Advice on interlocking campaigns [Archive] - Wizards Community

Advice on interlocking campaigns [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
HamHam
09-06-04, 09:53 PM To briefly explain the situation: I am, or was, running a campaign. 2/3 of the players are undependable bums who can't organize and follow through on a plan to get together to save their lives. Now, as long as we were all more or less in the same area I was able to actually bully them into actually being in one place as a group often enough to play. However, since college started a few weeks ago, while the actual distance between us isn't that much (hour drive each, more or less) it's making organizing a play session difficult.

So, I've decided to break the party up. I've still got one player who will be there every week and a new player that will join him. The other two players will get seperate campaigns in other parts of the world. In essence I'll be running three campaigns that are spacially seperated but temporally over-lapping and may intersect at some points.

My question, I guess, then is: has anyone done something like this before? How did it go? Also, any advice on running a game with only 1-2 players? At this point I'm thinking of a) adding an NPC party or b) beefing up (or unbalancing, in other words) the characters so they can have power levels equal to a full party with fewer people.
Sabin
09-06-04, 10:07 PM I had a party of 2 players for quite awhile. I usually put CRs of their level or lower against them, and everything usually turned out fine without having to beef them up or add NPCs.
The Shaman
09-06-04, 10:49 PM I did something like this many years ago - it worked fine.

One group was just two players, both fighters - while they tended to get pretty beat up, they had a lot of fun. The nice thing about small parties (one or two player characters) is that single adversary can pose a real challenge, such as the two of them against a single minotaur in a labyrinth (still one of my favorite adventures ever) - I would suggest avoiding the temptation to "beef up" the characters, for as long as the players have good heads on their shoulders, they should be able to manage (and if they don't, lots of bonus feats and magic only prolong the inevitible). We played more or less weekly, for a couple of hours a session.

The other group was five players, a mix of classes - we played about once a month, but usually for sessions of ten or twelve hours at a stretch.

As a result, both groups kept to similar timelines in-game, which made it very easy to keep the "big picture" timeline of the game-world intact. They also adventured in different parts of the world, and while I had aspirations of bringing both campaigns together for a long weekend, it never quite happened. There was one NPC that appeared in both campaigns at different times, which was kind of fun for me.

It certainly made my job much easier in terms of world-creation and campaign management.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
HamHam 09-06-04, 09:53 PM	To briefly explain the situation: I am, or was, running a campaign. 2/3 of the players are undependable bums who can't organize and follow through on a plan to get together to save their lives. Now, as long as we were all more or less in the same area I was able to actually bully them into actually being in one place as a group often enough to play. However, since college started a few weeks ago, while the actual distance between us isn't that much (hour drive each, more or less) it's making organizing a play session difficult. So, I've decided to break the party up. I've still got one player who will be there every week and a new player that will join him. The other two players will get seperate campaigns in other parts of the world. In essence I'll be running three campaigns that are spacially seperated but temporally over-lapping and may intersect at some points. My question, I guess, then is: has anyone done something like this before? How did it go? Also, any advice on running a game with only 1-2 players? At this point I'm thinking of a) adding an NPC party or b) beefing up (or unbalancing, in other words) the characters so they can have power levels equal to a full party with fewer people.
Sabin 09-06-04, 10:07 PM	I had a party of 2 players for quite awhile. I usually put CRs of their level or lower against them, and everything usually turned out fine without having to beef them up or add NPCs.
The Shaman 09-06-04, 10:49 PM	I did something like this many years ago - it worked fine. One group was just two players, both fighters - while they tended to get pretty beat up, they had a lot of fun. The nice thing about small parties (one or two player characters) is that single adversary can pose a real challenge, such as the two of them against a single minotaur in a labyrinth (still one of my favorite adventures ever) - I would suggest avoiding the temptation to "beef up" the characters, for as long as the players have good heads on their shoulders, they should be able to manage (and if they don't, lots of bonus feats and magic only prolong the inevitible). We played more or less weekly, for a couple of hours a session. The other group was five players, a mix of classes - we played about once a month, but usually for sessions of ten or twelve hours at a stretch. As a result, both groups kept to similar timelines in-game, which made it very easy to keep the "big picture" timeline of the game-world intact. They also adventured in different parts of the world, and while I had aspirations of bringing both campaigns together for a long weekend, it never quite happened. There was one NPC that appeared in both campaigns at different times, which was kind of fun for me. It certainly made my job much easier in terms of world-creation and campaign management.