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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 871524" data-attributes="member: 5328">I like those sessions too. The first time I tried one was for my Survivors campaign in second semester 1987, and that campaign is still one of my favourites, even though (and Herremann is going to smile at this) it was a collect-the-set quest to save the world. The only problem I find is that some of my players really resent having their freedom to introduce arbitrary characters trammelled. They will put up with being assigned a functional specialisation (sometimes). But they really bridle at being asked to discuss and agree what sort of personality types they will play for mutual support and contrast.And this is in spite of the fact that PCs really go off when each acts a a foil for the other. A series of young enthusiastic NPCs will never contrast a jaded cynical PC the way a young enthusiastic PC will. And contrariwise. Tony Purcell and I had a terrific time playing the naif but pugnacious young French nobleman Armand d'Alembert and his world-weary, brutally pragmatic English cousin the Earl of Rule. Mutual contrast made our characters far more vivid both to onlookers and to we who were playing them than our characters had ever been before, and certainly much more effective than characters are when several people are playing to the same stereotype and there isn't any contrast.The original Star Wars RPG from West End had an interesting rule that every PC had to have an agreed personal link to at least one other PC: to be his brother or her teacher or its former commanding officer in the Imperial Navy. The players could make up anything they liked (there weren't any tables or anything like that), but it had to be something that would give the characters a line of banter and would affect their decisions in adventures.I have run campaigns in which the PCs were just people who happened to be together at the beginning, and who were sucked along together, or were welded into a band of comrades by the early adventures of the campaign. But I find them too unreliable and too much work to GM, especially if my players are in a fractious mood. So I far more often ask my players to generate, for example, a the homicide squad of a police precinct, or the members of a small private detective agency, or a field investigating team of the Imperial Justice Department, or a half-file of the militia of the remote mountain city of Charn, or members of the agema of Darulan the Silent (episkopos of Skyra), or even members of the crew of a small Survey frigate, whose five-year mission....Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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