Getting Busy Adults Together to Play Games

[Joshua Randall]

D&D could easily adapt the Judge Dredd style of play noted above. We already have "scaling the adventure" sidebars for parties of different levels -- but what we really need are "scaling the encounter" notes for parties of different sizes (i.e., number of characters).

For example, if the party has 4 PCs, they face 6 kobolds. But maybe with only 2 PCs, they face only 4 kobolds. And maybe with 7 PCs, they face 12 kobolds.

Obviously you would need to do some number crunching up front to balance the encounters for parties of various sizes, but the back end benefit would be that you could run the same adventure regardless of how many players show up.

It would also be good to have a plausible in-game reason why PCs come and go frequently. An urban campaign would work well (again, borrowing the Judge Dredd idea), as would a planar campaign. Your standard wilderness/dungeon campaign would be a bit tougher to justify, but as long as the players are willing to suspend their disbelief, I think a clever DM could hand-wave the explanations.

For example,

DM: Last time, Tordek, Mialee, Jozan, and Lidda had just defeated the orc chieftain and were ready to explore the secret passageway behind his throne.

[Today there are only 2 players.]

DM: Jozan and Lidda [whose players are not there] decide to wait in the throneroom to make sure no wandering orc patrols suprise the party, while Tordek and Mialee [whose players are there] press onwards.

 

[scourger]

For me, one of the biggest hurdles is that the D&D game almost presumes that there are four players playing the four iconic archetype classes. To make a d20 game work, you have to get away from classes that are restrictive as to combat/magic/skill abilities. But then you take away the niches that classes represent and that players love.

I considered a Viking D&D d20 game in which all the PCs were gestalt characters with one of the gestalt classes being barbarian. That way, a gestalt barbarian/cleric and a barbarian/rogue have a reasonable chance to have fighting (especially melee); spells (particularly healing); and (trapfinding) skills covered. Adding more gestalt barbarian/whatever PCs just strengthens the core group of two PCs. The model seems to fit the group I have at the moment, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.