Extra-Special Unnecessary Campaign Planning Time

So right now I'm in two regular games (playing in one, running the other), about to start a third, and running a fourth on an occasional basis. (It's awesome. Time-consuming, but awesome.) Naturally, my thoughts have turned, not to the game that I'll be restarting when school begins again, but to the game after that. Speculation at this point is useless, because by the time that game actually rolls around, I'll have a different set of immediate interests, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it.

Right now, the two top contenders are some kind of World of Darkness thing, and an exploration-based Swords & Wizardry game. They've both been on the list for a while, and the group at college has expressed a certain amount of interest in both ideas.

The main thing that's got me thinking about World of Darkness (probably Mage, maybe Vampire, and I still haven't ruled out Werewolf) is that college would be a pretty convenient time to run something like that. My home group hasn't expressed a whole lot of interest in it, and so far college remains (mostly) free of the scheduling conflicts that would make an exploration-based game more attractive. I'm fairly confident in my group's ability to maintain enough cohesiveness to run the kind of campaign that the WoD books encourage.

On the other hand . . . the Arcana Evolved game I'm running now is very plot-based. (By design, and demand.) The Traveller game has been fairly plot-based, and will only continue to get more so. I'm starting to get sick of that kind of game; at the very least, the volume of information to keep track of is a bit daunting. It might be nice to try something different for a while. A switch from working out what all the NPCs are plotting to designing locations would do the trick nicely.

Of course, whenever location-based gaming pops up as a possibility, I start thinking about West Marches, and the multi-party style. One idea that's been bouncing around in my head today would be to have one local pool of players, who play every week or so in-person, and another who play online, via chat. I'm not sure if it'd really be a great idea to divide up the pool like that, and I'm not sure just how much success I'd be able to have in recruiting for the chat side of things, but the idea is there. It would, at the least, be an interesting experiment.