Sean Patrick Fannon said:
What I am talking about does require a certain level of cooperation and understanding on everyone's part. Limits do have to be set, and GMs who want to tie the events of their games into the greater whole will have to be willing to hold their stories and the development of their player characters to those limits. The key is setting up limits that can be lived with, and which are dynamic enough over time to not make players or GMs feel too held back.
The return on that is the ability to know that the stories told happen and matter. Quite frankly, if you make the world big enough, a lot can be going on at any given time. As well, you give "higher access" to major story developments to those GMs and groups that really invest into the process and play along the most effectively with the story directions underway.
I am not saying it doesn't require a lot of planning, detailed design, cooperation, and management. I am just saying that I believe it can work, and I believe it's part of the next step in evolving the hobby.
I'd say the next step of the hobby is the exact opposite- recognising that the hobby is inherently varied and versatile, and capitalising on that. We don't need systems that try and unify everyone into one continuity, and politely ignore those who play differently. What we need is to first recognise that everyone plays differently, and then focus efforts on enhancing the strengths of that model, while negating it's formidable weaknesses and drawbacks.
By trying to unify play, you're ignoring one of it's essential elements- it varies, greatly. This is one of the great strengths of the hobby, and one of the major problems that cause so many pitfalls and conflicts in groups and clubs and the comunity overall. There is a clear case for a shift in approach that recognises this and puts it at the core of the hobby, where it belongs.
I believe that features like player matching and versatile rules systems can be developed to take the hobby ot a new level, to codify the reality that 99% of GM's have been playing with all along. It's all well and good to talk about the RPGA and MMO hybrid models and the like, but ultimatly these approaches are working against the creative energy of the hobby unless they recognise that there is no unified approach, no grand scheme all (or even most) gamers can follow, and at the very least such a system must make genuine efforts to recoginise that if it is to function.
We are not all playing the same game, and so, for a game with a large audience, the solution is to offer genuinly different ways to play, and help people find others who play in a compatable way.
Otherwise, essentially you're going to have the same problem that MMO's do with varant playstyles, only while they can ignore them, an RPG analogue cannot, since for us, play style is at the core of the experience, while MMO's can rely on graphics, basic play, and their access to a larger and more mainstream audience.
