mrsueme2

That's sort of the conundrum between 24/7 and session-based servers. 24/7 is great for, like you said, drop-in anytime play that is really good for people. But I, at least as a player, have always found it difficult to keep up with that. Sometimes I just can't play one week, and people have put dozens of hours in to something that I was planning to do. With session-based, even if you'd missed one session people have only progressed like 7 hours or so, and not risk someone who happened to have a week off do things you were planning to do. It makes it so you don't 'fall behind' as much or risk missing anything since you happened to not be around as much, it's a much more universal experience in my opinion. As long as you can make the one session per week or at least most of them, you will largely have the same experience as everyone else. Both systems are good at certain things, neither is really the 'best', just better for certain things. And, at least in my personal opinion, session-based is a lot better for roleplay, while 24/7 is really good for casual or build servers.

Posted some of my thoughts in the previous thread, but will post the rest here as I love this idea! I did want to ask though, what sort of balance of events versus regular VS are you thinking you want for this? As in, time in game spent playing regularly, time playing regularly while pursuing some long-term material or roleplay goal, or time completely spent in RP events or adventures? Though I imagine it may be hard to tell accurately at this point

Maybe something of a hybrid would be better? Weekly sessions that are mostly standard fare, but campaign or event-specific objectives for players to strive for on top of their standard VS affair in between 'event weeks' where certain GM-ran events take place, something that will hopefully reward preparation made by players and strain resources like equipment, or even force temporary relocations to escape or follow threats and objectives, delay the mid and late game while giving players something new to do, whether they be a static number like you said or a more fluid playercount.

That's a really interesting idea, and one I'm definitely interested in given the pitch! I'm not sure if something like this has been attempted before so I don't really have a point of reference for this beyond the Tale of Two Towns event I spoke of in my post and the experience I've had with TTRPGs in general the past couple years. The two things I imagine being the biggest hurdles are a consistent playerbase and keeping things fresh enough, especially for the timeframe you've laid out, which all have a couple specific things I'd keep in mind. Lowballing the month speed at 2 sessions per game month, that's 24 sessions per game year. If there is one session a week, that is 6 real life months per year! That's a serious time investment. In ToTT, a month lasted about a 6 hour session if I remember correctly, so 3 months to get through a year, and even then there was some dropout, especially during winter when players didn't have as much to do. And there is of course the concern of having things to consistently do, especially if people decide to fill specific roles or if it is mandated by the server. During the early game, that is no problem, people are busy trying to survive and constantly have things to do. Mid-game, things like pottery become far less important as people generally start focusing on building and getting through the metal ages, and by late game there is usually only exploring, building projects and projects that take a long time like animal domestication left. A lot of servers seem to get around this by having some mix of server restarts, player-driven activities like roleplay, conflict and player-made events and server events. If this is a more focused DnD style roleplay adventure I am sure things could stay fresh for longer, but that would rely on you to somewhat regularly create new things in the limited confines of VS! All that to say that I still think it'd be worth it and a really fun experience, but a more limited runtime would probably be more realistic. And on top of that, unless we had considerable luck and got 15 other people who had no scheduling mishaps and didn't lose interest, there would have to be a way to get people in to the game to replace those who left, something other VS servers seem to survive simply by merit of not needing a specific number of players to work and simply run with whatever player numbers they get.

Not sure if something like this exists, but I was hoping to find a roleplay server that runs one or more weekly sessions instead of being up 24/7, like Tale of Two Towns if anyone happens to remember that from a year or two back. As long as it has a decent consistent playerbase (15+ or so) the specifics don't matter too much to me! I simply find the session-based servers much easier to play and keep up with.