Multi-crew interactivity

[lord Claincy Ffnord]

I am currently running 4 separate crews in the same universe. Setting is in the final empire a couple of years after a house war, and 3 of the crews are aspiring part of aspiring noble houses. The 4th is a "secret crew" of a diff faction. The three noble crews know of the other crews, and who is in them. But they do not as a general rule know who which houses the other crews are from, or what characters they are playing.

Thus far there has been fairly minimal crew interactivity. They get information (based on influence rolls at the start of each session) that is a mix of stuff I have put in and stuff relating to other crews activities, the kind of things that it would be possible for informants to have found out about. Sometimes they can guess correctly whether something was crew related or not and sometimes they can't =) .  Beyond that a couple of crews have had interaction with the house of another crew, thus far they are unaware of this, though some have some suspicions, like always, as to who other crews are. I really enjoy this its cool, and thus far as they have only been interacting with each-others houses it hasn't been, too, hard to organize.

The difficult part comes when the crews are aware of eachother (or not) and need to interact more directly. This could be when they are aware of eachother and one is attacking the others manor for example. Or they could both have people at a ball and not know which guests were the other crew/s. My current plan for when I do have the multi-crew interaction is to narrate one of the crews myself and to be in touch over an instant messenger service with a friend who will be narrating for the other crew, will probably also have mikes for if either of us needs to explain something to the whole other crew (rather than just the other narrator). The other guy who will be narrating has his own character ( a kandra) who goes on contract with all the different crews for jobs, allowing him to get used to all the other crews and he has by far the best idea of any player as to my ongoing story, and so should know enough to know which stuff to leave alone when narrating.

The system isn't perfect as it will obviously slow things down a bit, but I can't think of a better alternative, if later they are working together I could have them all in one place but at the moment any direct interaction is less likely to be of a co-operative nature.

Does anyone have any other ideas on how to run this?

[carisbourg]

This post is not a joke.  I feel it's necessary to say that because of how different my idea is from yours.  You have the ambition, the imagination and the ability (including delegation) to run 4 separate crews at the same time.  Your idea about IMs made me think, 'Huh, he's building an MORPG from the ground up.'

I know it means no playing for a while, but why not just go whole hog and do just that.  Hire, learn or use some coding skills.  Learn about how to program and run a MMORPG, draw up a plan and get legal permissions from Brandon for Mistborn: The House Wars, an MMORPG set several hundred years before the books.  Anything that happens non-canon can be attributed to either Ruin or the Lord Ruler rewriting history.  From the way it sounds in the books about technological and social stagnation, all you'd really lose is canning factories.

Or would that be too ambitious?

[Herowannabe]

Yeah that's a sticky problem. Doing a bullitenboard type system could solve a lot of that (steelministry.com has a nice setup for that), but again, it's pretty slow. Or you could have one crew being the "active" crew, and call/text members of your other crews when they need to interact directly , but then leave their characters in the background the rest of the time. Not a perfect system either, but still probably faster than the other options.

What I really want to know is: how in the world did you manage to get FOUR separate crews going? I'm struggling to get enough of my friends together to get ONE up and running. 

[lord Claincy Ffnord]

I know it means no playing for a while, but why not just go whole hog and do just that.  Hire, learn or use some coding skills.  Learn about how to program and run a MMORPG, draw up a plan and get legal permissions from Brandon for Mistborn: The House Wars, an MMORPG set several hundred years before the books.

Ok, that would be cool =) I have *some* coding experience and a desire to end up in games development. But its a bit too ambitious for me at the moment. After I finished Uni it might be worth the attempt.

What I really want to know is: how in the world did you manage to get FOUR separate crews going? I'm struggling to get enough of my friends together to get ONE up and running.  

Thanks for the ideas, I'll look into them and see if any will work better.

how? um, I really don't know. I currently have roughly 17 players involved. We had got the game and done one testrun. Had enjoyed it and thought, wait, wouldn't it be awesome to have a couple of crews running in the same universe? Haha, yeah, but we could never get that many people. But we started talking to pretty much everyone we knew who might be interested and quickly had the numbers 0_o. Organization-wise it is hard, and some crews are a lot easier to find times with than others. I've had a couple of drop-outs, unsurprisingly, but also drop-ins =).

Basically, ask everyone, and get them to ask everyone (and then hope you haven't taken on more than you can handle XD)

Edit: Actually all you need is a resources score of 6 or more