Bringing your pre-gen'd character into a PBP / online game

[Arcteryx]

Someone brought up this point on the play-by-post board, and it turned some gears in my head:

When most PBP / online games recruit, the first thing that happens is everyone throws their characters into the thread. Some are just concepts, but more often they're pretty much complete, to the point where really, we're massaging backstory to fit the aspects (which are already filled in).

That's cool:

1. its one way for the GM to vet players coming in from the wild,
2. we've done it that way for 50 years (AD&D, GURPS, Hero, ect ect ect) and its done all right...

But I just can't help but wonder... it seems to completely hijack the "collaborative / character generation as play / together we create the awesome / the rpg is not the story of me, it is the story of us" intent of DFRPG's city/character generation process.

Wanted to throw it out there as food for thought, and wondered what the rest of y'all think.

[Bruce Coulson]

It's a problem of the media.  It's fine, and works very well, to spend an evening around a table building characters/cities/NPCs while socializing.  But in PbP, you aren't doing things in real-time, so the collaborative effort would stretch out the wait before the game starts interminably.

So, the stop-gap is for players to modify their characters as written to the other characters and players.  As long as everyone is willing to respect the core concept of the other characters, and willing to bend for the purposes of story, it still works; it's just different.

[Baron Hazard]

yah in order for that to work in a pbp setting, you'd need to dedicate at least the character building (and maybe city building for speed) into a chat-room setting as opposed to a forum setting. and that could be issues getting everyone in with scheduling.