Rumple C wrote:t-ice wrote:Cast_No_Shadow wrote:...Server hopping might not be the most ic thing ever but its a sacrifice we have to make for the sake of fun...
If this is really so, then I think we seriously need to consider whether the Hardcore roleplay Pillar, or the One PC per player Pillar is the more important one. Because we can't have both.
So the "group", not being specific here - could be any group! has a dm'd event once per week. If there was a little more to keep them occupied during the week, then there would be no need to "server hop" in search of something (or avoiding boredom).
If a player is server hopping in order to play a part in two (or more) concurrent plots then I would say that player is venturing onto unstable ground; however, if a player is server hopping because there genuinely is nothing else to do on a server when not questing then I wouldn’t seek to bring that player to book.
CNS’s campaign apparently exacerbates the above simply because it is a long distance, long duration affair; analogous to being locked up in prison. For a game such as this (ALFA), and for players such as us (with real lives), it isn’t reasonable to expect all involved to restrict their actions to one location between sessions, thus the pragmatic DM calls comic book time. (Personally, I’m comfortable with between session play restrictions such as these on the understanding that the scheduled sessions are as concrete as is practicable. As a primarily social RPer this sort of thing holds a certain appeal but I wouldn’t feel comfortable if the more action orientated players were to be similarly restricted.) When comic book time is called it tends to
feel less clunky when all concerned remain within the general vicinity between sessions, i.e., the same server as a minimum. Where it starts to feel a little stretched is when said players then choose to scatter to various servers, and where it starts to feel decidedly questionable is when some of those players then become involved in concurrently running plots on multiple servers.
(Personally speaking, if a DM is going to the effort of running an event that I can take part in it is only fair that I exercise a little effort in return in keeping it all as believable as possible between sessions, thusly staying within the vicinity of an event when comic book time is called. I don’t server hop often and when my chosen server falls upon leaner times I tend to hibernate until things pick up again, so perhaps it’s easier for me to accept the implied restrictions of comic book time than for some. This is not to say that there is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to adapt to comic book time, more just to illustrate that people interpret abstract mechanisms in different ways.)
I do not believe that such things can or even should be directly legislated for, but I do think that it can be indirectly influenced with the application of mechanics such as RL holdover time for inter-server travel.