This is more a blowing off steam thing, but I'd be interested in your comments, and in any similar stories you have.
Like many of you, my group of players are not evenly enthusiastic in the game. I've an 8 man group and while a couple are especially keen (almost daily MSN chats about D&D, regular contributions to our campaign wiki including our story hour-style "infodumps", copying out spells from books I buy to expand their electronic spellbooks, etc) but others aren't. Similarly, some players can be pretty much guaranteed to attend every session, whereas others are more likely to flake: work commitments being the big thing which forces some people to miss partyor all of a session.
Now, this has a sort of knock-on effect of making some players have more "spotlight time". The players who spend more time designing character backgrounds are easier to drop hitns for: and those who attend more simply build up bigger webs of connections. I will freely admit, for example, that my girlfriend is one player who tends to get a lot of such time: but that's mainly because, by living with me, she's almost always guaranteed to be at a session. ;-)
I decided I wanted to tilt this balance back to some of the quieter players, including one in paticular: he plays a Dwarf Wizard called Ogri. Ogri has short man syndrome out the wazoo, years of Dwarves picking on him because he became a wizard instead of a "real man" making him a loose cannon who drinks hard, blasts fireballs and pees at least once in a surprisingly large number of encounters. The player is one of the quieter ones who tends to arrives a little later to session than others because his work is further away: I've in the past not been sure about giving him much in the way of long term plots because it's been awkward to resolve them the next week if he's late, but I decided I had a cunning plan to fix him.
The Book Of Vile Darkness lists a drug called Terran Brandy: magical booze, made from dead fey, which causes Con damage but gives a temporary boost to caster level. Suffice to say, "Dwarf Wizard" and "magical but addictive drink" is a match made in heaven: and the party had just gained a Satyr cleric as well! The player could encounter the drink in a veiled way, and from there he will probably purchase and use it: and when the addictiion kicks in, he can either ignore it, sit out the pain (Dwarf saves to Poison, and all that) and get back on the road, or if he wants to RP it there's room for all kinds of fun: especially if later on his Satyr friend gets followed by the same people who sell him the drink....
So I finally have a good plotline for Ogri, and I can make him feel a bit more directly involved. Alas, no sooner do I formulate this than Ogri's player says he has to b ow out for the moment. Work just got a hell of a lot worse, and he can't promise to make any sessions for the moment: he's been temporarilly relocated from Scotland to Ireland (!) and then after the lack of managers in his business means he's forced to work a hell of a lot more late shifts. Fair enough: I wonder if he's partly chucking it because he isn't getting as much in the way of spotlight time, but he assures me he'd love to come back when he has the time.
Well, a few months later, he has the time, and though the party are in later stages of a dungeon crawl they find a way to slip him back into the group. He says he's with us for the long term, though he may still have to miss a session every few weeks when late shift work comes up. I vow to try and make him more involved this time, but momentum of other stuff the PCs have done in his absence takes priority: there's a dungeon to finish, and then a missing artifact to recover, and then a party member is finally arrested for a crime he committed.... It takes a few sessions to get the group back in town and relatively neutral. In this time Ogri behaves a little more violent than usual, tending to his spells with less and less provocation, but I take this as partly RPing personality changes and partly that the player may just be a bit bored from a few "talky" sessions (since I was counterbalancing for the rest of the party with the recent dungeon crawl) and wants to get t o the "good bit".
Last session, we're finally in a decent point to proceed. The group has a new arc that has them travelling by boat almost a thousand miles, and before they go a mage they owe a favour to (he identified an evil artifact for them without telling anyone else what it was) asks them to ship a crate of brandy to his friend in the same town. The Dwarf recognises the friends name as a classmate at University, but his ears prick up at the mention of magical booze. (And my other players start to laugh, and one comments thjat "some players are more predictable than others, eh, GQuail?) He is offered a snifter to test, he passes his addiction save (but I was going for the long term...) and he notes it's effect: the trap is laid.
