Is it okay to create a lot of chat rooms?

Question

There's a few of us who currently play games of Fate in the FATE Game Room. All our games and chatter take place in that room alone, but at some point, activity may become great enough that we may end up running two games simultaneously, or otherwise cease to play our games exclusively within that room.

At that point, we would probably take the approach of creating a separate room to play games in, which is the reason for this question. How should we handle it?

• Is it acceptable to create a new room for each session, letting each one expire due to inactivity, probably adding a couple of pages to the room archives after a while? Or,
• Should we limit our number of rooms, e.g. having one per GM which is recycled as much as possible?

Ultimately: is there anything wrong with just creating lots of chat rooms over time?

Answer 1

I think one per session might be a bit prolific, but creating new rooms as they become necessary would suffice. So if there's Game Room 1 sitting idle and a session starts, it can go there, but if people are using Game Room 1, someone can create Game Room 2.

If chat rooms can be flagged "not worth retaining" even if the system thinks they are, or if frozen rooms can be manually unfrozen, then that would work out well. Otherwise, it would end up creating a bunch of frozen rooms as bubbles of activity rise, burst, and leave idle rooms.

Answer 2

Building on Holland's answer, The Back Room: Live Tabletop Games already exists. If we could get it unfrozen, it would probably suit our purposes well until such time as two games are running simultaneously (which is a cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it scenario, I think).

Answer 3

Let's not create a room per session, that seems like overkill, but a separate room for discussing FATE and playing FATE would be fine. If you want to track individual sessions you should use the Conversation feature which allows a period of time in chat to be named and linked.

Answer 4

The way that other sites have tended to do this is if there is considerable conversation around a game, open a room for that game. Keep the room around if it's not in use, but don't have a room per session. The best example is of Arqade, which has rooms for the most popular 4-5 games.

As far as Fate goes, I think if there is a serious effort, having one room per campaign would be reasonable. If one campaign dies, then the rooms could be recycled.