Occasionally I would be sitting around with just two or three players and, if they were in port, those characters would have an opportunity to wander around. This introduced the occasionally game-altering effect.

“As agreed, you rendevous on the ship at noon on your third day. Most of you have blown a substantial portion of your booty on rum and other pastimes, and have only a vague memory of what took place [ha ha]. However, someone is missing…”

Of course, what happened is that some player went and made a mess of things while no one else was around.

I’m somewhat ambivelant about micro-sessions as suggested here. I would like to try them out, but I worry that if introduced abruptly they could blur the distinction between game-time and real-time. A lot of people here are saying that players might not be INTERESTED in this kind of micro-session. I would worry that it would be downright difficult. In your day-to-day life, you’re not set in the thinking modes of Krogar the Half-Orc Barbarian (that would be highly inappropriate). The you that exists in your everyday life has no idea how to deal with a scheming goblin mercenary. Unless your players are good multitaskers, the transition to Krogar’s mind could be a bit jarring while they’re buying groceries.

I should be clear that that is just one of my groups. The other group loves this kind of stuff. I’m not GMing that group yet as there is one more session under the current GM and then I take over for 3 levels (it is a D&D 4e game). Then I’m sure I can get some results with this technique.

From the Wikipedia:

“There are possible future Serious ARGs described in fiction. In his novel Halting State, Charles Stross foresightedly describes a number of possible ARGs, where players engage in seemingly fictional covert spy operations.”

Just finished this book, and it’s outstanding – highly recommended, and it does a good job of explaining ARGs. Basically, you’re playing the game during your day-to-day life. Sounded fascinating.

@Scott – also a good example. I missed you in the first pass.

@Virgil and Bryan – excellent examples!

@Patrick – Unless your players are so untech-savy that they don’t even have e-mail accounts, you can still send them quick e-mails whenever you have access to an e-mail system. Even assuming your group is the tech equivalent of my grandmother, you can still use the technique, you just either have to get creative or wait for the right opportunity or both

@Almost everyone else – 100% right on the player buy-in note. I would imagine that after the first few tries you’d get a feel for which of your players are receptive and which would rather you left game time to game day. For the few of you that note that NONE of your players would be interested, this MAY (or certainly may not) be one of those cases where your group isn’t really all that interested in gaming and ought to give another activity a try (but this is by no means the only reason you’d get that result just something to mull over)

I like this because it cuts down on planning stages at the table, which is my least favorite aspect of roleplaying games. I’d rather “play” than “plan.” But e-mail is a painless way of planning ahead for what is expected to take place.

I know that when our Shadowrun GM seeded a wiki with random headlines (often hinting at future mission), only two of the players including me kept up with them.