Writing adventures (and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately), I was struck by the odd gap between the player’s side and the GM’s material. What’s the first or second chapter in most RPGs? Character creation – how to make your player character. Your singular, lonely, self-contained player character. Then, on the GM’s side, individual characters are hardly mentioned. It’s always plural: “the party”, “the adventurers”, “the investigators”, “the PCs” and so on. The assumption in most rpgs is that the player characters are working together as a group, an ensemble cast, and that the GM should treat this group as the primary focus of the game.
Yet, if an rpg addresses group character creation at all, it’s usually as an afterthought. You make your player character, then try to jam it in to some structure that vaguely fits with the other player characters. Even games which provide an explicit structure for the player characters (SLA Industries’ “you’re all Ops” or Ars Magica’s “you’re all part of the same Covenant”) don’t always give enough guidance to the players.
Group structures also feed into why the player characters have interesting lives, and may be a mechanism for the GM to dispense plot hooks. A group structure may also describe the roles that must or might be filled by PCs.
It’s common for a game to mandate that individual player character have reasons to adventure and to chase plot hooks, but what hooks one player character might not hook another. Trail of Cthulhu, for example, gives a Drive to each player character; they’re things like In The Blood (one of your ancestors was involved with the Mythos, and you’re tainted), or Vengeance (a shoggoth ate your buddy) or Thirst for Knowledge (you hunger for forbidden secrets). Drives are great, but either you go through absurd contortions to fit everyone’s Drives in (‘yes, you’ve heard a rumour of a book of forbidden secrets…and it was written by Bob’s great-grandfather… and, er, Phil, your buddy muttered something about a book as he was being eaten’). Realistically, you can only tie one or two PCs’ Drives in to a given mystery, and then you’re left hoping that they drag the others along in the absence of an explicit group structure.
The Laundry has a great party structure. Why are the PCs together? They’re all working for the Laundry, and the Laundry’s a weird place which can fit almost any PC concept. (In my playtest game, we’ve got an ex-cop, an ex-soldier, a mathematician, a computer geek and a cat-burglar.) Why do they go on missions? Because it’s their job. Follow the plot hook or else. It’s not perfect though – there’s no requirement for the PCs to work well together, and there’s no guidance on what makes a good group. (In the case of the Laundry, these omissions are at least partly deliberate – we wanted to leave room for the players to argue, to screw up, and to have grotesque mismatches of character skill and mission, for those times when one lone computer geek is sent out to save the world.)
Existing models for group structure:
You All Meet In A Bar…: The default in a lot of games; there’s no guidance provided at all, but it’s vaguely assumed that, y’know, everyone will work together for some reason. No explicit structure, no plot hook dispenser, no roles. You can muddle through with this sort of setup, but what happens is that the group ends up settling on one of the other models in this list. Examples: Too many to count.
Party: You’re together to kill monsters and take their stuff. D&D’s the obvious source here. There’s a reason for the players to work together (dungeons are dangerous, you need help to survive) and there are class-based roles that are more or less clear (‘we need a fighter and a healer’). Examples: D&D
Team: You’re a group of professionals who go on missions. Mercenaries, shadowrunners and so forth. The characters work together because they have complementary skills, and the mission is the plot hook. For a team game to work, all the characters have to be able to contribute towards completing the mission, which means everyone has to be on the same page during character creation. Examples: Shadowrun, SLA Industries, Leverage
Members of an Organisation: You’re all members of the same espionage agency/corporation/secret mystic order/gentleman’s club, and this organisation does interesting adventure-related stuff. Ideally, the organisation is one that includes members from all sorts of backgrounds, so you can have a mix of character concepts. You’ve also got scope for NPC peers and superiors who are also part of the same organisation. Examples: Spirit of the Century, Kerberos Club, Wraith Recon
Crew: You’re all part of the crew of the same ship. The interesting thing here is that the ship is effectively a container for the player characters – the GM needs only to worry about bringing the ship into the game, and the characters are assumed to come along with it. Example: Traveller.
Circle of Friends: You all know and trust each other. When one is in trouble, all the others help out. Example: Call of Cthulhu
Chosen Ones: You’ve been brought together by a higher power. Examples: Nobilis, Legend of the Five Rings (using the standard magistrate approach)
Coterie: You are already exceptional in some way; you have banded together with other exceptional individuals. Your exceptional nature is both boon and curse, and plot hooks are likely related to this exceptionalism. Examples: Vampire
Common Goal: You share some common goal or task. I’m actually blanking on games where this is the dominant model – old-style Hunters Hunted, maybe?
