Imagine this.

The game presents players with a fixed cast of characters, let’s say about 10-12, all statted out as they should be when the game begins, with a bunch of story hooks and links to various locations, etc. The players pick at least 3 to play from the start, forming their initial crew. The different character’s starting locations are linked together, forming the initial area of space that the crew is familiar with.

Thereafter, other characters can be encountered during the course of play — as you travel around — and, if you fulfill the right conditions, these other characters can potentially join your crew, Final Fantasy style. Since some of the characters will occasionally get lost or be doing other things, far away from the rest of the original crew, this enables players to take over new characters for certain arcs of play. Additionally, since all the characters grow and change greatly over the course of play, what’s happen with a character in my game will be dramatically different from what’s happening to the same character in Justin’s game down in Florida.

Inevitably, just through the mechanics of the game, one or more of the characters will be lost for a long period of time and probably reemerge as a major antagonist, crazy and powerful from being alone in the void for a long period of time. But just who those antagonists or anti-heroes are will be determined in each individual game.