The Flexible Game

[Gedrin]

I need to adapt, and I’d like advice.

I’m a superior GM, but a large part of that is because I build games around player characters. Stories that integrate characters by finding reasons the individuals would be chosen, and entwine the story goals with the goals of player characters are a large part of the success. My stories are measured, thematically appropriate, and grow in a “guided organic” way to tell a larger tale of adventure and heroism, frequently as a way to discuss a larger moral or philosophical idea.

Strangely, having sought out quality people who are creative and thoughtful, all my players are now married, parents, and/or have growing professional careers. In other words, everyone wants to play, but it’s difficult to get everyone together. Cross domain competence has sabotaged my game!

What I would like to do is maintain quality in the campaigns and the richness that my players have come to expect. However, I’m struggling to find a way to do this when I will not be able to count on a consistent cast of characters. I believe I need a mechanism by which PC’s can enter and leave on a per-session basis, while still being integrated into a group. The typical mechanism for this is some sort of patron that provides a team identity for the party; IST, Pathfinder Society, Camarilla, Stargate Command…you get the idea.

I have a few concerns:
Where were you!?: Say a player can’t make it. Where’s his character when the goblins attack town killing dozens? Do I require characters to have an “out of town” and/or “in town but busy” excuse on their sheet? What are good ways to handle this?
Story Cohesion: I still play to tell a larger story than just a series of one shots, but I’ll shift to a more episodic strategy. How best to tackle people who weren't around for last installment? If you weren't part of the group that won the trust of the Ent-king, do we just handwave your presence at the sacred hidden grove? Do we transfer that loyalty to the patron? Similar questions apply to episodes where vital information is uncovered. If we expect the PC’s to remember that the Space Pirate always bets on red, but the guy making the decision was missing that day… Perhaps an advantage similar to Common Sense, maybe Party Tales, that allow players to “have filled someone in on the story over the campfire”? Handwave?
Risk Planning: Most of the parties I've run eventually wind up with each player having a niche, and I can judge difficulty based on their capabilities. This lets me build adventures that push the PC’s pretty hard, heightening the sense of risk, without actually killing them all. A death trap can be impressive and add a lot to a story, but have a low lethality if the right skills are present, but TPK if not. How can I best handle this not knowing the characters in the session?

If anyone has experience in this sort of play, or ideas for making it work, I’d really like to hear them.

[Varyon]

So, what you need is a setting where people can pop in and out at semi-random without causing serious continuity issues.

It may require a bit of work, but the solution is simple on its surface - Virtual Reality. The anime (and related media) .hack took place in an MMORPG wherein there was a large-scale conspiracy with very real and very serious consequences (namely, players had an annoying habit of going comatose IRL, trapped inside the game). You could take a similar tract, having the characters resolve serious real-world issues within the VR environment.

Megaman Battle Network followed another premise, wherein the primary characters were self-aware avatars of the secondary (real world) characters, fighting swarms of viruses (which are conveniently Megaman-style enemies, like Metools) within various systems to fix things that were going horribly wrong (out of control buses, ovens trying to burn down houses, communications shutdowns, etc).

A VR/game approach allows you to start out lighthearted (it's just a game) until it Gets Real (a character's RL friend gets zapped into a coma, trapped on an out-of-control airplane, etc) to show that all isn't right in the digital world. Following this, you can have the characters begin trying to investigate what is really going on within the virtual world (RL attempts likely fail, as the characters are ordinary people and nobody online has any clue what's going on). In that respect, it makes perfect sense why so-and-so couldn't make it today - he had real-world obligations that couldn't be put off... or his internet simply stopped working!

You can still have serious consequences in such a setting. In .hack, character death meant losing all advancement (levels/equipment) since your last "save" - and against certain foes, it meant slipping into a coma! Megaman Battle Network was presumably similar in the video game (other NetNavis got killed all the time and restored from backup, although if Megaman died it was Game Over), but in the anime the NetNavis were fully self-aware and killing them could actually kill them, permanently.
Similarly, failure can be serious. In .hack it could result in friends/innocents getting coma-tized, in Megaman Battle Network it could result in friends/innocents getting killed (not that that every happened in the anime/game). You could also design your virtual world such that it itself functions like a "real" world, with political ramification, permadeath of NPC's, etc.

For a change of pace, you can also have players stat out their "real world" characters and have occasional events they need to deal with out in reality.

[whswhs]

How often do you meet? I have entirely adult players, mostly with jobs (though one has been unemployed for a disturbingly long time) and often with relationships. I run monthly sessions of each of my campaigns. My players can get together once a month. I haven't tried for once a week for a long time; I don't know if I have any players who would sign up for that if I offered it.

Bill Stoddard

[patchwork]

Originally Posted by Gedrin

What I would like to do is maintain quality in the campaigns and the richness that my players have come to expect. However, I’m struggling to find a way to do this when I will not be able to count on a consistent cast of characters. I believe I need a mechanism by which PC’s can enter and leave on a per-session basis, while still being integrated into a group. The typical mechanism for this is some sort of patron that provides a team identity for the party; IST, Pathfinder Society, Camarilla, Stargate Command…you get the idea.