Family Ties: You’re all related to each other, and blood is thicker than water. Plot hooks might threaten the family, as opposed to individual members. Amber and Nobilis are examples here; possibly Pendragon or L5R too.
Overlapping Goals: You’re all pursuing your own goals, but by working together you can help each other. In this model, each PC has a strong and distinct sphere of interest, and they may be opposing each other at times and aiding each other at other times. I guess Paranoia is one example of this; a lot of games shift to this set-up when the PCs have a lot of power and influence.
What other structures are there for getting the party together? And are there any games where the PCs are explicitly not working together? Are such games possible or desirable?
22/04/2010 at 3:56 pm Permalink
FATE games such as Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files heavily encourage character generation as a group activity, and tend to give a few examples of linking characters together mechanically.
As for games where the players are not working together, I can’t think of any systems that are designed that way, but I’ve come across scenarios from time to time.
The Gift is an interesting scenario (which I would like to play one day) where the characters are designed to have conflicting objectives and have to negotiate and compromise to find an outcome.
Final Flight is another good example. The players are working towards a common goal (or are they? Could there be a traitor among them?) but have their own reasons for getting there in different ways (it is amazing how entertaining it is to be trying to set a budget for EarthForce that will be popular with the electorate while also providing money to the areas that your character cares most about).
22/04/2010 at 4:43 pm Permalink
Hot War and Cold City. The party dynamic is an integral part of the rules. Not being the expert, I’ll refrain from going deeper into it (never got round to running or playing either past doing a couple of sessions of playtesting for Hot war).
22/04/2010 at 4:56 pm Permalink
Interestingly the new WFRP has party mechanics built into it a bit, during character creation the players choose what type of party they want to be that gives them a few advantages. In my current game the players spent a goodly chunk of time debating what kind of party dynamic they wanted.
Plus there’s the idea of party tension, a little meter the GM’s raises when everyone is just standing around bickering. It’s a quite simply way of keeping things flowing, if it gets too high the tension between the PC’s boils over and everyone suffers.
It’s not for everyone but I think the system is worth more than the casual, oh it’s a board game, that it currently seems to get.
22/04/2010 at 6:16 pm Permalink
(((And are there any games where the PCs are explicitly not working together? Are such games possible or desirable?)))
Wait, what? This from the man who last year wrote 400,000 words of PARANOIA?
22/04/2010 at 6:27 pm Permalink
@David: SotC’s chargen is… odd. I’ve played three campaigns of it, and the whole ’starring in each other’s books’ gimmick never really produced anything useful in play. Maybe if one of the Aspects you get from that phase had to reference another player…
Final Flight… heh, yeah. It’s a very odd game. I’ve another blog post related to High Programmers, and how Final Flight was a precursor to that design.
@Derek: Cold City is an excellent example of how a strong and clear party dynamic can define a game. Without the Trust and the common goal/conflicting secret agenda, and the US/UK/French/German/Russian national roles, it’s just another monster-hunter game.
@Simon: I really must read WHFRP, or force Fiki to run it.
@Allen: Ah, but in PARANOIA, the PCs are working together as a team – a dysfunctional and backstabbing team, but they’re still treated as a single unit. It’s not like half of them are playing Troubleshooters and the other half are playing Commie Mutant Traitor saboteurs (as opposed to everyone being a Troubleshooter AND a CMT saboteur, if you follow me.)
22/04/2010 at 9:08 pm Permalink
I was thinking of the mentions of having aspects that mention other players. They do tend to get mentioned a few times in each book.
Requiring an aspect to mention another player character sounds like a good house rule though.
Final Flight is also a very fun game. I’ve both played it and GMed it and found it enormously entertaining each time.
I’m going to have to buy High Programmers now, aren’t I? Does it stand alone or do I need Troubleshooters and/or Internal Security? (I have XP)
22/04/2010 at 10:02 pm Permalink
Hmm, I ought to add a box on this stuff to Albion.
It’s quite hard, in a more sandboxy setting where there are lots of things you could hook into and characters don’t have a predetermined role.
22/04/2010 at 11:55 pm Permalink
@David: High Programmers is stand-alone.
@Tim: Yeah, sandbox games are pretty much the antithesis of what I’m talking about here. All you can do there is appeal to the players directly, and ask them to play nice.
23/04/2010 at 12:02 pm Permalink
I have run several games with a variation of some of the above themes as a group dynamic. To be honest I have mostly favoured the organisation/government body approach in the recent past and ignored tortured ideas to force characters into a group.
