Reconnection

If you miss a session in the virtual world because your cat was ill, the rest of your party may have moved elsewhere. How are you going to find them? Even if you know exactly where they are, it’s not really pleasant to spend half an hour trekking through swampland to hook up with them.

If people are members of a community of interest, they need to be able to communicate with one another; if it’s a community of practice, they need to be able to access one another’s data; if it’s a community of commitment, they need to be able to act in concert with one another; if it’s a spiritual community, they just need each other. The domain in which these proceedings take place is the community space for that community. For mages passing spell sequences between each other telepathically, all action and interactions takes place through the telepathic network, therefore that would be the community space. In most cases, though, the virtual world itself is the community space. In order to participate in a community, members need to be proximate to the rest of the community in its community space; for virtual worlds, therefore, this means that characters must be able to reach the same (virtual) physical location as other members with relative ease. In other words, they have to be able to teleport to them.

There are two main problems with this. First, it’s often fiction-breaking. If it took eight of us five hours to reach the oasis and it took seven of us another five hours to reach the pyramid, how come it takes one of us only five seconds to make the second half of the journey? Magical explanations are always possible, of course, but the players will view them as the cop-out that they are, spoiling immersion. The second problem is that if characters can appear anywhere at a moment’s notice it makes everywhere local to everywhere else; this plays merry hell with economic systems.

Fortunately, there are ways to promote connection without screwing either the fiction or the economics too badly. These are discussed in Chapter 5 in some detail, but they essentially involve finessing everything through the medium of offline action. When you’re not playing, your character is still active. When you restart, you decide where your character traveled during your offline period and appear there.