The Campaign Builder's Guild

That's really fascinating, LC!  Come to think of it in my CE game that's almost what it turned into... as my players can attest, players were always coming and going and I ran a lot of solo side-sessions and even mini-campaigns with 1 or 2 characters.  But there were also big meet-up sessions with everyone involved.  And although it took so much time that to keep up with it would be a full time job I logged everything for people to read :p.

QuoteStill how is this done? Is it done through forum pbp,or PMing?

That plan's actually done over Skype (or comparable chat software; there are reasons I like Skype for this but that's not really crucial).

PBP or PBEM games have other stuff that works for them.(Maybe this is confirmation bias at work, but I can think of a lot of PBP games that have worked well that use different kinds of setups, and none that worked for very long that use an "adventuring party" setup.)

I guess it mostly boils down to the idea that in-person games and online games are different animals, and should be treated differently to get best results. The sculptor and the painter and the illustrator all have different technique to fit their different media, even if they all share the end goal of "make art".

Quote from: Steerpike
That's really fascinating, LC!  Come to think of it in my CE game that's almost what it turned into... as my players can attest, players were always coming and going and I ran a lot of solo side-sessions and even mini-campaigns with 1 or 2 characters.  But there were also big meet-up sessions with everyone involved.  And although it took so much time that to keep up with it would be a full time job I logged everything for people to read :p.

Umm.
Yeah.
Llum, Limetom, myself and others are often still on the #celtricia channel on nights.
So...you are onto something, groupthink man.

So, I've got three groups of people I'd be interested in gaming with. There's my Skypester Crew, a handful of friends locally that may or may not be interested in sufficient numbers (who knows), and you lot.

I've got various notions of games I am interested in running, in various stages of completion. The real questions now are these three: 1.) accounting for my various responsibilities, do I have time to run a game now/soon (and if not, when will I have that time)?, 2.) which one of these games do I want to run first?, and 3.) which game gets pitched to which group?

Here's the stuff immediately on my plate:

games what might be run soon

- Chaos Theory - Amber Diceless campaign; certainly run in the "many interconnected solo games" form discussed prev. in this thread. In some ways, an experiment with style and mechanics elements I'm not used to, which is exciting. Basically ready to run; I'm in that "I just want a little more prep to be truly comfortable" stage which never actually ends. The game would be set in Chaos prior to the events of the novels, with a cast of Chaosian PCs engaging in cutthroat republic politics, empire-building across an infinite scape of pseudo-universes, and the sort of general hedonistic puttering around you get to do when you're all basically gods. Due to factors in the setting, this also means that all the PCs will likely be, in their own subtle ways (not necessarily known to the players who play them), somewhat mad due to exposure to raw Chaos power; I look forward to essentially getting to be an "unreliable narrator" ST as a result.

- The Butterfly Effect - Scion campaign; likely run as a set of semi-connected solo games as above. Again with the experimental style elements. This game is city-centric and somewhat sandboxy, though I fully intend to meddle and interfere to make things interesting. Premise involves the modern-day children of diverse mythological gods all setting up shop in the same city, Portland OR, to see what the place can become under the subtle shaping of many quasidivine hands. This aims to be a very social game, with PCs' relationships to the mortals and other Scions in their community being very important. Expect to have your own change-the-world agendas really take center stage. Also expect tragedy and catastrophe on a truly mythological scale, because Fate (read: LC) is a real asshole.

- unnamed "Jade Apocalypse" game - Jade Stage/Apocalypse World mashup campaign. This is a crossover I've been wanting to deal with for a while, and though I don't expect JS to get any more apocalyptic than it already sort-of is, these mechanics are too good not to swipe. Since an AW conversion is a huge damn project, I'm narrowing the scope down a bit, and I have 90% decided on using Tiburon, the mostly-subterranean dwarven kingdom, a strict theocracy run by orthodox dwarven sorcerers who have stolen their magic from their feuding gods, and which is taking the brunt of a crushing siege from a neighboring kingdom of human xenophobes and slavers. I think I'm interested in having this be a game about societal underclass-- have-nots, pariahs, exiles-- in the midst of a war. So PCs would probably (though not necessarily) be dwarves, and would certainly be on the outs in some way. Also, everything takes place in underground tunnels, so there's that.

setting ideas what might be done soon

- you're gods, see, but only sort of, you're the crew of a spaceship from a relatively advanced civilization with futuretech gadgets and cultivated telekinetic powers and whatever, and your ship crashed on a planet with a relatively primitive civilization, and yeah I'm obviously ripping off Lord of Light here shut up

- in this one, it is the future and everything is controlled by computers, only a new security vulnerability has suddenly opened up basically everything to manipulation by skilled hackers (the PCs), who are Like Unto Gods in the digital realm but mere nerdly mortals in meatspace. Likely a "who can you trust" sort of conspiracy thriller where your exact physical location of your body is a huge secret, because if your location can be traced the dystopian futuregovernment will be On Your Ass like an ill-considered tattoo.

- In this one, it is modern-day earth, and cutting edge scientific research has been experimenting with rudimentary simulated universes, trying to explore different aspects of physics in lab-controllable settings. In the process, they have come to the alarming yet unmistakable conclusion that our entire universe is a complex simulation run by someone else, presumably researchers outside our entire universe who are running some experiment of their own. Panic follows, existential crisis is everywhere, and people desperately try to communicate with these supposed extrauniversal researchers to ask for beneficial changes to our world, plead for answers or meaning, or just to ask them to kindly not pull the plug when they're done with whatever they're using our simulation for.