Another All Games Considered

Another episode that actually has Chris and I in the same room - with only minor injuries on Chris' part ;). We talk briefly about the game engine for Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot - which I think is one of the coolest game titles *ever*.
We talk about pulling together parties for games and an interesting discussion on boardgames - especially with how long games have taken.

Risus and its pronunciation issues :). Chris does a very in-depth review of the game.

I did not quite address the question of group character creation and thankfully we'll be able to do that in the upcoming GM recording - and I do apologize for some of my rambling, hopefully as I do more I'll learn to curb the digression and my tendencies to tell a few too many stories.

Some of the things that I was trying to get at that I explained with story rather than getting to the point were:

1. It's easier when your players know each other - even to a small extent. I started the Changeling game I run as a one-shot and I created one of the pregenerated characters for someone I knew was playing, but the other three were people I knew but hadn't created the characters for.

If the characters and the personalities gel, then even a pregenerated character can blossom into a fully-developed three-dimensional character that can interact with the other characters in a positive way. I don't mean that everyone agrees all the time - that's artificial and no fun. But that the conflicts are consistent with the characters' personalities - and ideally NOT the player personalities.

2. When you create your group - even if you're not creating all the characters at the same time, you'll have the tendancy to want to pull them all into the same external group. To an extent, you want that, I think. They have to have a reason to want to interact with each other, but those reasons can be many and varied.

Example:

They all report to the same authority figure (Commander/Captain/Baron(ness)) but in different capacities. One or two knights, maybe some are reluctant citizens, this can lead to interesting discussion and conflicts that don't mean a breakup of the party.

Allow them to switch allegiances - to use a Changeling example: Let one or two (or all of them if that's the way the game is going) go from Seelie to Unseelie. In the case of my game the Unseelie aren't the automatic bad guys so this led to a more in-depth exploration by the characters of the two sides and what it really meant to be of either court. Some incredibly great roleplay and plot twisting was the result.

3. Set as few "you have to have this in your character background" as possible. Your players *want* to play. They don't want to disrupt the game (and if they do - there are plenty of ways to deal with that as well). Give them several different threads with which they can tie a new character to the game. If you have a good gaming group, the other players will look for ways to integrate the new one.

I hope that helps and clarifies things some.