DISCUSSION: How long is it reasonable to hold the spotlight?

[Fauchard1520]

We all know that splitting the party is bad. But by the same token, allowing a player to have a "spotlight moment" can be good. These include backstory scenes, solo stealth missions, and dramatic confrontations between a small number of party members. These can be tense and exciting encounters, and some of the most meaningful of individual PCs.

I think that the problems tend to come up, however, when these scenes drag on. If you force half the party to sit by and take on an audience role for hours at a time, you're no longer GMing for the full table.

So for GMs that do like to give dramatic moments for individuals: How do you do it well? What's the longest you're willing to linger on an individual character while the rest of the party looks on? And for the players out there: When is it good form to be a good audience, and when does that expectation become unreasonable?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

 

[Blue]

I'm confused by the concept that giving someone spotlight means everyone else is audience. The player characters are very rarely audience - at worst they are supporting characters.

 

[Umbran]

I'm confused by the concept that giving someone spotlight means everyone else is audience. The player characters are very rarely audience - at worst they are supporting characters.

That can depend a bit. In a combat scene, you are generally correct - if one person does some stunningly awesome thing in the fight, the rest are still helping.

However, if the scene is some hefty role-play between a character and the the BBEG who is also the PC's stepfather... it is entirely likely that the party is sitting on the sidelines while the role play plays out.

I don't think we can set a plain clock time limit on it - it'll vary a great deal from one group to another, and even one scene to another.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm lucky to be the most spotlight hungry person at the table when I'm a player, and being a DM who sometimes has very prominent NPCs has trained me to be very, very, aware of how much spotlight I've been taking compared to anyone else. I've had good and bad outcomes running so-called DMPCs. Usually because I'm not going to just have a person who is integral to the life of someone else, and a trusted and valuable member of their combat team, fade into the background for obviously forced reasons, and, well, we don't stop playing campaigns when a DM stops running them, in my group. Another DM just picks them up.

All that said, it depends. Timing it involves trying to plug subjectives into an equation and expect a coherent result. Unlikely.

Rather, I'd say that what you want here is a solid understanding of where the other PCs are, and to think about these scenes like a TV or movie. HOw long would a show-runner let this scene go on for, before cutting away to the other characters to see what they're doing?
And it needn't be a whole long thing with the other PCs, just check in ans ask what they're doing. Maybe keep a sort of "initiative order" to help you track when it's time to jump back to the other PCs, and ask each of them in order. Maybe each jump goes to one PC, or to a group of two or 3, and the party is split into 3 groups. Great, each times it's a PC's turn, we return to the scene that they're in.

That might mean spending 5 minutes talking about and rolling dice to resolve how they're stealing another PCs favorite camp blanket as a prank, or breifly discussing what the interesting book they're reading is about, or introducing something into the scene that will vex them but not endanger them, etc.

If you are running a deep simulation game, the above may be of no use to you, of course.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yeah, I'd tend to go the route of cut scene if the spotlight moment was running long. So long as the scene is good I don't want to stomp on it, but it can't drag on too long for the rest of the table either. So I'll take a dramatic moment and cut back to the other characters for a while.

 

[uzirath]

I ended up managing a party split three ways this weekend and rotated between each scene every 5-10 minutes, giving each person an opportunity to do something useful and then cutting to the next scene at an exciting moment.

 

[tommybahama]

So long as the scene is good I don't want to stomp on it

In books and film they often cut to a different scene at a cliff hanger moment to increase drama, not stomp on it. It would also give a player like me a chance to reflect on the scene and plan my reaction. So I'm in favor of the cut scene when my DM uses it.

 

[Imaculata]

I have a rule at my table that whenever the spotlight is on a particular player, all the other players are allowed to comment on what is happening, and offer advise. Their characters may not be present for the spotlight moment, but I encourage them to participate all the same.

However, I always keep an eye on the attention span of the other players. If I feel a scene is dragging on too long, I may suspend the action and switch to a different scene. I don't really have a set time duration for it.

 

[John Dallman]

I have a rule at my table that whenever the spotlight is on a particular player, all the other players are allowed to comment on what is happening, and offer advise. Their characters may not be present for the spotlight moment, but I encourage them to participate all the same.

This is a good scheme, and we follow it. I have a character in an occult WWII game who is a truly effective solo infiltrator, and can sometime be miles from the rest of the party, getting into places that they could never reach. Another player has an ally ghost who gets sent along with me, and the rest of the party are often staging distractions or otherwise contributing; we cut back and forth as makes sense. It helps that we're all in our fifties or sixties, and can be reasonably entertaining for the other players.

If I've had a long scene, I will then deliberately avoid the spotlight for a while.

 

[Umbran]

So, part of the question will be - how invested are other players in the story that they aren't personally involved in?

I played in a Star Wars (Saga Edition) some years back. One of the players had a Mandalorian character. However, they played it...laconic in the extreme. They didn't invite any of the other PCs into their Mandalorian-ness. Didn't discuss culture, or why they did the things they did, and engaged in pretty much no interpersonal bond-forming with other characters. They were supposedly, for their own inscrutable internal reasons, dedicated to the same goals as the other PCs, and so could generally be trusted with our physical welfare, but beyond that... no interpersonal engagement to speak of.

So, when Mandalorian stuff came up in game, it bored the crap out of the rest of us. We just didn't care, because it was their story, and their story alone - they'd allowed nobody in to care about it.

So, if someone hoards a plotline, focus on that plotline is likely to be less well tolerated than if they share it.