One of the things I like about online games is the ease with which a group can split up and with the GM still be able to keep up with each group without needing to have some people waiting their turn as can happen in face to face games.   Or on even on larger scales with sandbox games that have a lot of characters.

My question is how do you manage your sandbox games where not all players are part of a team and may be doing things in widely separated areas like different cities or planets.   How do you structure your game threads?  By location or by story thread?    And what do you do in terms of trying to synchronize time between various groups in case they have sufficiently fast movement or communication abilities to interact with people that are far away in another group?


I guess I'm curious how other people handle the unique challenges of games like that because I'm interested in putting something like that together but don't quite have all the details ironed out.  Andy advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated

I ran a New World of Darkness game in the the style you describe above. Game started out with five players but atrophied down to three by the time we completed the story. I ran the game over the course of two years and here are the things I learned about running these kind of games in the process.

#1: Games where players frequently split up are really difficult, especially with regards to building any sort of community within the game. I have seen many GMs create private groups where you only see what is happening around your character, but this tends to keep players in isolation, as sometimes players can end up in their own threads for a long time. If the threads are open, at least the players can comment on things happening to them in the OOC thread. It just depends on what you want to do though.

#2: I gave threads a title that summed up what was being accomplished in the narrative. Once that task, mission, or goal was completed, a new thread started. This meant I sometimes had multiple active threads at the same time, which brings me to my next lessons learned.

#3: Time commitment. Multiple threaded games require much more time than when you have all your players in the same place, all the time. Be prepared for this. If you have a bunch of lone wolves doing their own thing, you will essentially be running separate games for every player/group.

#5: Speaking of time. Time is already difficult to track in PbP because long spans of real-life time can pass and it will only be a few minutes or hours of game time. My recommendation here is to keep time fluid and somewhat abstract, that way you can bring players/threads together at a moment's notice, without worrying about, "Oh no, Sara is five days ahead of John and Bill...so I will need her to wait." John and Bill might take several months of real time to resolve their threads. Sara will either grow bored of waiting and drop out or start her own new thread, and the players never end up meeting one another. Keep time fluid to avoid this issue.

Overall, I enjoyed the game I ran in this style, but probably wouldn't do it again. I don't really enjoy running duet games and found that the vast majority of the game was spent dealing with players separately, rather than as a group, which is funner for me as a GM.

Hope that helps.

Dont roleplay everything out, you will save yourself WEEKS if you just summarize your downtime.

Action. Action. Action. Everything (dialog and conversation, minor events that add something to the whole) else can be resolved over PM

Dont over complicate things in general.

While we have the freedom of time on PBP there is a such thing as posts being to long, to descriptive, to unnecessary.

while yes, its nice to add details. But shaking someones hand and saying hey shouldnt take 3 paragraphs containing a monolog about the daily go-about, a description of your characters breath and the fact, that there fingernails are longer on one hand then the other.

Don't be afraid to fast forward. As Andrew said you can skip background stuff that isn't important, and can fast forward different groups at different speeds to get the slowpokes to catch up...

Thanks for the advice.

I have a personal dislike of games that are divided into reusable concurrent locations. Having a thread titled 'The Pig and Whistle' that includes every event at the local pub over the past five years is fine while you're playing along, but it's almost impossible for a new player to read and have any idea of what's going on, and it's equally difficult for archiving purposes or GM reference.

I try to start a new thread for each scene, with scenes titled something like 'Castle Bram, dusk, 13th January 1885'. If your game has five (or twenty five) scenes at Castle Bram, anyone needing to check back will be able to find the right scene by looking at the date and/or time.

This means you'll generate more threads long term, but you'll probably have fewer open threads than the 'reuseable' game types do. If someone wants to go somewhere, just open a new scene for the action.

If there are concurrent scenes in different locations, then time can become a problem with different posting rates. Often, these can be rectified by making a small time jump and starting a new scene a little ahead of all the others. This is easier to do if the scenes are fairly short, so you're only jumping a few hours. It's far more difficult to ask what Frodo and Bilbo were doing at Bag End while Gandalf was travelling to Minas Tirith...