And then, things go horrible. Before departing the group get into one last combat: but the combat is started by the group just as Ogri's secondary damage from the Terran Brandy kicks in. We RP this Con damage as being intense stomach pain, so he's sitting outside when they get into trouble inside the house. The combat is only one round, because it's a pretty brief and violent affair: a single mage holds them to a Mexican Standoff with a metamagiced firebal ready to slay their Wild Shaped and unconscious Druid, but the Barbarian manages to spring in from the side, takes the fireball himself, and the group drop the mage.
Ogri arrives after all this has finished: he spent the firs tturn making himself invisible and moving into the house, and by the time he moves in the mage is on the ground. The party heal up the mage, planning to interrogate her: but Ogri is all invsibiled up, tense, and is not about to leave without showing off his spells. The Satyr hears him in the room (her listen is stupidly high) and attempts to stop him from doing anything stupid: trying to catch the invisible mage, trying to use Silence to prevent spells from being cast, even moving herself in the way so he can't use spells like Lightning Bolt. But in the end he moves in, and beheads the mage.
The party go spare as the Wizard appears. Harsh words are exchanged, the barbarian grapples Ogri and the Satyr goes utterly spare that the women she was healing exploded in front of her. At least one party member storms out, and as the city watch arrive to sound of the carnage inside, they hand over OGri to the authorities.
After ICly arguments and OOCly discussions, the group are a bit unsure of how to move on from here. Ogri is pretty impossible to put back into the group: the Satyr is just too far gone with him for what he did, and they're loathe to kick /her/ PC out of the group since she seemed to be perfectly reasonable. Ogri's player will probalby need to roll up a new PC, which means all this time on the Terran Brandy plot is kinda wasted: and worse still, the Terran Brandy plot actually ended up /part of the reason/ why his PC has to go! :-(
I don't totally feel this is my fault: part of it was the PC being Chaotic Stupid and ignoring the other PC's pretty clear wishes. But I feel like I should hav said to him, explicitly, "If you do this, the rest of the party will go utterly, utterly spare."
Like many of you, my group of players are not evenly enthusiastic in the game. I've an 8 man group and while a couple are especially keen (almost daily MSN chats about D&D, regular contributions to our campaign wiki including our story hour-style "infodumps", copying out spells from books I buy to expand their electronic spellbooks, etc) but others aren't. Similarly, some players can be pretty much guaranteed to attend every session, whereas others are more likely to flake: work commitments being the big thing which forces some people to miss partyor all of a session.
Now, this has a sort of knock-on effect of making some players have more "spotlight time". The players who spend more time designing character backgrounds are easier to drop hitns for: and those who attend more simply build up bigger webs of connections. I will freely admit, for example, that my girlfriend is one player who tends to get a lot of such time: but that's mainly because, by living with me, she's almost always guaranteed to be at a session. ;-)
I decided I wanted to tilt this balance back to some of the quieter players, including one in paticular: he plays a Dwarf Wizard called Ogri. Ogri has short man syndrome out the wazoo, years of Dwarves picking on him because he became a wizard instead of a "real man" making him a loose cannon who drinks hard, blasts fireballs and pees at least once in a surprisingly large number of encounters. The player is one of the quieter ones who tends to arrives a little later to session than others because his work is further away: I've in the past not been sure about giving him much in the way of long term plots because it's been awkward to resolve them the next week if he's late, but I decided I had a cunning plan to fix him.
The Book Of Vile Darkness lists a drug called Terran Brandy: magical booze, made from dead fey, which causes Con damage but gives a temporary boost to caster level. Suffice to say, "Dwarf Wizard" and "magical but addictive drink" is a match made in heaven: and the party had just gained a Satyr cleric as well! The player could encounter the drink in a veiled way, and from there he will probably purchase and use it: and when the addictiion kicks in, he can either ignore it, sit out the pain (Dwarf saves to Poison, and all that) and get back on the road, or if he wants to RP it there's room for all kinds of fun: especially if later on his Satyr friend gets followed by the same people who sell him the drink....
