gizmo33 said:Mega-dungeon crawls might be old-fashioned, but time-line issues arise outside of dungeons as well. I didn't think it was old school to think that two characters from two different groups might meet in town somewhere. I'm not trying to judge, and I don't take offense to the "old school" label, it's just that until now I though everyone with multiple goups of players and characters played that way.
I don't consider this "old school" as much as "campaign style adventuring". For example - Frodo is trying to destroy the Ring while Aragorn is fighting the armies of Mordor. If you're not keeping track of time in your campaign, how the heck does a person know what's going on?
If you don't think it's old school, then I humbly suggest you've never played anythign new school. ;-)
It's not unheard of to see groups still playing this way, but in my experience two different groups playing in the same world at the same time is pretty rare: certainly, my RPGing circle doesn't contain anyone doing that, and my attempts to include a "crossover" adventure between two groups were considered odd and unusual by most of them.
I don't think I can pick a specific time people stopped doing it, but certainly the growth in story-based games and adventures that aren't site-based and have long-term effects makes this kind of gameplay harder: it's no coincidence this talk of a rotating group goes hand in hand with talk of a Greyhawk-esque mega dungeon.
So, to use your Lord of the Rings analogy: if my group were the Fellowship, it's unlikely they would break up for any real length of time, and if they did they would expect that the characters who departed would need to be retired and new ones rolled up to join the main quest. If that meant Aragorn became an NPC and instead they had to play Gollum or Faramir, then that's wht would happen: and to be honest, it would partly be my problem for investing the Frodo player with so much power over where the adventure went anyway. ;-)
GMs with more than one operation group in a campaign world are rare, or at least nowhere near as common as older editions: that's why this post is here, because the OP clearly wants advise on how to do something he considers a change of pace. But since it's the only way you've ever done it, you're in a perfect position to help him!