Hey again everyone,
I’m here with a new question in regards to MC’ing The Sprawl. My question I believe is simple so maybe you can help me.
Do you ever allow multiple missions to be happening simultaneously?
To give context my players are action centric and four of the six players are owned by various corporations. The other two are hunted (thankfully).
The clients that give the jobs remain anonymous but I will occasionally have character hesitate to call in the others or “I don’t know why I would call someone else for this job”
At a moment like that would you allow the player to operate independently and offer a more group centric mission to another player or should I encourage that player to find a reason to seek out the others.
the four that are owned often end up at ends with each other over directives or affiliations. This derails from the flow of actions but has also lead to interesting twist (one player executing the individuals the team was escorting)
Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.
I’m sure you could do this (I’ve certainly run games where some players have sub-missions within the main job), but if someone says “I don’t know why I would call someone else for this job”, my first thought is that this a warning light for a meta game problem.
I’d be thinking and asking:
Are all the players on board with what the game is about?
Have all the players made characters that are compatible with the game as you’ve all set it up?
Sometimes this might be a problem of mission that seems to narrow and simple. E.g. Asking an infiltrator to steal a thing. You can head this off by giving missions to the characters who are more obviously organizers (starting with soldiers and fixers).
But then it comes back to the meta level: the player knows how the game works, that you are all sitting around a table to play this game, this mission, that you have given them this mission to share with the group. So what is going on that makes them want to break that social contract?
(In other words, don’t let “it’s what my character would do” mask group disfunction.)
I would give the four side objectives from their corp handlers regardless of what mission they take. Also operating solo should be pretty risky. If they really want to do solo, you can use the conduct operation move in the mission chapters to keep things brief.
They should have a little history of working together. So maybe take some time doing vignettes figuring out how they feel about each other. What is the danger hanging above their heads?
You can also always talk to your players about what kind of game they want to play. Are they interested in heavy pvp and paranoia? Do they understand it can mean a lot of ticking clocks and stalled out missions? Get their opinion of how they’d like to move forward.
If everyone is okay with the character not sharing the mission, one approach (and this comes under the PvP questions Aaron Berger raised) would be to have another employer contact the rest of the group to complete the same job (and using the same mission clocks) or have an employer contact the tests of the group to defend the target against the lone PC.
In other words, these would be multiple goals within the same mission structure. Otherwise I would personally find that running two separate but interwoven games simultaneous wouldn’t really deliver the best experience to either game. If they split focus, I would focus up to give the whole thing more coherence.