.8
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
User Alert System provided by Advanced User Tagging (Lite) - vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2024 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.
Last Database Backup 2024-03-19 05:19:57am local time
Myth-Weavers Status