Many authors make fights work

Nov 25, 2010 15:07

Now that I'm back in Australia, it's of course time to get another D&D session organised. Which, as always, is proving tricky to orchestrate, as various players jet off to do various work/family/holiday things that all seem to happen on different Sunday afternoons. This is okay, though, as we're moving into the 'open' stage of the campaign, where the focus is on player-generated events and I'm prepared to run for whoever manages to show up and work on their own storylines on a given afternoon.

However, a new thought occurs.

I was having a beer with two of the players from our recent Dark Sun Encounters game - good, smart blokes I'd like to do more gaming with. They're both interested in Exile Empire, but I don't want to run a game with more than five players. However, given the mix of schedules, the chances are good that even with seven players, only five (or less) could show up for any particular session. That's got potential, and so I asked the guys to have a look at the campaign info and session writeups on Obsidian Portal and have a think about it.

More interesting than more players, though, is where I think this could reshape the game. It's tempting to think of a RPG campaign as a novel, or at least a TV series, that focuses on a specific group of characters. But with a large group, it might be better (and certainly easier) to move to an 'anthology' framework, where the campaign is structured as a set of short storylines that may or may not be connected, with a mutable group of central characters that come and go as the spotlight moves. This is more the Thieves' World model (or the Marvel Team-Up model, if you prefer), and it's one that can work, so long as a) characters have coherent personal storylines that can be explored, b) can find reasons for working with other characters on those storylines, and c) can, in turn, suspect their storylines to get involved with someone else's.

This is not the way I had thought about the game to this point, and I am a fan of long, coherent story arcs over short, self-contained adventures/delves. But I'm finding more and more things to like about the approach, both for gameplay and for organisation.

Must think more about this. And I'm interested in hearing from anyone who's done something similar, whether deliberately or just because they had more players than chairs at the table.

exile empire, nerdier than thou

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