Astral Travel and Party division in a Fantasy Setting

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

One option I pondered was having her do Astral Travel, while the rest of the party has to defend against attacks. Which could make for an interesting siege situation which might be interesting some of the time, but it would get boring doing it over and over.

Flashback for me. See, I was in a boffer fantasy LARP for years, and one eventholder had a particular pattern: he'd arrange for one favored, small party to go off to do the climax of the day's quest. This would leave a couple dozen players left over. So one event the rest of us were defending a narrow bridge against a small horde of NPC "orcs."

After a half hour of this, we were getting worn down, and I had some serious suspicions: the bad guys could've broken through that last assault. Why hadn't they? Now as it happened, I was the leader of the defense, and I ordered the whole PC force to pull back to the encampment. Get off your feet, folks, get something to drink, cool off.

So when the next bad guy attack came, they charged at ... an empty bridge. And the NPCs crossed over, and milled about in confusion, gazing over at us taking it easy. I no doubt made some sardonic comment along the lines of "Gotcha."

And that's the rub. I really most sincerely do NOT want to be relegated to doing busywork, because the GM has nothing better to do with us, while the Cool Kids get to have the genuine excitement. As a one-off, sure, whatever. As a general thing, hell no.