Well, it depends on what the participant expectations are. With a succession style game, you usually do things in large increments, and depending on the style of the activity, it might take a day or week for each turn to complete. Because this focuses on swapping back and forth between a small number of characters many times, it’s definitely more fun to have a faster pace. You could do one on the forums with a one or two day turn around, with occasional breaks for the main participants by either pausing the game, so to speak, or by electing someone else to do stuff independent of them on the same save file until the main people get back. I think it’s totally workable.
There would be a lot of communication at the start and end of your turn, basically, but in the middle… it’s up in the air. Really your call. I like to give my buddy updates on steam chat. We do know each other in real life, but we’ve communicated entirely over the internet for the duration of our game.
And as for file swapping, the barebones requirement is deleting the contents of your save folder, then replacing them with the up-to-date files. Takes very little effort, honestly. With a forum, you would want to make sure you had a file host that wouldn’t get annoyed that a ton of people were downloading your file and make you upgrade to a premium account. Pretty sure dropbox would work indefinitely, if the host just never touched that file again hehe.
So, I agree that it does require a bit of effort, which makes sense because it’s not an intended feature of the game, but I disagree that it wouldn’t be a fun waste of time. I’d also argue that the point of succession games on forums is to have people commenting on them, even if they’re not playing. It’s to get the community involved in an activity, which might take months or years to complete. None of that is precluded in this method, is it?