I have a few concerns:
Where were you!?: Say a player can’t make it. Where’s his character when the goblins attack town killing dozens? Do I require characters to have an “out of town” and/or “in town but busy” excuse on their sheet? What are good ways to handle this?
Story Cohesion: I still play to tell a larger story than just a series of one shots, but I’ll shift to a more episodic strategy. How best to tackle people who weren't around for last installment? If you weren't part of the group that won the trust of the Ent-king, do we just handwave your presence at the sacred hidden grove? Do we transfer that loyalty to the patron? Similar questions apply to episodes where vital information is uncovered. If we expect the PC’s to remember that the Space Pirate always bets on red, but the guy making the decision was missing that day… Perhaps an advantage similar to Common Sense, maybe Party Tales, that allow players to “have filled someone in on the story over the campfire”? Handwave?
Risk Planning: Most of the parties I've run eventually wind up with each player having a niche, and I can judge difficulty based on their capabilities. This lets me build adventures that push the PC’s pretty hard, heightening the sense of risk, without actually killing them all. A death trap can be impressive and add a lot to a story, but have a low lethality if the right skills are present, but TPK if not. How can I best handle this not knowing the characters in the session?

If anyone has experience in this sort of play, or ideas for making it work, I’d really like to hear them.

While a patron organization is nice fig leaf, I would submit that this is the player's job, not yours. It their duty to create characters who plausibly work together, not your job to keep shoehorning them together. I see this as an extension of that problem; PCs need to be basically ok with the fact that their "fellow" PCs are unavailable often, yet choose to work with their "friends" whenever that's an option. So all YOU need to do is communicate this quickly, clearly and explicitly during character creation.

Transferable loyalty (the Ent-King question) is essentially a setting question. Reliance on this sort of players, in my opinion, constrains your settings somewhat, but aside from modern realistic espionage/military stuff, you still have most options open. Feudal setting? Any vassal of my liege is welcome here. Modern Cabal? He displayed the right runes to the Tyler so he's in. In remembering the clues about the Space Pirate, I'd probably demand an xp/cp each time it came up as a scene edit rather than allowing a "10 points up front to do this as often as you like" discount package, but that's a matter of taste.

Risk Planning/Death Traps is an unavoidable pickle, I'm afraid. I run a weekly at the FLGS where the basic deal is I take anyone who sits down in exchange for free and nearly-free stuff, and this means that sometimes I kill people accidentally. Rather than try to correct on the front end (calibrate threat precisely for an unknown group of characters), I correct on the back end (Death is a recoverable condition for steep price that the characters can probably meet if they care to; the debate on whether or not to bring a recently dead companion back is always entertaining).

[Gedrin]

Varyon: I have a collection of settings; fantasy, sci-fi and supers, but I don't think the VR idea fits well for what my players enjoy. However, I've seen some of .hack, and it might be a worthwhile thing to see how it's handled there as a source of inspiration.

whswhs: I'm expecting to run monthly, but I'm looking for ways to mitigate the problems when they pop up. You mention "monthly sessions of each of my campaigns". Does this mean you have more than one session a month? There are some appealing things in that for me, variety, venue, frequency. How do/would you handle inconsistency in your player base?

patchwork: I like the idea of sacrificing an XP to gain prior session knowledge. Regarding situations where a specific skill set is lacking, it occurs to me that better intel would go a long way toward mitigating this sort of thing. I wouldn't have to come up with a way around a problem. If the PC's are forewarned, I can count on them to be forearmed.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Gedrin

whswhs: I'm expecting to run monthly, but I'm looking for ways to mitigate the problems when they pop up. You mention "monthly sessions of each of my campaigns". Does this mean you have more than one session a month? There are some appealing things in that for me, variety, venue, frequency. How do/would you handle inconsistency in your player base?

A few months ago, I put together a list of possible campaigns, and asked each of the possible players to rate them. (I allow players to assign a total of 2N points among N campaigns, with each campaign getting from 0 to 2N points; ranking them in order or rating each of them from 0 to 5 could also work.)

I picked out campaigns that were liked by a substantial number of players, and that had fairly clear differentiation on which players liked each one, rather than a lot of overlap. Then I assigned players to each one. No one is playing in both, so no one is playing more than once a month. One campaign will have six players, the other five.

Now I'm doing the setup work. I'll start running next year.

Note that this assumes that you have roughly twice as many players as you want to GM for, and don't mind having two partial groups—and that your players don't mind. That's not for every group, I think.

Bill Stoddard

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Gedrin

Varyon: I have a collection of settings; fantasy, sci-fi and supers, but I don't think the VR idea fits well for what my players enjoy. However, I've seen some of .hack, and it might be a worthwhile thing to see how it's handled there as a source of inspiration.

Fair enough. A variation of the concept is the Dreamworld, where the characters' minds go into another world when they sleep. Characters may simply be enhanced versions of themselves, or they might become entirely new people (possibly with their own personalities, memories, goals, etc) in the Dreamworld. When a character is missing, it simply means he/she woke up. The Dreamworld is very much a real world (although the characters might not realize this at first) and events there may have serious ramifications in the material world (an easy one is to have the Big Bad of Dreamworld trying to cross over and take control), making actions have real consequences.

An advantage of VR/Dreamworlds is that they can be literally any genre. A disadvantage is that, try as you might, players may still think of it as "All Just a Dream" and have issues taking things seriously.