I'm not opposed to that form of awareness of the characters; a friend of a friend introduced us, etc. It<em>is</em>fun to discover things about the characters; I'm just not a huge fan of everyone being total strangers and all of the jockeying for position and trying to out muscle each other thing that seems to always pop up in that setting. No one has to be BFF's... God, now I'm doing it!... but knowing something about each other helps to start the story on something less conflicted and argumentative about who should be on top.<br/><br/>I recall a game here on E that had a character going so far as threatening all of the characters just to say "I'm a bad-ass and don't give a shit about anything else." sort of thing.<br/><br/>Anyway, casual interactions works and if individual players want to create events in the past to drop into the story as sort of private jokes or interplays that others may have to ask about.<br/><br/>"I'm not going to open the door.... you open the door..."<br/>"I'm not going to open the door, remember what happened the last time I opened a door?"<br/>"Oh... yeah... ummm... lets get Mikey to do it!"<br/>"Yeah!"<br/><br/>Meanwhile, everyone is confused and wondering what happened... admittedly, it's a lot more difficult inPBP, but it could be done in non-critical moments, if people don't mind the occasional out of order posting to get the feel.