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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 7999382" data-attributes="member: 633">Hi all,I'm toying in my head with some potential ideas for our next campaign. One of these is a novel way to represent a setting where the PCs are at the head of a secret conspiracy or covert faction of some kind, and waging a secret war against some other such cabal.The basic idea is that players don't always use the same character. During the game, they may encounter and recruit suitable NPCs, which then get detailed and customised and become PCs. Each time some mission opportunity presents itself (the campaign would be fairly structured, although not everything needs to be a formal "mission"), the players will decide who to send on that mission.There are a few tricky bits to make this work. The first is to make it so that just sending the highest-level characters is not always the obvious choice. To this purpose, I introduce the concept of a team "profile". The "profile" is a number that's equal to the highest level of the PCs in the team. A high profile draws a lot of attention, which means the player cabal's occult enemies will bring in higher-level opposition, and covert operations will be far more difficult. The enemy is competent and resourceful, and although they can't know everything the players do, it will be very hard to prevent them from even suspecting the involvement of a high-level character - someone that has probably thwarted their plans before, on whom they have extensive dossiers, and whose every acquaintance is being monitored. Also, it'll be more difficult to gather intelligence when you have a world-famous face (even if only in the spy community); at the very least, NPCs will require bigger favors, and small fish may just be afraid to get involved at that level. Note that because the profile is the highest PC level, it also discourages composing groups with extreme level differences (which is usually problematic).The other tricky bit is what happens when you have multiple missions going on at the same time. You probably don't want to switch back and forth between PC groups all the time, and you don't want to be unable to have different missions progress at different paces - ideally, most of the time, you should be able to run a mission start-to-finish and then switch to another team, or at least only switch scenes at well-controlled plot points. To this purpose, I introduce two concepts. The first is that if the cabal sends two teams in the same general area, this draws a whole lot of attention, as it's exponentially harder to keep a large operation hidden. The profile for both groups is equal to the sum of their profiles (i.e. if a profile 3 group and a profile 9 group both operate in the same city at the same time, the mission profile is 12 for both). This means that attempting concurrent missions where the teams can easily meet is all but impossibile. If the players really want to attempt it, I'd be okay with handling the extra complexity in exceptional circumstances.The second is that the enemy has extensively compromised long-range communications. They have an artefact that lets them monitor sending and similar spells and/or they have spy satellites and taps inside Internet and phone providers. Bottom line, anything you do to quickly contact HQ or another team while on a mission may not get through and/or get intercepted. In this way, the DM can control if and when one team's actions can affect another's. Couriers, dead-drops or other high-latency methods are easier to handle as then the DM can control when a scene change is required.That's what I have so far. Does it sound like an interesting idea, overall? Any glaring flaw I can't spot?</blockquote>

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