Figures of Text

It always strikes me as odd that a lot of roleplaying games never take into account the fact that they’re going to be played by a group of people. You might be presented with a pile of rules for designing your character, but only given the loosest notes on how that character fits in with the other player characters. The old World of Darkness games were notorious for this, practically encouraging players to create characters that had absolutely no reason to associate with the rest of the group. If there’s one thing D&D got right from the start, it’s the notion of the party.

Of course, just saying ‘you all work together’ isn’t enough. Games should try to offer more to the players to actually work together in creating the campaign framework. Ars Magica blazed a trail here – you create your character, but then you work together to create your Covenant, the magical fortress where you all live. Nobilis, similarly, has the Chancel and Imperator created by the group as a whole. Spirit of the Century does it in a backdoor manner by having the player characters star in each other’s books; I did a stripped-down version of it in Traveller where you get skills for having explicit connections to the other characters (and if I had complete freedom when doing that book, I’d have made having a spaceship mandatory and included collaborative ship design rules).

I’ve come to refer to this style of play as ‘tribe’ play. The ‘tribe’, the collaboratively designed party/organisation/family/ship/whatever is the real star of the game. Player characters may come and go, but the main plot revolves around this single entity of which they are but smaller parts.

The single best rpg campaign I’ve run was a Legend of the Five Rings campaign where the player characters were all nobles whose lands bordered on the city of Ryoko Owari. Each of them has their own distinctive character and background, but they were united by their shared interest in the fortunes of the city. Having that shared element made all the plots much more involving. It wasn’t just an invading army of monsters, it was an invading army of monsters that threatened our city. It wasn’t investigating a criminal gang, it was a criminal gang stealing from our city.

I’ve been playing the Battlestar Galactica board game a lot lately, which is a good example of this sort of play. The Galactica and the RTFF are your tribe; you unite to fight the Cylons attackers, but bicker about the use of resources and try to work out who are the Cylon agents in the tribe. I’m also outlining the Paranoia: High Programmer book, which will use a variation on this style of play (you’ll all in charge of this section of Alpha Complex; you’ll need the help of the other players to deal with the problems, but you also want to eliminate them), which sparked the thoughts behind this entry. There are several advantages to this style of play.

Player buy-in: It instantly gives the players ownership of more than their own character, without necessarily ceding any of the GM’s power. Especially in the critical early sessions of the game, anything that makes the players care and work together is good.

Continuity: As the tribe is the ‘hero’ of the game, the story can survive player characters being killed and replaced, absent players, or new players joining in.

Collaborative decisions: All the players may have their own idea about where they want the tribe to go, but ultimately one viewpoint has to win out. I adore any situation where the player characters have to resolve questions between themselves.

Structured conflict: You can have player-vs-player disputes and intrigue within the tribe, but they’ll still pull together to fight an external foe.

In my ideas folder, I’ve got notes for half-a-dozen games under the Tribe heading, and I’m going to write one of them up here over the next few weeks.

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