For example FIASCO.
To even start you need to get all players together and determine the connections.

Is this practical when not all of them log in with the same frequency?
Does initial setup collapse before a game can even start?

What about after things begin and the inevitable player drop happens?
Can such a game continue with the loss of such a tightly connected character?

Is this the only game with a mechanic like this that could impede play?

I know * World games do this some but, is it as critical?

Yes, they can work.  However, it often comes down to the adaptability of the GM.

Often times they need to do some extra story work to make it all fit.

Star Wars is often like this.

Personally, I find it useful to tweak the rules slightly to let the character interconnectivity to be slightly looser than what is usually intended.  This way its easier to jam the next character (once drops begin) into the slot.

GamerHandle has the right of it, an adaptable GM can help those problems become much smoother. Especially when player drop comes in, as that can usually kill a relationship-heavy game. Even without game mechanics associated, really. I've seen freeform games fall apart because someone stopped showing up and the others just couldn't get moving again.

You'll find that games which allow most of the relationship design on the fly work much easier. *World, Fate, some flavors of Cortex Plus, all make it really easy to just pick up and go, while still crafting bonds between characters.

The place you might run into trouble without a really savvy GM are games where a good chunk of game time, like a tabletop session, is devoted to building those bonds. Dramatic Cortex Plus games like Smallville will be a lot harder to get together, and I've seen many fail during character creation. I've only played one Fiasco game and can't remember how intensive that process is, but I imagine it'll be somewhere in between.

So yeah, it can be done, but some games' mechanics lend themselves to it much easier than others.

I usually make my groups do PbtA-like interconectivity type stuff regardless of what system I use.  I link NPCs, locations, and "other" (a catch all category for whatever).  I find it really lays good bedrock for the kinds of games I try to run.  Key of course is making sure the game is about these places, people, and things (otherwise what's the point, really?).

As for player drops, I usually just have new PCs tap into existing NPCs, locations, and stuff, and also ask existing PCs to tap into new PC stuff as well.  It seems to work pretty well.

I've only been involved in one such game...and it almost didn't even make it off the ground because of players dropping out.  But most of the games I'm in create some kind of interconnection between characters (unless players are actively trying to avoid them), even though the rules don't actually require that.  Granted, we're not talking anything on the level of 'My aunt dated your dad's college roommate and was maid-of-honor for your parents' wedding' or stuff like that...a couple of the games I'm in have very heavy military themes to them and it doesn't take much time for characters to build a shared respect (or distaste) for the officers they serve under and around, which lends itself to connected characters (and those, actually, are the kinds of connections I prefer...organic stuff, as opposed to heavily engineered backstories.  If they're done well, it's great...but all too often, they seem to feel like an arbitrary contrivance in order to make sure characters stick together.)

So, they CAN work...but unless you're ready to adapt those rules and find some way to breathe new life into the game as players drop out (which inevitably happens...I can't think of a single game I've ever been in where the player line-up stayed the same for the first three months of the game...), those systems face an additional hurdle in the obstacle course of creating a game that runs smoothly and long-term online.

There's supposed to be interconnectivity mechanics in Numenera, and I for my game I just made a thread for people to post their backstories into and work out amongst themselves how they wanted to be connected. It worked fine for us, but then the group is composed of people who know each other in real life and/or otherwise outside of rpol, not a group that formed on rpol.

I'm a big fan of interconnections like you get in PbtA games.  They work just fine on RPOL, because they're connections but they're small.  If you have someone vanish, then linking in to a new person isn't a big deal.  The danger is if you get really invested in another PC, but that's always a danger.

I've found Fiasco to be tough because you only want about four players, but -- since they build the story themselves -- each one is critical. When one (inevitably, it seems) drops out, it is very tough to bring in a replacement and the story/game dies.

Games like FATE and the *Worlds are designed to build a great deal of character interconnectivity in chargen. This takes a bit of time and it seems one or more drop out before it is done or immediately after. Then others have to rework their backgrounds, further delaying start of play. And a dropout once the story is rolling, can be just as disruptive.

Finally, I like to build character inter-relatedness and backstory into any system I run, just for the role-playing fun, but it isn't formalized and doesn't take as much time and doesn't affect play mechanics, if someone disappears. I also try to avoid having any one character be the driver of my story. As sure as I do, that's the player who flops on me.

On a related note, I've also found systems with complicated chargen mechanics, insofar as they delay the start of play once all the players are on board, can frustrate/bore some players who quit before the story begins.

Are there good ways to speed up the process?
How bad is "packages" of choice to pick from?
Does that defeat the spirit of the game so much that you might as well play a different one?
This message was last edited by the user at 13:55, Sat 07 May 2016.

I've found a lot of resistance to pre-generated characters. That may or may not relate to the fair number of players who seem to drop out after chargen before the game really gets underway.

For my own part, the time commitment of a PBP game encourages me to build my own character.  It's one thing to play a pre-gen character for four hours at a convention.  I can even work myself up for it for a few weeks.  But I approach RPOL games with the thought that the game will run for months or years...and it's easier to invest that kind of time when it's a character I made, as opposed to one that was handed to me.  On rare occasions, a pre-gen character resonates with me and I'm excited to play it long-term...but most often, I don't feel enough 'connection' to pre-gen characters to stay invested in playing them.

I've found that there are quite a few players who thoroughly enjoy chargen, but aren't all that interested in actually playing them. Those are the ones that tend to wander off when the game starts.

One thing that I've found will absolutely murder my interest in a game is if I finish chargen and then get to sit and wait for a lengthy amount of time.  After a couple of weeks, I'm usually done, and I suspect that some folks get "done" well before that.

That hasn't been a problem in games I've run. I start people playing as soon as their characters are done, usually within a few days at most.

In real life games, these tend to be the people who have lots of fully fleshed out and statted character ideas at the beginning, and then often want to change out their characters for new ones mid-story.

I had this great big post written up, but I ultimately trashed it because it was such an abnormal confluence of a bad GM and pot-stirring circumstance that it doesn't serve to answer the original question.

Personally, I despise shoehorning people into pre-generated connections, both as a GM and as a player. That being said, I can appreciate the fact that they can be utilized as handy, optional tools at the absolute beginning of a game if two or more players are having trouble fleshing out their backgrounds.

Later on, though, they can become unwieldy and can cause some serious issues in a PbP atmosphere. For instance, I used to play several Robotech games in RL and online. Robotech has a notorious and horrendous player attrition rate and it isn't abnormal for those games to either die stillborn or to slowly bleed to death as people lose interest. Though incredibly well-known, Robotech is an oddly niche IP in the roleplaying world. In one of the games I played on this site, we had a pretty good run with our original cast, but one of the others finally bowed out due to RL issues and his character was killed off in the last mission he played. Our GM eventually found a replacement teammate for us, but insisted that this new player roll on the "Teammate Relationship" to find out how their character would initially react to our characters. Thanks to a simple roll of the die, this new character was suddenly introduced to our group as a "long lost sister" of one of our characters and it just completely disrupted that character's long-running personal arc - and not in a good way.