03-28-2012, 04:06 PM | #11 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
In my current game the party is split between support type characters and operations type characters and they split as a matter of SOP. I don't really have any problems with that. It helps to have in-setting communication available between the two groups though through technology or magic.
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03-31-2012, 10:49 PM | #12 | ||||||
Join Date: Mar 2012
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
I think Bruno and aesir23 are right. It depends on the players. Our group weren't all that close. Two of the group actually liked each other and everyone else just kind of tolerated each other. Incidentally, the two who actually liked each other were also the two who hogged the spotlight. Actually, it was mainly the girl who seemed to CRAVE it. The other guy just had a more decisive character. They weren't all to blame, though. In retrospect, I didn't really give my character a personality or interesting motives. To be fair, that was only my third roleplaying campaign, and the first two just fizzled out after a few sessions. You know, come to think of it, the two who had all the spotlight had also roleplayed A LOT more than I had. We're talking years here. In fact, just about everyone else in the group were roleplay newbies.
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Our former GM wasn't exactly a "people person". He was mainly the GM because he was decisive, and he knew a little too much about math and various sciences as well as a bunch of trivia. He has admitted that he'd prefer to play a character, but he hasn't run into many people who could GM well enough for him to play. On top of that, most (if not all) of us were introverts and mostly new to RP. We didn't know what we liked and disliked yet, and if we did, it was hard getting some of us to express it. Personally, I hate too much talking. I much prefer action--not just combat, but action. I like having to beat the clock, chase the bad guy, dual a master swordsman, and all that other fun stuff. Talking is good filler in between the action. For me, it serves as a time to cool down and reflect on that "close call back there". Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions and anecdotes, everyone (including the people I didn't quote specifically). If you guys have anything else to add, I'd be happy to read it. |
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03-31-2012, 11:21 PM | #13 | |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
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The difficulty of playing two roles at once is a more valid criticism if you get into odd situations such as one talking to the other. In reality, though, the whole point is to give somebody an active role when their main role is passive or out of the scene, so this rarely occurs. And anyway, I've seen experienced roleplayers happily do both sides of a conversation, complete with different voices, whilst firewalling information so that the two people they control don't act like a collective intelligence.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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03-31-2012, 11:25 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Vancouver, WA
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
Perfectly understandable that you don't know what you like yet...I still don't know myself and am always learning new things that I'm interested in doing. It takes some getting to know the players to figure it all out. In my group I have two players that are easy to suss.
One almost always plays the skill monkey and likes collecting things but isn't so much interested in personal interaction between his character and NPCs. The other is less interested in the numbers and more interested in coming up with creative solutions (she always has some gadget/potion on her sheet I didn't realize was there and comes in handy at just the right time) and interacting with the NPCs...even ones I *really* didn't even expect the party to even speak with. For those two, breaking things up is easy. In our Star Trek game (just the two players, three characters each), the first player has the chief engineer, the main helmsman, and a Bajoran security officer. They just need a problem to solve with dice...though he often gets more creative with the Bajoran. The second player has the Bolian chief of security (who likes puns and collects macaroni art), a surly Klingon combat medic, and the Betazoid first contact officer. While the Bolian sometimes takes a shot with the ship's weapons, these characters are usually about interaction. In a recent split scene on DS9, the Bolian and the FCO had dinner with the station security chief to convince him to give them some quantum torps. The chief was squeamish and Quark was exited to have a Bolian onboard (they'll eat anything)...and brought him just about every living dish he could think of, on the house. The FCO spent most of the evening covering and trying to keep the dinner from going south. They also caught Quark taking 'tips' from gambler's latinum stacks at the Dabo tables...so that helped. Meanwhile, the Bajoran was on a sensor array being constructed nearby cleaning out an infestation of Cardassian voles, the engineer was upgrading the warp core (skill challenge), and the helmsman was dealing with some tricky manual docking things. Again, the Bajoran was the most entertaining (to me) of the three of them. I've known these players for a while, of course, but their character creation choices really said a lot about what they were going to want to do in the game. I'm sure that was too much information for you...but hopefully the example is somewhat useful. M |
04-01-2012, 07:42 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
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Bill Stoddard |
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04-01-2012, 09:15 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Vancouver, WA
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
We had a little "sock puppet" action in the dinner scene I mentioned above but the player handled it pretty well. I'm not so good at it myself, as I found out in the first couple of episodes...so one of the players suggested they switch off playing the ship's captain. I try to arrange heavy interaction scenes to happen on the days the "talky" player is running him, problem-solving for the other player...with some switch-up, of course.
While I'm at it, if one of the player doesn't have someone to run in one of the split-scene action groups there's usually an NPC they can jump into, so both players generally get to take part in every scene. The ubiquitious Crewman Jones (security) is usually on-hand when one of the security people is off doing something. There are a few others as well. I reserve the ship's XO, the ship's resident civilian scientists, and a few others for myself. The XO (a Vulcan named Tu'pak) sometimes serves as a check for the player-run captain: a la, "I feel I must remind you, Captain, that we are currently at peace with the Cardassian Union." M |
04-01-2012, 09:18 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Kansas
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Re: Managing a party that splits up.
Back in college, when I could actually get a game together, I'd keep a few index cards with the stats and just a couple of RP notes for a variety of NPC types. On a couple of occasions, the party would get split, and when it made sense to have NPCs appear, I gave the non-spotlight players each a friendly NPC to run for a while.
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Tags |
group, manage, party, split, strategy |
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