So I finally have a good plotline for Ogri, and I can make him feel a bit more directly involved. Alas, no sooner do I formulate this than Ogri's player says he has to b ow out for the moment. Work just got a hell of a lot worse, and he can't promise to make any sessions for the moment: he's been temporarilly relocated from Scotland to Ireland (!) and then after the lack of managers in his business means he's forced to work a hell of a lot more late shifts. Fair enough: I wonder if he's partly chucking it because he isn't getting as much in the way of spotlight time, but he assures me he'd love to come back when he has the time.
Well, a few months later, he has the time, and though the party are in later stages of a dungeon crawl they find a way to slip him back into the group. He says he's with us for the long term, though he may still have to miss a session every few weeks when late shift work comes up. I vow to try and make him more involved this time, but momentum of other stuff the PCs have done in his absence takes priority: there's a dungeon to finish, and then a missing artifact to recover, and then a party member is finally arrested for a crime he committed.... It takes a few sessions to get the group back in town and relatively neutral. In this time Ogri behaves a little more violent than usual, tending to his spells with less and less provocation, but I take this as partly RPing personality changes and partly that the player may just be a bit bored from a few "talky" sessions (since I was counterbalancing for the rest of the party with the recent dungeon crawl) and wants to get t o the "good bit".
Last session, we're finally in a decent point to proceed. The group has a new arc that has them travelling by boat almost a thousand miles, and before they go a mage they owe a favour to (he identified an evil artifact for them without telling anyone else what it was) asks them to ship a crate of brandy to his friend in the same town. The Dwarf recognises the friends name as a classmate at University, but his ears prick up at the mention of magical booze. (And my other players start to laugh, and one comments thjat "some players are more predictable than others, eh, GQuail?) He is offered a snifter to test, he passes his addiction save (but I was going for the long term...) and he notes it's effect: the trap is laid.
And then, things go horrible. Before departing the group get into one last combat: but the combat is started by the group just as Ogri's secondary damage from the Terran Brandy kicks in. We RP this Con damage as being intense stomach pain, so he's sitting outside when they get into trouble inside the house. The combat is only one round, because it's a pretty brief and violent affair: a single mage holds them to a Mexican Standoff with a metamagiced firebal ready to slay their Wild Shaped and unconscious Druid, but the Barbarian manages to spring in from the side, takes the fireball himself, and the group drop the mage.
Ogri arrives after all this has finished: he spent the firs tturn making himself invisible and moving into the house, and by the time he moves in the mage is on the ground. The party heal up the mage, planning to interrogate her: but Ogri is all invsibiled up, tense, and is not about to leave without showing off his spells. The Satyr hears him in the room (her listen is stupidly high) and attempts to stop him from doing anything stupid: trying to catch the invisible mage, trying to use Silence to prevent spells from being cast, even moving herself in the way so he can't use spells like Lightning Bolt. But in the end he moves in, and beheads the mage.
The party go spare as the Wizard appears. Harsh words are exchanged, the barbarian grapples Ogri and the Satyr goes utterly spare that the women she was healing exploded in front of her. At least one party member storms out, and as the city watch arrive to sound of the carnage inside, they hand over OGri to the authorities.
After ICly arguments and OOCly discussions, the group are a bit unsure of how to move on from here. Ogri is pretty impossible to put back into the group: the Satyr is just too far gone with him for what he did, and they're loathe to kick /her/ PC out of the group since she seemed to be perfectly reasonable. Ogri's player will probalby need to roll up a new PC, which means all this time on the Terran Brandy plot is kinda wasted: and worse still, the Terran Brandy plot actually ended up /part of the reason/ why his PC has to go! :-(
I don't totally feel this is my fault: part of it was the PC being Chaotic Stupid and ignoring the other PC's pretty clear wishes. But I feel like I should hav said to him, explicitly, "If you do this, the rest of the party will go utterly, utterly spare."
, but they may have some interesting things in there to make sure and monitor the spellcaster is going to his sessions.
