group dynamic

[wadesauce]

Just curious, what are your plans to hold diverse groups together, for example, aspiring death marshal, guild guard, grave robber, and December cultist?

I forsee either fluff or role play problems with oddly diverse parties. What do you guys think?

[Fetid Strumpet]

Depends on the campaign. Either tell them to create a cohesive group, or figure out a way to leverage them into needing to cooperate. A classic one that I use for the occasional beginning 7th Sea game is as the players are creating their characters I for example give them a a background that I created and tell every player that their character needs to have some dark secret in their past. So dark it would ruin not only them, but their families and loved ones as well if it came to light. The secret doesn't have to be true, they could have been framed if that is more fitting to their character, but evidence of some kind exists that would be disastrous if it was revealed. And then I start the session out by having them all be summoned together by an individual who happens to know their secret, has the proof, and wants them to do something for him. How they react is up to them. I've had groups form a temporary truce to ally, ignore the requested and scripted job, and they all go after the puppet master to get their own packets of evidence back. I've had them grudgingly cooperate with each other and eventually someone on the group alters the perceptions of another and they change their ways... and everything in between.

 

Raid the plots of movies and TV shows for those episodes where arch enemies are forced to cooperate, and create similar circumstances. There are a plethora of them out there. The point is in a Roleplaying game you are involved in cooperative storytelling, and a story that begins with a Death Marshall and a Grave Robber are forced by circumstance to work together, and the Death Marshall vows he will die rather than work with the Robber, and then either does, or similar, creates a very uninteresting story. If you have the ability and time to run packs of the group in splinter group sessions, then that could work, but as the story in Roleplaying games often requires the group to stay cohesive you just have to figure out exactly what a particular character would compromise on. A Federal Law enforcement agent and a known Crime Family Mafioso might never work together in normal circumstances, but what if the city they lived and worked in, and housed their families and friends were threatened with nuclear Annihilation if they didn't combine their resources? They might snipe at each other, and take notes on weaknesses for when the crisis was over, but they would most likely pull together to avert the crisis. If the Federal agent just flatly refused, the story either ends, or one or the other falls out of the main story arc.

 

Roleplaying is cooperative, and if a player creates a character that can only work with certain individuals, under any circumstances, then either A) the group needs to only create individuals of that type or the player needs to re-imagine their character, or create a new one.  

[Kadeton]

This is a perennial problem in RPGs, and you can get through it in quite a few ways.

 

My favourite method is Mutual Peril - have all the characters come together by accident, and share a traumatic, formative experience that forces them to band together and survive. If characters have disagreements, you can just keep piling on the threat until they're forced to overcome their differences or die. Once they've grown used to working as a team, you can give them more freedom - the team will generally stay together despite their disparate backgrounds.

 

(For example, you could start a game with the characters crossing the Breach for the first time, which in itself could be made fairly traumatic by having another passenger succumb to Breach psychosis. Once the characters get through that, the train derails. As they pull themselves from the wreckage, they're attacked by bandit looters. After escaping, they're hunted by Nephilim, and waylaid by Malifaux's mind-twisting geography. By the time they make it safely to the city, they're not just a random group of people, they're a team.)

 

An easier way (from the GM's perspective, at least) is Shared History - make the players generate their characters collaboratively, so that they are all assumed to know and like each other before the game begins. This can be quite challenging and fun for the players, as long as everyone is on board - if anyone decides not to play along, it will fall apart pretty easily. You can still get some pretty diverse characters, but the players have to put a bit more effort into helping create a believable story.

 

(For example, the characters are a group of homesteaders from various backgrounds who are striking out into the uncharted wilds to establish a new community. How they came together to start this crazy scheme, and what each character's personal reasons and history are that have led them to this, is a question for the players to answer together.)

[vagen]

For my group, I simply created the major setting and told them that was where they were going to be spending the majority of their time. I then made them new arrivals in Malifaux and set them loose. I based the first week around one characters fate and made it a big enough problem that they could all bond. For me this ended up being great because my people have ended up designing a lot really complex interaction between their characters. I have 2 people who are a Guild sponsored Sheriff and a Shop keeper who is a front for the Ten Thunders, and I'm not certain that there wont be a point where they'll be standing in a room with guns on each other. Part of that is whats really making it fascinating to show up every week and see what happens next. The way I force them to work together is I gave them the shared experience at the beginning where they had to rely on one another and I have been eeking out little bits and pieces that are forcing them to deal with things that threaten the town they're all a part of. If you give your group one thing they are all attached to and is important to them, then they are forced to work together even if they have to keep who they are secret for fear of reprisal. 

