Side adventures

[Brother Ezra]

The rogue in my campaign has been pining to do some "extra-curricular" activities appropriate to his class, but is finding it difficult in the context of game-time. I don't want to take away time from the other six players while I role-play his side-adventures, but want to give him the opportunity to explore some independent activity.

We've role-played a few scenarios via e-mail, which was effective, if slow and somewhat cumbersome. I've offered the chance for all the other players to do similar solo activities away from group game time, but none of the others have taken up the offer yet.

The rogue is neutral, but the rest of the party (including a cleric of Tyr) is all good-aligned and would not look favorably on any morally questionable activity he may engage in, so any unlawful activities must be undertaken by the rogue in private, away from the other characters prying eyes.

Has anyone else faced this? How did you allow the player to perform his covert activities without detracting from the time spent with the rest of the group?

 

[Napftor]

Do you and the player in question have time to meet one-on-one to play a mini-session? If so, this is my knee-jerk response. Unfortunately, if none of the other players are interested in similar sessions, repeated mini-adventures for the rogue may place him farther away from the rest of the party's XP average, thus unbalancing future encounters. Of course, you can mediate this situation by throwing a few negative level-inflicting creatures at the rogue.

Another alternative may be for the rogue character to have separate adventures and then rejoin the party at a later time. When the main group plays, have this player play another character. Perhaps he is a friend of the rogue's and is looking for him for whatever reason. The party members might be worried as to the rogue's situation or they might just tell the new character that "he'll turn up sooner or later." Once the rogue character has had his fill of side treks, the player's temp PC can deliver a message (or whatever he was up to that he was looking for the rogue) and then split; leaving your party as one happy family again...maybe.

You can't blame the player for wanting to have some extra personalized screen time, but you may have to say "no" if things cannot be easily worked out. It makes the job harder on you as the DM to run side treks. Not because you don't want to, but because it creates too many in-game problems.

 

[Brother Ezra]

Le bumpe

 

[Desdichado]

Plenty; I've had gamers in the past that had almost a fetish for running off on their own. I got pretty good at juggling multiple story lines after a while.

Although it's harder if only one guy is running off on his own, and the rest of them are sticking together. I tend to give attention based on the "people factor", not the roleplaying factor. In other words, if I've got one guy on his own, and four guys sticking together, the one guy will get something like 1/5 of my attention, and the others will get the lion's share.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I had a player doing this. We played some very brief stuff in game... I let it lead up to a climax of their side story, then we ran him a solo adventure. He bought 1 other party member along and the other PCs played the 'NPCs' for this. I gave them pre-genned characters and a crib sheet of their motivations/knowledge.

We played a modified version of 'In the belly of the beast' - which is an amusing zombie movie style module. Players got rewarded XP for how well they roleplayed their NPC - which is a little metagamey... but what the heck, it worked!

We all had fun, and it's a plot device I'd definitely use again in the future. But it'd have to be a different player next time... No favoritism here! Also, I'd probably use slightly less antagonistic NPCs - they nearly blew the thing with their in character backstabbing.

 

[Kalendraf]

I've run a few side adventures like that with just 1 or 2 PC's. Most of those sessions ended up being a lot heavier on the roleplaying end of things, with just a few minor combats/traps/whatever. So the XP issue wasn't really a problem.

In one example, the mini-adventure was used specifically to introduce a new player's character. Instead of being "thrown to the wolves" as they called it, they wanted to just meet up with 1 or 2 of the party and get started that way. Luckily, a couple players wanted to do something like that and were happy to help out. I ran them thru some heavily modified sections of Village of Hommlet.

The most recent mini-adventure I ran was done to explain/set-up one of the PC's relationship to an extra-planar being. It was needed for his Prestige class, but there was no easy way to slip in something at the time into the campaign without causing problems. The adventure only lasted about 2 hours and had very little XP involved.

 

[Ravilah]

I DM for a group of my friends, including my roommate. Since we live in the same apartment, my roommate was always asking to go on independent side-quests (albeit with his "cohort" NPC sorcerer/rogue). When he was about level 16, he was the cockiest, most reckless, and most munchkinized Planer Champion you could meet. So when he decided to quest [ALONE] for the coolest Holy Avenger in the multiverse (as a birthday present for his paladin brother), I said "yes" (with a sardonic grin a dragon's tail wide).

The sword was on a middle level of Hell, gaurded by an army of half-dragon yard trash, a chromatic dragon of each color, a butt-kicking enchantress, and a Blackgaurd named Bulwie who was easily the Planer Champion's equal or better. He laughed his way through the yard trash, a few higher level captains, and three of the dragons. Then the blue dragon wiped the floor with him. He was taken prisoner and forced into a half-dragon breeding program.

In the end, the other PCs came to rescue him (dang generous if you ask me), and the loot they found ended up changing the course of the whole campaign, eventually leading to their ascending the throne of a new kingdom.

So...uh..basically...what was I saying? Umm.....side quests are cool!