Looking for feedback on a game idea

I’ve got a weird idea for a PbP game. I haven’t done any of the hard design work on this, it’s just an idea at the moment, and I wanted to see if anyone else thinks the concept has legs before I pursue it further.

Core concept: The game is played with a GM and multiple players, each playing a character—standard RPG setup. The twist is that in-game time never stops running. For every real-world day that passes, an in-game day passes as well.

Question: But doesn’t that mean PCs won’t get much done? Like, if I say "my character opens the treasure chest" and the GM doesn’t get around to posting until the next day to let me know what was in the chest, does that mean my character was just standing next to the treasure chest all day?

Answer: Actions in this game are expected to be bigger than that—closer to what some RPGs call "downtime" activities—the sort of thing a character could be spending multiple days on without needing to sweat the details.

Q: A game composed entirely of downtime sounds boring. How would you make it interesting?

A: I think the best way is by leaning hard into domain-level play. The PCs will have control over more than just what their character is personally doing. They’ll be bossing around minions, conducting diplomacy, building castles, and generally having big effects on the world over long timelines.

Q: That could be cool, but it sounds more like a strategy game than an RPG. Is this even an RPG?

A: By maintaining the player-GM dynamic, you still get the imaginative possibilities of roleplaying games. If a PC wants to construct a 500 ft tall pyramid and fill it with manticores, that’s something they can attempt and the GM will adjudicate with the aid of a dice-based resolution mechanic in typical RPG fashion.

Q: Okay, but it still doesn’t sound like much actual role-play will be happening. What if I want to simply have an in-character conversation with another PC or NPC? If the idea is to gloss over anything that would take small amount of time, then we’d be glossing over most character interaction, since conversations don’t generally play out over multiple days.

A: Ah, but there are forms of communication that do require long periods of time for messages to be received, the prototypical example being regular old physical mail. So, instead of conceptualizing character interaction as characters verbally speaking to one another, we would say that they are writing letters to one another as the default mode of communication. This could be true of PCs giving orders to their followers as well. In fact, I can imagine a large portion of play might consist of players writing in-character letters to their henchmen to give them their orders and the GM replying in character as the henchmen to let the players know what the result was.

Q: So, it’s like a realtime-epistolary-roleplaying-strategy game. This sounds pretty weird. Are you sure it will work?

A: Nope. I have no idea if it will work. It’s definitely a departure from anything I’ve played before, and I don’t expect it to fit every player’s taste. But it’s an idea I keep thinking about, so I’m here to get feedback on the concept.

I think it does sound interesting as an idea. It seems like you definitely need players of around the same degree of activity on GP for this. Like, one player who posts twice per day and one who posts twice per week will get very different things out of this, I guess (though maybe the twice-per-week player might be able to plan out their next couple of days in their post if they know they're not going to be active then). Same with GM activity. The GM would probably have to reply at least once per day for this to work, maybe even more, at least with smaller notes, if not full posts.

I might potentially be interested in giving this a shot, but I would need to know what the setting would be before deciding. The manticore pyramid makes me think of a D&D setting, which I probably would pass on.

@Falconloft ran a kingdom style game where each player controlled a kingdom, rather than a PC. While day to day might be to slow for that scale, this game might work well for faction play. Something like rivalling crime families, for example. Each player could control a faction and then just have characters inside that faction if they want to get more down to individual levels.
Just typing out my immediate thoughts...

Yeah my immediate thought was the type of "faction" game that have been tried around. Microscope is the most famous I guess. I think the best bet is to focus on writer story-teller type players and prompt them with something to get them started. It is something that may work on GP :D The one I tried to run was going very well, but the problem with all PbP is that life happens, so long term games are always risky.

Is this going to be a game game or a shared story-telling? Are you introducing any randomization (dice/cards) to the game? I have also been in some shared story-telling and it can also work.

I'm not sure "construct a 500 ft tall pyramid and fill it with manticores" would be a daily activity as I'm guessing that take some years to get done. So maybe the daily thing is hard to do, but the "downtime abstraction" seems to work well on PbP.

Aside: Not for nothin', some of the very early D&D games (mid 70s) ran, in a way, like this. If you played on Oct 9th and then not again until the 20th, 11 days passed in the game world. This was tied at times to healing, recovery and such...

My thinking is that each PC would have a sort of status quo lifestyle. So, if a player doesn't post for a while, we assume their character is just living their life and not doing much of interest during the elapsed time. I agree it would be a lot of work for the GM though. It might even be a game where multiple co-GMs could be of help. And if players drop out, well that would be handled as gracefully or ungracefully as in any RPG.
I've gone back and forth on what the time scale should be. I said 1-to-1 in the initial post because that's easiest to conceptualize, but the ratio could be one real day to one in-game week or even month or year if that's the scale of things that players want. But yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that the manticore pyramid would be a 1-and-done thing. There would be a few steps involved, for sure :)
I guess it depends on what you consider to be the primary difference between a storygame and an RPG. I definitely don't want this to have heavy crunch. If I did that, I fear it would quickly turn into a strategy game. But I would really want to maintain the notion of playing your character and trying to overcome obstacles in their way, with the player's goals being equivalent to the character's goals, which storygames (like Microscope) often lean away from. And yeah, I imagine there would be a dice-based resolution mechanic for certain things. I need to think out what that would be, but there are many example to emulate in the RPG world.
D&D-esque fantasy settings are definitely what interests me, but I imagine other settings could work. What sort of setting is your preference?

