maxplaysgames ([info]maxplaysgames) wrote,
@ 2005-02-10 20:03:00
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Party Themes
One of the things I find annoying about many RPGs is the lack of emphasis on party dynamics and unity.

Of course all the high-minded and cerebral gamers I play under motivate the players to form their own parties, but sometimes you have a GM who doesn't do this, or you are playing in a massively distributed campaign (like one of the many RPGA campaigns) and so there are only individual guidelines.

So what to do? I usually try to find a theme for the party. Sometimes this revolves around a specific member, sometimes it involves similar goals, or similar interests/professions. Some parties are very close, while others have internal stresses and disagreements.

What are your favorite party ideas, and what groups did you create that didn't work out as well as you had hoped?

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[info]crs
2005-02-11 04:11 am UTC (link)
Captain and Crew as a group does not work very well for the crew. I was captain and I got to play. And I deferred as much as I reasonably could, but... when there was a big decision to be made, and the ship had to go somewhere, or do something, I was it.

Kinda sad, it was a really good game. I kind of want to make a single-player computer game out of it, with the GM's permission.

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Wait...
[info]maxplaysgames
2005-02-11 04:21 am UTC (link)
what game are we talking about? Was this at AnonyCon?

Do you know who the GM/writer is?

Maybe this is the game I didn't get to play...

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Re: Wait...
[info]crs
2005-02-11 04:24 am UTC (link)
No, this was a multi-year campaign run locally... We ran through about three different crews as they fell out of the run piecemeal and we replaced them. The GM and I were the common thread.

It was a Traveller: The New Era (i.e. with Virus and the collapsed Imperium) game...

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[info]nikotesla
2005-02-18 03:41 pm UTC (link)
The problem there, which I've seen before (from up close. Like, as in, I caused the problem as GM), is that you, as the player, are assumed to be captain of the other players. Just because your character is the captain doesn't mean you have to be.

As players, talk about what you want to do before you do it as characters.

For a good model, take a look at Firefly. Consider how everyone's interests are played out by the crew at different times. The captain's not in charge of the story. The captain's just in charge of the functioning of the ship.

Consider the captain to be a character like any other with issues and personality to play out, and his job, as an element of the story, is no more relevant than the Pilot or the Bodyguard.

For very excellent rules on how to run this kind of game, check out Prime Time Adventures, a groundbreaking RPG that uses TV drama as its model.

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Forming parties
[info]yandros
2005-02-12 05:40 am UTC (link)
In the several long RPG campaigns I've run, party coherency has always been the hardest, most oft-recurring problem. Usually it came down to a lack of balance between party members, but that problem can be addressed with GM experience.

Lately, I more or less require groups of players to make characters as a group. Typically, I either provide a background or provide a few options for backgrounds. Usually I am very liberal in what options I allow in play, but my one requirement is that everyone make a character that can `get along' with the rest of the party. This approach does close off certain lines of role playing, but I've found that it makes the game flow better overall, and that's usually worth it to me.

My most recent party-building efforts have all roughly taken a form like ``You are all members of a group known as Blah. Blah is bigger than the party, varied in level, talents, background, etc. The party will be a particular cell of Blah. Blah is financed and backed by Mr. Guy. Mr. Guy is powerful, curious, generally good, and very jealous of his personal time -- that's why he hires groups of people like you.'' So far, this has been enough to get people to form coherent groups, and yet flexible enough to deal with player/character changes. It does more or less count as a GM cop-out, but it works for me. :-)

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[info]nikotesla
2005-02-18 03:54 pm UTC (link)
My favorite way of developing a party is coming up with a genre and setting with all the players, then listing, with them, all the characters that are likely to be in that story. Then have everyone pick the character they want to play.

That way, two things happen: the players are invested in the story, and the characters are invested in each other, one way or another.

Ron Edwards wrote in Sorcerer and Soul about the technique he calls a 'relationship map'. In short, it's a chart of what the characters - PC and others - want from each other and what they've done with/to each other. A little bit of that would also yield a tightly integrated party.

With a system like either of these, you can easily have The World-Wise Loner, the Trickster, the Tank, etc., and you always know what (or who) to do because, ultimately, the group's interactions with the world have more to do with those relationships than the plot.

I think you could probably do a relationship map for a PC group in a Living game or some such, as well. It would only take a few minutes with the players before the story starts, and if you give bonuses or XP to players that act along the lines of the relationship map, it would really encourage party building. It works best, though, when the players are really in control of the story as its protagonists.

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