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I, too, cannot for the life of me understand why proactive players are not more common in games both here and elsewhere. I mean, many people complain about railroading and lack of player agency, but when it comes down to deciding to which direction the narrative should be pushed, the majority of players (in my limited experience) just freezes and stops posting… |
Second, players don't want to be "that guy". If a player is pushing their own proactivity, that means the other players might feel like their characters don't matter: that one person's plotline is apparently somehow super important now. To make things worse, players often don't create characters in unison, meaning that one player's own proactivity leads to complete exclusion of all other characters outside of their presence. Can be very disheartening.
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Rant aside, I’ve found that having just one proactive player is enough to keep things moving. The cynic in me says you don’t really need more; too many proactive players pushing towards different directions can be a GM nightmare. The experimentalist in me would like to play in a game where more PCs are proactive, but it hasn’t happened yet. |
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As for the “Five-man band” example, I personally don’t see a great need for striving for this type of party composition. I guess the original idea of “balanced party” (if I can use a D&D reference) is to have the spotlight shift from PC to PC, giving them all similar air-time. But, I think spotlight is something to be achieved via role-playing, and character skills don’t matter too much. I definitely like the character story-arc idea though! Maybe I steal it… |
As a contrast, when you have a group of characters who are all essentially the same, or who refuse to have anything to do with each other beyond hitting things until they die, the ensuing roleplay will not be as satisfactory.
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In relation to your “organic storytelling” idea, in my younger and more idealistic days I run parallel threads for different PCs; the threads slowly converged as the party got together. It was all very neat and natural-feeling and rewarding, but A TON of work for the GM (me!). So don’t do that! Parallel threads --> GM burnout (I’ve experienced another example since then ) |
Of course, this does highlight the main difference in expectations: I'm not a PbP GM. I don't run PbP. And hence, what I write here is never really meant for a PbP medium. I run live games through virtual tabletops, and those allow for far faster progression of the narrative, reducing the time a player spends in limbo before they're introduced from months to mere hours. Similarly, there is no real possibility for parallel threads in a live game. A GM can only focus on one thing at a time.
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I guess I could say more, but these massive posts are difficult to go through! Very interesting; though, I’d definitely be keeping an eye on this. |