Split the party.
oculusverit:
First of all, an apology to all. My name is Kinch, hello everyone and thanks for your replies!
Moreno was right in the fact that I seem to have misrepresented myself as the "railroading" type of GM who wishes the story to go his way and no one else's. I try not to railroad when I GM, though, and that's definitely why I am very open to GM-"light" games where a lot of the story is character and/or player driven. My principal goals are as follows: for there to be a cohesive storyline that at times surprises players, and that they feel that there is a lot of player and character control over the storyline. My goals in regards to this thread are to add a particular type of player experience to the mix by starting with a group of characters that support each other, and then the party splitting based on one or more of three possible reasons:
a) Character decisions
b) Player desire
c) GM design (only for short term splits, rather than long term)
Does that mean that I want one game that provides means for all those reasons? It would be nice, but even a game that allows just a) or just b) would be a great experience.
I'm slightly familiar with Polaris, but haven't read it. All I know is that it does have different players playing antagonists and allies to the "protagonist" with the protagonist rotating, but don't know how it mechanically does that. Is it something that could be adapted to what I'm talking about? I am interested in exploring mechanically mandated party splits as well, so thanks, Aetius.
As for the mechanic in Ars Magica, I was unfamiliar with it. Sounds like it could be worth reading.
What sorts of games are you referring to by "games where the characters aren't in any party" that you're describing with your "frame aggressively" statement, Moreno? I'd like to hear more about that as well.
--Kinch
oculusverit:
Oh, by the way, I also wanted to define "the party" for this thread's purposes as any group of characters that share common goals and/or best interests. Usually that means they meet to discover they have these goals and best interests and thus pursue them together, but by defining it this way they can choose at some point to split up in order to best achieve or pursue them.
--Kinch
Moreno R.:
Hi Kinch!
With the specifications you added in your last posts, I think that your problem is at least partially solvable.
First, about Polaris: Ezio was talking about a value called "zeal" in the Polaris character's sheet, that goes down when the character get increases in experience and increase his abilities. When "zeal" goes to zero, it become "Weariness" and start increasing again. When Weariness goes to the original value of Zeal, the character (who is a knight of a sacred order of defenders of their people) betray his order. (it's more complex than this, but this should give you the general idea). This is because Polaris is about tragedy, and characters are expected to end only in two manners: betray their ideals, or die heroically BEFORE their weariness goes to that point.
So, Ezio was talking about having some point during a game where, by design, the party HAS to split. I was saying that from your initial message this wasn't was you were searching for, and I think that your following post confirmed this, right?
There is another sort of technique that permit the GM to split a party using Force that it's not railroading: it's when the rules of the game assign a cost, paid in some sort of game currency, to do so, so the GM can't do it at will and have to "pay" for the privilege. For example, a game could give the GM the possibility to change a "dial" of a character from "in group" to "alone".
But all this is moot: from what you say, you simply want the player to be able to split the "party" when the story conditions make it the best choice (or simply if they want to) without having half of the group sit apart waiting for a lot of time their turn to play, right? It's not so much "how can I split the party" as "how can the party split without ruining the game to the players", if I did understand correctly your problem.
The oldest solution I know is the "Troupe Play" from Ars Magica. It's based on a lot of assumption specific of that game: the PC are not "adventurers" but they are powerful mages, with a fixed base (a castle, fortress, hidden cave, mystical forest... it can be really a lot of thing, but in any case it host not only the Mages, but A LOT of servants, men-at-arms, specialist (spies, torturers, physician, etc.), guests, etc.). So it's not so much a way to "split the party", as a way to have rich and complex stories involving really a lot of minor characters, with the players always (or almost always) involved in every scene
What is the problem with troupe play? Well, first that it depends on a kind of setting that give a lot of people "from the same side" to play in almost every scene (so, Mages who never go outside without a group of men-at-arms to protect them, for example), but the biggest problem is that in Ars Magica is proposed as a "way to play if you want" without any systemic help.
So, it works very well.... if all the players want to play like that because they like to play a lot of minor characters! And I really mean "ALL".
When I played Ars Magica, most of the players enjoyed it very much. If I would have done a survey, it would have been probably the game with the better votes in years in my game group. But I had two persons (in a group of 7) who simply didn't see any sense or reason in playing "not their characters", so they simply played always the same character, in every scene, and when they couldn't they simply didn't engage with the game. And this caused enough friction (having two player playing their mage in every scene meant than the other players could almost never play theirs) to stop the game.
If you want to try, you can download the 4th edition of Ars Magica for free following the links on this page. It's not by far the best edition (the best in my opinion is the 2th, followed closely by the current one, the 5th. Almost everyone agrees that the 3rd was terrible, but the 4th it's not so bad... until you try to fight without using magic..) but it should give you an idea of the setting and kind of game without having to spend money.
The second solution I talked about is, in my opinion, much more applicable in general, doesn't require some specific kind of setting or characters, doesn't require in general to play more than one character (but it's possible if you want) and in my experience works very well. The biggest problem in its use is that is something that the GM has to learn to do, it's an acquired skill, and no "traditional" game that I know of teach it: Aggressive scene framing.
