The Problem with Adventuring Parties

[bolen]

I try letting PC's take turns "starring" in the adventure. One week it will revolve around the fighter, the next the mage ect.

 

[Talic]

How does everyone forget about X-Men? Definately team oriented heroes.

Perhaps the best way to make the team a hero, is to focus each session on the skills and abilities of one or two characters each session as bolen mentioned. The first session may be about cleverness, skill, and subterfuge and so your rogue and mage will shine. The second could rely on repelling an attack, where your fighter and cleric will best stand out. The third might require some investigation that requires some strong arm tactics reqiring the rogue and fighter's skills most.

By the final session each player has had his turns in the spotlight and all can feel important. And as the grand finale, the final session can include small portions for each to excell; the rogue to sneak into the stronghold and let the part in, the cleric to fend off the hordes of undead gaurds, the mage to cleverly bypass a dangerous situation, and the fighter to slug it out with the henchmen, and combined tactics to bring down the BBEG.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The problem with all the movies, from X-men to Lord of the Rings, is that they really only *do* focus on a few characters. LotR has Frodo, X-men has Wolverine...not everyone is the main character. In a game, the challenge is to make everyone feel like the main character.

But this isn't a problem with adventuring parties. It's a problem in trying to use the game to tell a story *instead of* to play a game. Movies and TV shows need main characters to ground the audience to one person that they can feel sympathetic to. Games don't....each person's character grounds the audience (the players) and they can feel sympathetic to them. A good DM's job is to make them *all* feel like central characters, focusing on one character just as much as the other, and making sure that they are *all* there for the final conflict to save the world, not just one, two, or three people, but *everyone*, for their own epic reasons.

It's a lot more like a movie where four different, unrelated, insignificant people all have one event which links them together for some reason. One big thing. It's not mostly about the characters, it's mostly about the event, the challenge...that's where the game is, that's where the story should ideally be focused. That's not to say that you should ignore character development, that's to say that character development shouldn't be a huge and isolated goal of the campaign. The story may be based in the characters, but it's more than the characters.

 

[ThirdWizard]

All this talk about "a team" but no mention of The A-Team? Come on, its four heros of varying abilities out to right wrongs and save damsels in distress!

The way I look at it isn't that there is no main character, it is that all the PCs are trading the status of being the main character around, and from session to session or minute to minute (or even round to round) they might switch who is the main character at the time. One session they're off to discover what happened to one character's ancestor, in another scenario the cleric is incurring favor with the local temple, and yet another time the wizard is casting a spell that may keep the town safe from some disaster. Other times, they're all working together, but sometimes one character should steal the spotlight and become the hero of the hour/minute/six seconds.

 

[fredramsey]

All good thoughts, and I knew people would bring up exceptions, but when you break it down, there are very few movies where a group of characters walk everywhere together, fight the same things at the same time, etc.

And a lot of those increase the tension by killing a few off and leaving the hero alone (Aliens anyone?). And yes, every generalization has exceptions...

But I think the best advice is that you have to forgo some of those conventions to make it a game.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Well, I know that I am still pretty angry about a DM who built our game off of one character's story and then scrapped the whole game when his schedule changed.

It's very much, 'Hello, despite how much we miss him we were enjoying the game just fine without him.'

 

[DragonSword]

I think it's maybe a better fit to think about RPG gaming compared to a TV/Drama series rather than a movie. Loads of good series have at least a few main characters, who develop, swap round, fade away, get killed off etc.

Also, if you use a campaign form along the lines of adventures forming a series that culminates in a big event, then the TV series works a lot better. In a long running series there is much morew time to develop the actual characters as well.

My two cents...

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I agree that there are plenty of examples of ensemble heroes. But one problem I have seen in the past as a result of said "Lone-Hero" thinking is that when one PC wants to be the star hero. This easily leads to group conflict, especially when you have another PC that also wants to be The Hero. What usually follows is that one or both become The Villain.

 

[Hand of Evil]

campaign design: the DM has to know the strenghts and weakness of his players and look for options to play to them so that the players share in the limelight. I will tell you, some players will always be supporting roles, this is their nature, they are good at it. It is a tough balancing act, you just have to see how your players handle it in game.

 

[Arnwyn]

Most movies, stories, etc. by and large have one, maybe two people who are the center of the story. Lord of the Rings non-withstanding. Perhaps this is why RPGs rarely feel like a good movie, even if we want them to.

Any thoughts?

This is why our group considers RPGs to be more of a "game" than anything else - and certainly not a novel or story at all.