I prefer settings in the modern day or beyond. A faction game could work well in Urban Fantasy for example. Or space SciFi could be a good fit if you consider long travel times (both for ships and messages) to support the time thing. Maybe you need two or three days to get from planet A to planet B and a message needs a full day for that same distance.

I'm not saying I'd be 100% out if it was a D&D-esque setting but it would be a point against it for me personally. In that case, it would very much depend on the conceit of who the players are.

Yeah, I've heard of that! I've even seen stuff in the AD&D DMG that implies long passages of time like this. That's one of the things that got me thinking along these lines.

Gotcha. Well, I'm quite fond of Star-Wars-style science fantasy but not into hard sci-fi as much, at least not for gaming (hard sf literature is awesome though).

I usually like to lean into like the kind of scifi, where I can pretend it all makes sense without having to think too much about it. Artificial gravity, some kind of excuse for interstellar travel, a couple but not hundreds of inhabitable planets.
That probably counts as soft

But just make whatever game interests you. Nothing's worse than a GM running something they're not invested in 😄

I think you'd have to find like minded individuals. That being said, there are also people who like to watch cat videos - I would not be one of those (cough, cough, the one with the cat chasing the laser dot...) It sounds a lot like a writing project than an rpg to me. I could be wrong. So, as a writing project, I think it sounds great. As a role playing game - kind of not my cup of tea as a GM. I'm not saying you won't find people to play this, but you might have to build a preview of such a thing for others to join you. Godspeed brave hero! And may fate bring you safely home!

Right, a lot will depend on being able to generate interest. And that may require fleshing out the concept more. Thanks for the encouragement :)

When I ran mine, it was fairly similar, but the time frame wasn't one-to-one. One week in RL was one month in the game. If you didn't post during a week, your nation just didn't do anything.

I'd suggest looking at Sword Chronicles for a good starting point.

We have played a lot of games like this on my previous site and I can say that it can be incredibly fun - we've done everything from ancient roman noble houses, through gods vying for power up to the PbP version of Spore. Galactic empires and fantasy kingdoms too.

The format of players and GM works extremely well, especially if you pair it up with PvP elements. The only thing I would be concerned about would be the 1-to-1 ratio, as quite often there are interesting elements the players would miss this way (in-person negotiations, grand battles and such).

The most functioning system was a set timeframe (usually 2 weeks in RL, but it was adaptable when a lot was happening) within which the players had to design their actions and possibly react to the actions of others. After that, a skip to the next in-game season/year happened. This worked extremely well, especially since some of us had different schedules than the rest of the players.

I am close to my limit of games as of now, but since this is kind of a soft spot for me, I may be interested based on the setting and the system.

Yeah, based on the feedback I'm hearing, 1-to-1 might not be the best ratio after all. Thanks for the recommendation!
So is the idea that within the 2-week window, time would be sort of elastic so things could play out as needed and as people are available—and only at the end of that period does time advance by the fixed amount? That's an interesting idea. I feel like having time alway pass at a constant rate has a kind of conceptual elegance to it, but the method you're suggesting is probably the more practical way of doing things.

In any case, it's encouraging to hear that something similar has been done successfully before. I'll keep developing the concept and post any updates this thread.

You just have to find the right scale. I think 1-to-1 can work, just not on kingdom size. Once teh scale gets too big, one day doesn't mean enough anymore to be relevant. If you keep it smaller, then 1-to-1 should be just fine

True. I'd ideally want a medium-ish scale—small enough the individual characters can make a difference, but large enough that players have a big impact on the world. And that seems like a tricky thing to get right, which is probably why I'm uncertain of the right decision here.

Something else that occurred to me: running larger scale actions on a slower timeline is still doable, it would just mean that posts would be less frequent. So, if you're running a 1-to-1 timeline at a scale where most of the things players might be doing take several days to get done, they won't necessarily need to check in and post every day. Less demanding.

This sounds similar to a Birthright campaign. Birthright was a 2nd edition AD&D setting in which characters took on the roles of rulers of domains. Each turn, you could do certain things on the domain level and a turn represented something like a month or a year (I forget, I'd have to look at it to recall). You could also have regular role-playing adventures representing the expeditions of heroes within your realm. It was an interesting concept that I never really got to try, despite having purchased the rules.

Birthright was a complex overlay to AD&D. It had a lot of great concepts but they were tied to the setting pretty closely from what I remember. It was an interesting way to expand AD&D but it made for a huge amount of bookkeeping.