Of late I had been toying with the idea of a variation on this theme with the players functioning as individual team leaders AND the team members. Let me explain:
The players create a troupe/team of players, (2, 4, 6 or however many) and an unnamed team leader (effectively themselves). The GM in the guise of boss/superior details the plot hook/intro to the players then they decide in a sort of management committee meeting which of their respective team members would seem to be the best suited to the assignment. The other advantage being that should an individual member die then another team member can be sent in to replace them.
I dunno, I’ve yet to test it.
24/04/2010 at 12:58 am Permalink
If you mean stronger than agnostic about whether the PCs are working together, the two that come to mind are In a Wicked Age and Legends of Alyria. In each, PCs take all “the good parts,” so you have at least some PvP in every scenario. Depending on how you think A Dirty World is meant to be played, it might qualify too.
You mentioned Amber as a family-ties game, but it’s also famously a game where some PCs might be at odds for a very long time. Trollbabe is a game where PCs can come together, but it can also be run in a way that they never cross each other’s paths. The text implies that PCs never crossing each other’s paths is the default mode of play.
I think the problem for targeting individual PCs in module-writing is that, unless you write it for pre-gens, you don’t know what material will be germane to any given PC, and even with pre-gens you can’t know what will zing any particular player.
24/04/2010 at 11:08 am Permalink
@Charles: The idea of split-level gaming is intriguing. I touch on it a bit in High Programmer, and I recall Robin Laws running a game where the players were simultaneously playing political leaders and spacegrunts. Plus, there’s the Ars Magica with its troupe-style play. Hmm. Maybe that’s a solution for adversarial play – you can kill off other player’s low-ranking goons, but not their high-ranking character. There’s potential there.
@Jim: In A Wicked Age… yes, that’s what I should have thought of. I suspect it gets away with it by making PCs very disposable; your characters drop in and out of the game and there’s no strong identification between his player and his PC (as opposed to say, D&D, where you’ve built your character up over twenty game sessions).
27/04/2010 at 10:42 am Permalink
The original Twilight: 2000 had a very, very strictly defined default setting – all player characters are members (or hangers-on) of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, positioned at a particular point near Kalisz in Poland, on a particular date when the game begins. Old-school, but an in media res start that certainly gets people working together.
I just quit on running a Twilight: 2013 campaign with very disparate characters and a corresponding lack of direction. The replacement campaign starts this week and goes with the old formula – strictly defined starting organisation, far from home with the overriding party goal being to get home. It’s the Common Goal style.
27/04/2010 at 1:04 pm Permalink
I think your impression about IAWA is only sort of true. I’ve observed the whole spectrum of character attachment in IAWA from one guy who never wanted to play a given character in more than one chapter to others of us who tended to repeat characters as often as possible. And structurally, two things are true:
1. Im IAWA, getting to bring your PC back in a later chapter is the chief reward the system gives you – it’s what players work toward. The design of the game really presupposes people will be attached enough to their characters to want to replay them; otherwise.
2. In practice, there are multiple ways to get your PC from last chapter into this one, and I’ve used them and seen others do so.
27/04/2010 at 11:09 pm Permalink
Primetime Adventures touches on the dynamic of the players as a group, in that “screen presence” encourages you to think about each person’s role in an individual episode relative to the roles of the other PCs.
Best Friends also features a more collaborative character generation, in that your character’s stats are derived from interaction with the rest of the group.
27/04/2010 at 11:40 pm Permalink
@Jim: Aye, I’m probably generalising too much from my own experience. I know that Vincent Baker is much more able to invest himself in a player character than I am in a short time. When I play something like Shock, I find it very hard to treat the character as anything other than a disposable playing piece because… it was made with such naked purpose. A PC in a more traditional game isn’t so focussed… or something.
*waves hands*
*realises he should just play IAWA before trying to respond coherently to discussions of IAWA*
28/04/2010 at 12:26 am Permalink
@mytholder: It’s funny. It seems to be true that *Vincent* loves Shock:, but I have no use for Shock: for the same reason you do, and IME characters in IAWA are nothing like characters in Shock: *because* they aren’t “purpose-built.” I mean, secretly, IAWA chargen is practically *Everway*, right? You’re given a handful of evocative word pictures instead of an a bunch of real pictures, and you pull out a figure that strikes you and make him or her your own.
That said: 1) I think that two years of improv training really has left me much readier to invest myself in a PC more quickly than I used to; 2) Not everyone in my play-group *liked* IAWA (and I’ve never played Shock:, only read the rules with a growing sense of deflation as I went); 3) Have you ever GMed Dogs? If so, how quickly and completely do you get into the townspeople you portray? I was amazed how truly, deeply and madly I loved my NPCs in that game, and they’re pretty much nothing but rough sketches until you open your mouth.