Playing in Realtime

Let me just for a moment stop and explain why playing/growing your character in realtime is not as good an idea as it seems. While it allows for greater depth of play and social interaction, there is one thing it doesn't take into the equation. You, your narrator, and your fellow gamers all have this thing called a real life. It's a very demanding thing, and you need to do what you can to take care of it and make sure it comes first.

Playing in realtime tends to make for more requirements and detail required to get things done, things that are frequently brushed aside by things and people existing in our mundane lives. Those things are more important than the game, and it makes for a very frustrating time when forces beyond your control make completing and fufilling all those requirements and detail nigh impossible to maintain. Thus such games are frequently and unavoidably delayed, cut short, and generally pushed around. Leading to frustration on all fronts.

On the flipside if you separate gametime from realtime, then events in the game are no longer at the whim of the fates, and instead come back under control of the narrator and players. Most game books allocate experience by session, these sessions can last anywhere from a few hours, to a few months in gametime (regardless of how long they took in realtime) and usually allow the players a certain amount of experience depending on what happened and how well it was played. Flexible to narrator option.

The online environment doesn't lend itself well to regular sessions people always show up for and don't play outside of, so I'd go with a compromise. Players control the timeframe outside of the regular sessions, and Narrator controls the timeframe in larger sections. Tell your players you have so much in-game time before the scene, and what you need from them before it happens, and then let them do their own thing before the Scene. That way they can play what scenes they want over messenger, and when it comes down to brass tacks for the scene they've been forewarned what they need to have ready.

If they don't have it, that's player failure. If the ST didn't warn them, that's Narrator failure. Simple, and allows everyone to manage things as they are able.

The OTHER problem with playing/growing your character in realtime is that players generally want to buy up stats faster than they could realistically achieve them, and storylines may even require it. Therefore realtime-gaming actually limits the pace of the plot, and how fast things can progress, which is just made worse by delays caused by real life. Nobody wants to wait around the time it should actually take to learn all that stuff, and players don't want to have their characters put in a ton of effort and not get stats for it, or be allowed to progress because enough real-time hasn't passed to allow it. If gametime is flexible, this problem dissappears.