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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8669247" data-attributes="member: 42582">For my part, I'm talking about not being on the same team: ie PCs who engage the fictional elements that the GM is presenting with different goals and concerns, and who are not making a coordinated effort to achieve some particular outcome. In play, this means that there is no adventure that all the PCs are taking part in. They're not collectively trying to solve a mystery, or explore an outpost, or find (or get rid of) an artefact, etc.A particularly strong case of this is PCs who are opposed to one another, but you don't have to go to the strongest instance to have the general phenomenon. The weakest case I can think of is where the PCs travel together (in my Classic Traveller game, they're the crew of a starship plus some hangers-on) but are pursuing different goals among themselves and with the NPCs they interact with.Whether or not PCs are in the same scenes is a different thing. If they're not, I personally think it's desirable to have consequences from one scene ramify into other scenes. I think this makes for more interesting play, both because (i) just like in a comic or TV show or whatever, it's fun to see the results of what happened then and there manifest here and now, and (ii) it allows players to at least indirectly respond to one another's play.There are different ways to set this sort of thing up; Apocalypse World has one account of how to do it. In my experience, it needs PCs with relatively clearly-articulated goals, and preferably also relationships to the immediate setting. These give the GM material to use in framing scenes that will provoke the players to respond. The fall-out from one scene gets used to build the next. As a GM, you look for ways to link together the elements that emerge from different PCs' contexts and consequences; if the players are proactive they might help with this too. Whether this leads to moments of cooperation, or moments of opposition (or both), is part of the fun of play.I don't think this has to be so at all.Just to give one example: if the PCs are a manager, a worker in the managed facility, and someone who rents a workshop next door to the facility, their paths might cross quite a bit - they're hanging out in the same place with the same people - without them being a team. This is roughly the AW model.[USER=467]@Reynard[/USER] gave a different example: three vigilantes each of whom patrols the same neighbourhood. We can easily imagine both (i) consequences from a scene involving one of them feeding into a scene involving another of them, plus (ii) framing scenes in which more than one of them is present, and part of what is at stake in the scene is whether they cooperate or conflict with one another.A different example again - which might be done using HeroWars Glorantha, or maybe Stonetop (? I only have a general sense of it) - would be a village where one PC is the head of the village, another is the weird oracle/shaman type, and a third is the trapper who lives in the surrounding woods but supplies furs to the villagers and also the occasional herb to the oracle.</blockquote>

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