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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 7255148" data-attributes="member: 32659">Hi all, I am planning on my next game featuring a challenging (for me) social encounter, the dreaded ‘party goes to a party’ scenario. The players have been invited to attend a party at the Hawkwinter mansion in Waterdeep, in part to give the Waterdhavian Noble Arcane Rogue her allotted spotlight time. What I’d like to do is start a conversation about how people have successfully run this kind of group conversation or party scene, and then see if there is a good methodology that others have developed and which I can use. I mean specifically where there is numerous NPCs in a room, and you want the atmosphere of the players wandering around and talking to people to learn interesting background details and important plot foreshadowing. I’ve had very little success with this kind of scenario in the past; it always seemed to result just in me and the players staring at each other in confusion, them not knowing what to do, and me not knowing how to prompt them into fun situations. The players had a blank slate and couldn’t meaningfully interact with it, and because they were not doing anything I couldn’t easily improvise off of what they were doing.  To start the ball rolling, my most successful one was an introductory scene for the first council meeting in Rise of Tiamat, where I pretty much just wrote up a half-dozen scripted social events (Archmage disagrees with Elven King over whether to wait and see, Open Lord fields jealous questions from Neverwinter Ruler, etc) and then ran each little event when the players split up to interact with the different people. That seemed to work, in part because I had bits of paper on the table showing who the people were, and so the players could physically interact with them by moving their models near them. However, this method took a lot of work to write up, and didn’t last all that long at the table, so it’s a heavy investment of time to results. Has anyone else had significant success? If so, what’s your secret? J</blockquote>

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