 

In the end, it's going to rely on your group to play it out. It's entirely possible that your grave robber will announce he animates the dead and your death marshal will go I should hate you because that's wrong but I like your face. So make all the places you want just be ready for the players to go where ever they do.

[osoi]

 

My favourite method is Mutual Peril - have all the characters come together by accident, and share a traumatic, formative experience that forces them to band together and survive. If characters have disagreements, you can just keep piling on the threat until they're forced to overcome their differences or die. Once they've grown used to working as a team, you can give them more freedom - the team will generally stay together despite their disparate backgrounds.

 

 

... and this is what I did for all you guys. Basically everyone has been convicted by the guild for a crime and they have an opputunity to work off their crimal debt by doing a job for them in the quarantine zone. I have decided to start a thread for our story so I will go into more detail there, of course feel free to add because I'm not taking full notes of the sessions

[Brewmaster]

Given that this particular system lends itself to a much more narrative style of gameplay, the idea of a group template (Fear the Boot podcast is where I heard it first) would fit very nicely. You tell the group "here's the edges of the pinball machine you're playing inside, you guys need to build for that." And having people build as a group will guide characters much closer together, dropping the "death marshal/ graverobber" chances down.

For the first game I'm going to run for example, I'm going to say players who want to play the Dabbler pursuit have to take the Thalarian Doctrine school of thought. This makes immediate buy-in work better since they'd be a government Mage, and it automatically helps guide the characters "where am I that I would work with a government Mage?".

[Spence]

For a game like this I have always preferred to sit down with the players and give them a run down on 'the world as they know it' and then have them make their PC's as a group.  The good role-players will tend to make complimentary PC's without really thinking about it and that occasional munchkin that lives to derail or screw up a story line will tend to be boxed in and neutralized by the real gamers. 

 

In play the group will not take kindly on the munchkin mucking up the works and will shut them down early.  That generally leaves me free to just run a fun game and not have to ride herd on a idiot. 

 

 

<edited for spelling>

Edited April 11, 2014 by Spence

[Malsqueek]

My Fated provided me with pretty rich stories about who they were pre-malifaux and why they were going in, which allowed me to tie them all together fairly well. After that, I played on one character's extreme greed to make the fated all complicit in a smuggling operation gone bad (they stole something from a smuggler who was executed in front of them by guild guard for it).

 

That did a pretty good job of impressing the danger they were in upon them, and I was able to weave several of their backgrounds together for some mutual interest.

[Spence]

My Fated provided me with pretty rich stories about who they were pre-malifaux and why they were going in, which allowed me to tie them all together fairly well. After that, I played on one character's extreme greed to make the fated all complicit in a smuggling operation gone bad (they stole something from a smuggler who was executed in front of them by guild guard for it).

 

That did a pretty good job of impressing the danger they were in upon them, and I was able to weave several of their backgrounds together for some mutual interest

 

It's great when they do that, as long a they built their background stories with an eye to fitting in with other players and the general outline/theme of the adventure/arc the FM plans to run.  

 

No more slave labor attempts to force wildly divergent pegs into the wrong holes for me. 

 

All the participants are allowed to have fun and that includes the GM.  The lone/solitary hero works great in a scripted Movie/TV Series/Book but pretty much fails in RPG's except for the 1 player/1 GM games which I don't find fun. 

 

A major issue I find these days is many players lack the ability (or choose to ignore it) to understand the difference.  Most of the characters in the fluff that I like operate alone and at most use lesser beings as pawns.  Fantastic for fluff fiction.  Bad Bad Bad for an RPG featuring a group of PC's.   YMMV but I got off that train years ago. 

[Ad1]

TtB offers another option being Ongoing Challenges. You could handle some of the story that doesn't gel well with others in the group with these challenges and some narrative. It does mean it takes more of a back seat to the overall action on the game night but the system does allow for weeks, months or even years of 'downtime' to impact on the communal narrative. it does mean that they're working 'behind everyone else's back' but if you're  group is happy to RP through the conflict that may ensue later and your group is mature enough to RP on only in character knowledge the system does allow for such activities to be undertaken.

 

Have to agree with the previous posters though, the easiest path is to have everyone with similar interests.

 

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