Which highlights what others have said above. I make it clear to players that their characters should act together whenever possible. Yes, theoretically a sandbox means everyone can do as s/he pleases, but I tend to insist that they come to a consensus about what they intend to do and then do it together! Otherwise, the game falls apart. I don't have the time or inclination to run seven or so solo games.

Sometimes a split off is inevitable, and the story will dictate whether that should be hidden or open, but ideally such splits should be short and simple, bringing everyone back together as soon as practicable.

Abstract time? Hmm, maybe, if it's not obviously distorted or broken. If the splits are short enough, it shouldn't be too obvious or even necessary.

I'm not at all sure about action over description. I think this is a matter of taste. Some GMs and players consider description to be a waste of dice-rolling time, whereas for others interactive writing is their purpose for gaming.

If you have both player types in one game, you're going to have a hard time! It's probably something you should iron out before you start.

One last thing I would say: make sure you have an overarching plot. It's not enough to create a world and expect the players to come up with a story by interacting with it. If players wanted to create a plot, they'd be GMing their own game. They come to your game to take part in a story. They want to affect the story, and their actions will often create new story arcs along the way, but players have a tendency to stagnate if there is no obvious direction to move in. You need to give them pushes and pulls and to know where those pushes and pulls are likely to lead.

And yes, I've made every mistake I've highlighted, and will probably do so again, but the main thing is to have fun. Try something out, if you don't like it, either change it or do it differently in the next game. There's always a next game. :)

I don't mind the single thread/reusable location thing as long as players and GMs use links. As long as a thread is kept under 1000 posts, it works out.

In my experiences of running Exalted using sandbox - managing multiple threads came down to 'how important is this data once the event/scene is resolved?'

In my earliest, and albeit worst attempts with sandbox; believing that this data was all important was a big downfall.  Even making the information public to the rest of the group still became far too burdensome as no one could keep track of any of it except for me; and even that became a dilemma.  (That being said - offline I use spreadsheets to track every NPC these days.)

To this end, my suggestion:

Have players keep some sort of journal thread going (PMs are great for this.)
They keep what they feel is the relevant data, and you download the rest and then delete it from your game.  Yes, your post-count goes haywire; but, you keep the clutter removed.  This becomes moreso true once you start making whole new groups for duo and trio groups of players instead of singles.

In reply to icosahedron152 (msg # 6):

In one of the games I'm in, the GM doesn't even bother with location threads...he has 'chapters' or 'episodes', which makes it really easy to keep track of what's going on in sequential order.  (Granted, that's not a sandbox game, but it IS a freeform game with a pretty loose plotline laid out and lots of room for players to improvise their own subplots into the story.)

I'm in another game that has separate threads for specific locations...and, having had to go back through them to try and relocate details that I forgot to note for my own reference, I have to say that I'm of two minds on it.  It was nice, because I could remember WHERE in the game the details were relevant, so I knew which thread to look in...but I couldn't remember when, specifically, so it took a LONG LONG time for me to find what I was looking for.  I like the notion of breaking them up in specific chunks based on date, or specific event, or something similar.  If I ever end up running my own game on here, that's very likely something I'll try.

And I've got to agree with the idea of having some kind of overall plotline to follow.  I've tried a couple of sandbox games that had really cool settings...but no plot to them.  And what we ended up with was a really cool setting with some really awesome characters who either sat around doing nothing or were so busy pursuing their own interests that the game never achieved 'critical mass' and ended up dying off because not enough people felt engaged in the game, and the ones who felt engaged got frustrated because nobody else was participating in their storyline.  You CAN do a totally sandbox game, where it's up to the players to determine their own plotlines within the game...but your odds of the game drying up and blowing away go way up if you go that route, because you have to get enough of just the right kinds of players to sustain it.  People who are willing to follow a plot and develop their own subplots are a lot easier to find.