Re: Do games that require inter-character connections work here?
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.