[guest author] You are what you play(ed)

It just so happens that the 2 projects I’m working on are for single player character genres albeit from different angles. Even after some of my first ideas didn’t work because of that very reason, I still tried to find ways to fit in other player characters because virtually all of the games I’ve been involved with have been traditional single-GM, multi-hero games. I know that’s just not going to work here, yet I still find myself automatically drifting back to traditional roleplaying paradigms in a pinch.

Guest Author: Ping | January 15th, 2008 | guest author | show 3 comments

#3 Andy Short said:
December 21, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Or, you still have only one GM, but the players all run individually. It can actually work.

I’m currently involved in such a campaign under the No Dice system in which all the player characters are based in their own worlds (a teenager in 1970s Florida, for example, one in modern-day Boston, one in Essex during the First World War, a street thief in pre-Crusades Baghdad, and myself, an 17th century Australian aborigine), and only sometimes do we step into another player’s setting and interact with them. Most of the time, we’re each playing out our own story.

Now normally, you’d assume that this would be a disaster, since most of the time you’d have most players sitting around watching while one hogs the spotlight. But this is probably because the spotlighted player is essentially doing something you could be doing yourself; it’s actually as enjoyable watching in this case as playing, as the story the spotlighter is playing is completely different, possibly even of an entirely different tone, than that which your own character is playing.

Something to consider.

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#2 Anonymous said:
November 14, 2009 at 9:52 pm
What about something opposite?
Single-player, multi-GM game.

Basically, the “GM”-figure controls the single hero, and the other players control locations, scenery, NPCs, monsters, etc…? It’s an idea I’ve batted around before.

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#1 ars ludi said:
January 21, 2008 at 6:07 am
[…] of games have one big thing in common: the player characters wind up being a team because it’s easiest to run a game if they stick together and are on the same side. Genre or […]

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