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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9624413" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I think the largest issue is splitting the focus/how to keep others engaged while the focus hovers on one character to the exclusion of others. It's theShadowrun/Cyberpunk 'hacker problem' writ large. While individual people have found solutions that work for them, overall I think it is one of those problems* where the community as a whole has not come up with a solution which has achieved majority or significant-plurality acceptance.*similar to social rules, stealth&perception, and a few other rules that end up being perpetual bugaboos to the community (even if you or I personally have found our solution). A lessor--but still significant--issue is managing synchrony. Strictly speaking, you can pretty easily manage two characters that are physically distant acting at the same time*. Other than the likelihood that it means they have more around them (people/places/things) with which to interact, it's not that different from them all being in the same room** except that they can't directly interact with each other/the things the other is directly addressing. However, once they start doing different things, the different things are going to start taking different amounts of time, each of which needs to be tracked. More than bookkeeping, that's also going to run into the issue of actions from one venue interrupting the actions of another. And there, most systems become pretty loose -- I can't recall if the Cortex System or Fate or Hero has rules for what happens if a social or search roll is interrupted, but I suspect that if it is there, it's something like 'the character can abort, or attempt to keep going at -x' or the like, as opposed to rules for what happens if the interrupt is 10% or 80% into the time the action typically takes (or even when in a successful search check an item might be found, etc.). This kind of stuff can get very complicated very fast, and thus systems that care about such things can get complicated in turn.*at least as much as generally turn-based systems allow.**also a question about communication and what each of them knows about the other's situation, etc. But that's going to be very genre- and scenario-dependent. </blockquote>

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