Temporary or Permanent?

Sometimes, people want to group together for only a short period—a single session. A group of characters are hanging out at a bar, someone comes in and announces that there are wolves attacking the village, so everyone bands together to beat off the wolves. This would be a temporary group.

Groups that persist (in particular, that would continue to exist when all their members were logged off) are classified as being permanent. Even if the group has a definite aim and will cease to exist after a certain point (for example, a consortium to sell virtual pumpkins on Halloween), it counts as being permanent if it would survive as an entity were all its members to log off.

Temporary groups tend to be (but aren’t always) informal; permanent groups tend to be (but aren’t always) formal. For formal groups, there may be differences in facilities depending on whether they are temporary or permanent: It doesn’t really make sense for a temporary group to own property, for example. Although it’s possible to implement a temporary group as a permanent one, there are two principal reasons why a designer might decide not to do this:

• People are often more willing to sign up to a group on the understanding that it’s a one-off commitment than they would be if it were permanent. They might want to join a lynch mob, but not the police.

• Players may be limited to one permanent group (to help it develop quicker) but allowed to join any number of temporary groups (to assist the development of a wider sense of community).

It is important that temporary groups be quick to form and quick to disband. Players regard them as a superficial convenience, therefore anything that makes them inconvenient (even having a hard-to-remember command name) will reduce usage.