Hmmm... Do you mean PBeM or pen & paper ones?  In my experience, they tend to work a bit differently, but do have major similarities.

The PBeM one I'm in (click sig banner for details :P ) has everyone working together to basically play out the lives of their characters, which includes the various scrapes they and their ship get into.

Pen & paper... In my experience (both playing and running), this type tends to focus more on the action and adventure side of things, though players often still manage to work in their character's lives "off-stage" into things anyway :)

Hope this is even remotely helpful, but if there's anything else you want, feel free to poke me and I'll see if I can come up with a better explanation :)

Looks like it runs similar to the PBeM ones I'm in, and quite amusingly too from what I saw before my browser crashed :P

I like to compare the writing I have done for the past...oh...15 years or so in Star Trek RPGs to the cooperative writing of a book. In the end, you could almost paste together everyone's posts to create a real and quite saleable book with a bit of formatting work.

Basically saying - the story can go wherever you want it to go. Just like in our real lives, there will not always be an emergency, meeting with a diplomat, or lay around time. Everything has a time and place, and it is up to us as writers to include what we want in our writing while keeping the plot and storyline realistic...or at least believable.


^.^