Any thoughts?
Originally shared by Vincent Quigley
I know that by design they are not made for that but has anyone tried to do an open table/revolving cast type game with PbtA/Apocalypse engine games?
What would need to be changed to do so? Which one would be the easiest to hack/modify to do so?
As a player, would it bother you playing in a game like that?
I probably would not want to play in this style of game. I prefer games with a set and steady cast so that stories and character development progress with everyone present.
If you were going to do a rotating cast though, I think you’d need to make sure all the characters begin and end each session at a home base. Otherwise you have to deal with characters appearing and disappearing for no reason in the middle of an adventure as players show up or not.
My Dungeon World one shots have frequently built on one another, which each session pulling elements from the previous. As long as you’re treating it as an episodic adventure (a la many classic pulp serials) rather than a set campaign, there’s no real harm. You just need to to leave lots of blanks on the map.
I don’t think it’s more difficult than with other games. In some ways simpler even, as there isn’t a notion of “We need a Wizard!”.
You might something similar to the intro questions / bonds on the playbooks that you can hand out. So no matter what configuration of characters you have, there will be bonds.
Nathan Paoletta ‘s World Wide Wrestling almost handles that already. And by design, AW collapses in to function with as few as one GM and two players, and I’ve run games for ten players who are not all able to be there at the same time, so six players per session.
Chris Stone-Bush(null) That’s part of the whole point of “gigs” and love letters: characters may have totally legit reasons to just not be around for a couple sessions. Just write a love letter for when they get back that deals with what they missed or what they did.
Joseph F. Russo Blanks in the map is always a good plan.
You don’t have to come home at the end of each session. It’s quite ok, as I understand AW, to leave things a bit wooly and when you start the next session the MC hands you a love letter explaining what happened in between then and now.
All the games I GM are like that, because life. Just say something that gives a semi plausible reason why. You are not writing a movie script that needs to make sense to an audience.
“Where’s Pete?” “Dunno. But half the camp got diarrhoea after last night’s seafood paella.”
“So who’s this dude?” “You know Johnny! He is your second cousin twice removed from way east. His mother wants you to show him the ropes.” At the end of the session Johnny (played by a visitor) conveniently dies a spectacular death or just walks off back to mommy.
Bottom line: Don’t take yourself or your campaign too seriously, and having people coming and going is not a problem.
(Moditorial note of appreciation for Chris Stone-Bush for firmly basing his response in “that’s not my thing, but good on you if it’s yours” territory!)
I wonder if my preference for having everyone at the table (regardless of game system) has more to do with the fact that gaming is how I socialize than anything to do with the actual game. Or perhaps it’s because the games I play in were not set up as “revolving cast” style games; I expect to see these main characters every episode.
Regardless, I too do not think a revolving cast of characters would be more difficult to do in PbtA than in any other game.
Since I have been in a scifi kick ( binge watching the Expanse) I might try to run Uncharted Worlds like that with all the characters being major players (pub intended) in a belter/”shithole at the end of the galaxy” spacestation.
Probably tangental, but this raised an interesting thought for me. You could use PbtA to design a game specifically for this purpose. Write the moves to focus on the pacing of the story in order to keep your session plots neat, and the playbooks are shared assets. Each one describes a role, not a character. Such as comic relief. So different players can make interesting shared decisions on how to advance the roles place in the story.
This is the Dungeon World setting I’ve been playing with. It’s designed for open-table/West Marches style.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwbHes6iNuGrWk1pbm5GNEE5VnM
I’ve been doing something like this for Dungeon World, doing fairly episodic sessions. (The Archmage assigns you to investigate another town! Some of your friends will stay behind at the last place to make sure everything there is safe before they catch up…) The only thing that feels weird is managing bonds with that many players, so I’m considering switching to flags: walkingmind.evilhat.com – From Bonds to Flags
Monster of the Week works especially well for this kind of thing too, given that it’s written to be pretty episodic.