To put it simply, its the skill of framing scenes very fast, very quickly (but still giving enough information about what the character see and hear, and smell, and touch, etc.) jumping from a player character to another so fast that you can easily play with 2, 3 or even more groups of PC in different situations at the same time.
Obviously, you need a game system that allow you to do this (if a single fight take 30 minutes to resolve, your framing will never be fast, the scene will drag for at least 30 minutes, and you risk having the other players bored to sleep waiting for their turn). Some game systems allow the players not in the scene the chance to interact in some way, with some currency of their own (for example, in the game Primetime Adventures, the players can spend a currency called "fan mail" to help or hinder the character of other players, and to win the chance to narrate themselves what happen to that character...) or use some other way to keep the other players interested.
I would like at this point to direct you to some article or free game that explain this method better than I did, but i have not the links at this time... I will post some link in the next post if you are interested, but if anybody has the link to some good article about these matters, it could be very useful.
Marshall Burns:
Hi Kinch!
I know of some techniques that might help.
Your central problem is one of screen time, yes? Like, players who aren't in the scene aren't doing anything. This leads to them feeling like they don't even need to *be* there, or, indeed, even pay attention. Which is almost certainly universally undesirable.
Beyond the suggestion already provided regarding having players whose PCs aren't present in the scene play NPCs, here's something other things to consider:
Ok, you've got a PC in his own scene without other PCs. What you do is you play it like normal, up until you reach the point where it's time to roll dice (or, y'know, use whatever resolution mechanic you've got going on). When that happens, STOP. Freeze frame, cut away to the next PC's scene, before you even get it hammered out what the guy's gonna try to do, what stats are being rolled, all that jazz. Then, with the next guy, do the same thing: play up until the conflict point, freeze frame, cut away. Do this until you've covered all the players.
Now, get each player's course of action for their PC and their opposition hammered out, in turn. Then have everybody roll their dice at once.
What's going on here is that the players' interest is better held because, a.) they don't have to wait long for their turn, and b.) while they're waiting they get to think about what their guy is about to do in response to his personal cliffhanger. Plus, c.) they can always weigh in on each other's problems, if that's germane to your game.
To my knowledge, this technique was first written about by Ron Edwards in Sex & Sorcery (although I, and probably plenty of other folks, developed it independently before encountering Sorcerer or Ron). I think he's since coined a cool name for it: flashpoint.
The next two techniques are as old as fiction, but not bleedingly obvious. The terms for them were, again, coined by Ron in Sex & Sorcery.
The Cross: this is where you take effects and consequences from one character's emerging plot and introduce them into other characters' scenes. For instance, the fire that Bob inadvertently started spreads to threaten something of import to Steve; the guy who got his ass kicked by Steve shows up at Lucy's door, seeking aid and succor; the messenger that Lucy sent is waylaid on the road by bandits just as Bob rides up by coincidence. Or, Merry and Pippin manipulate the Ents into laying siege to Isengard, which prevents all the folks at Helm's Deep from being inevitably wiped out.
What this does is incentivize the players to pay attention to each other's scenes, because the stuff that happens might become directly relevant to their own characters. (Plus it makes the story interesting and exciting in a Dickensian kind of way.)
The Weave: this is where you frame scenes and conflicts such that PCs directly cross paths. This could be a chance for them to band together momentarily, or it could pit them at cross purposes, or it could just be a chance for a crucial exchange of information or resources; whatever. This is a bigger deal in games like Sorcerer where the default is that the PCs aren't a party of any sort, but it's still a useable technique outside of that framework. To return to Tolkien as an example, Gandalf constantly weaves in and out of the other characters' paths.
These three techniques are REALLY powerful when you use them in synergy. I mean, which is more engaging: the way that Helm's Deep is narrated from start to finish and then the siege of Isengard is narrated in flashback as in the novel, or the way that the two conflicts start, get developed, and resolve concurrently as in the film? That latter is flashpoint + cross.
Does any of this help?
-Marshall
Jarrodimus:
As a player I have mixed feelings about playing one of the DM's NPCs. I don't have the same emotional attachment to it as I do my own character, so I'm not inclined to play them as well as I would my own. Plus that sort of thing can, at times, require that the DM tell you what to say or do. Which further lessens my interest in playing an NPC. The flipside to that is that the rest of the party leaves the room and turns on the Xbox, starts surfing youtube, etc. Which is also annoying since
As a DM I like to keep the party together for the sake of simplicity. When I do split them up, I prefer to have the inactive players leave the room because I don't want them to know what's happening, because they have a tendency to metagame. Like "oh, John's getting beat up? Well my character bursts into the room to save him!" That's an exaggeration, but you get the point. I think the key to splitting up the party is to keep it short so the other players don't get bored.
Oh, and this is sort of related: at one point my D&D 3.5 group had discussed splitting up the party that had been running for ~12 levels. The idea was to give the DM a break, so two of us were going to take over and DM a side adventure for each half of the group. The people who weren't part of the group that was running would make characters that would somehow get involved with whatever sort of quest they were doing. Then at the end of both of our sessions, the two groups would meet together and from then on, each player would have two characters to choose from for the main campaign. We never followed through with it, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea.
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