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FASA Games, Inc. • Handling large groups with iffy attendance - Page 2
Page 2 of 2

Re: Handling large groups with iffy attendance

Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2016 8:30 am
by Slimcreeper

Re: Handling large groups with iffy attendance

Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2016 7:38 pm
by The Undying
Kinda off on a tangent - not that that's a bad thing, per se.

Non-Adepts with half-magic could be an interesting concept for an entire campaign, but I'm personally not sure that they could be used as player characters in the same sessions with Adept player characters. The power level between the two is just too significant. Might make for an interesting way to introduce people to the ED universe in a super low intensity fashion - something along the lines of half-magic capable villagers repelling some scorchers, enlist the aide of a small band of travelling NPC Adepts to help push the encroaching tribe back, and let the Adepts notice the potential of the players, maybe patron them with some of their friends for training to become Adepts.

Other than that, though, if a GM is trying to speed up game start for an open table, seems like a good idea would just be to have a nice assortment of pre-gens and then, if a player wants to stick around, help them roll up their own character and transfer over any accumulated legend points and items.

Re: Handling large groups with iffy attendance

Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2016 7:51 pm
by The Undying
More thoughts on the attendance thing:

There are enough people in my core group that we'd LIKELY have what amounts to an ED holy trinity (caster, tank, face). However, there's always a risk that we DON'T and one of the trinity ends up with the 80%-ers or, Passions forbid, the Strangler. In the latter case, I could see how a planned obstacle (social, physical, or what have you) could be extremely difficult if that trinity member isn't that.

For those that have had players with intermittent attendance, how did you end up tackling this? Let the player play what the wanted and just find a way to make it work? Help nudge the player towards a more utility Discipline so they have far more opportunities to contribute when present versus either being super impact or completely unnecessary (e.g., Warrior in a combat session versus a social session)?

Re: Handling large groups with iffy attendance

Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2016 10:19 pm
by Telarus_KSC
The Social side of the game has much "flatter" mechanical growth than magic and combat (which scale up steeply), so everyone there should be able to get into the social side of wheeling-and-dealing in Barsaive. The best advice I've ever gotten for ED was from my first ED GM: Give players full LP reward for "Defeating" an obstacle/'enemy' via social means. If you get as much LP for cutting through the Theran Governer's 10 elite guards before kidnapping him as you would for getting them all drunk on spiked-ale so they all are unconscious and miss their shift and you slip in during the confusion, then players begin to really think outside the box.

Re: Handling large groups with iffy attendance

Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2016 7:28 am
by The Undying
I think one of the blogs on the main site covers a recommended process for fleshing out an original adventure. As part of the post, it covers the idea of obstacles as things to be overcome rather than specifically encounters to be beaten in a specific way (e.g., talking your way past a combat).

More off topic again, but a chief complaint I've had in games I've played historically is that social stuff is often allowed to be executed by the player versus the character. Kind of the age old "charisma is the dump stat" thing. So you end up with people creating people with miserable charisma steps, no interaction skills, and the only "penalty" is the miserable social defense while the GM allows the player to be socially graceful despite their totally socially inept character. I'm all for player agency - very much in line with my other current post about enchanting - but my opening on social interaction is to force rolls with difficulty modifiers based on player description of their approach. A silver-tongued player pouring all their LP into combat talents should not get a pass with their garbage characters social scores, and a socially inept player that wants to play a silver tongued rogue should be appropriately rewarded for the investment.

But my point about the trinity stuff is still standing. If you expect someone to have access to astral sight or tracking skills as a runner up, and those characters end up absent, you can get boned fast. Maybe you set the obstacle up to give one of the trinity a chance to shine while being difficult to solve but solvable otherwise.

Re: Handling large groups with iffy attendance

Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2016 2:56 pm
by cz1234
My two cents on expecting someone to have access to astral sight or tracking.

First there should never be any aspect of the adventure that relies on a single roll of a single skill for progress. In my experience this can fail for one of two reasons. First your players could be rolling 20s and 30s all night and then they get to that critical roll and get a 3. Now what? Second you think it is an obvious place to use a particular talent and yet the player just doesn't pick up on it. For new adepts (or new to that talent) you can nudge by mentioning your character realizing something that makes the talent applicable but that feels kind of crappy from a GM and player perspective IMO.

Second these talents can flesh things out or make things easier. For example in Infected (spoiler ahead if you haven't been to Hanto) the dragon statue looks pretty special without any kind of astral sight/sense but succeeding on that roll really drives it home. Even without it you should be able to make it pretty obvious there is something special about it.

Tracking might make finding someone in a city easier but without it maybe social skills come in to play. And if all else fails go off script. Maybe while the PCs drink away their sorrows their target walks in. Now it is chase and not tracking. Or maybe they just fail to find that person, unless it is critical maybe it just makes life harder later or leaves the PCs a bit confused about exactly what happened when it all wraps up. Players will fill in the blanks, sometimes what they think was happening is better than what was actually happening and since they never saw what was happening maybe this new guess was correct. Now the Player/PC hunch was correct and that opens up a new avenue of events.