Convergence
Street Samurai’s scanner must have picked up something! What with all that gothic neon technology rising from the deep, I’m sure it was like a breath of fresh air for her to sense a scifi wifi signal. We may never know how many cyber-pterodactyls she had to ride to get to Aqua Vitae, but let’s hope her endeavors are successful!
In the meantime, let’s talk about interweaving narratives. Although I must admit to you: my comic has outstripped my experience here. You see, I’ve always wanted to run a party vs. party campaign, alternating weeks between groups and letting each session inform the next. After all, there’s nothing more unpredictable and plot-twisty than the antics of other PCs.
- Revolution Party decides to assassinate the cardinal. Zealot Party has to figure out who unleased the hunter-killer construct that terrorized the Cathedral District.
- Ghoul Party has blocked up an exploratory mineshaft to protect Ghoul Town. Dwarf Party has to find another way to retrieve the their ancestors’ stolen grave goods.
- Kobold Wingz Party has to sabotage their rivals. Goblin Pizza Party has to deliver an extra large with extra scabs to Themberchaud’s cave.
You could also opt for the cooperative route, allowing groups to do a sending or two between sessions to keep their allies abreast of a mutual threat. So in 25 words or less:
- Cardinal is a demon in disguise. Members of the Glorious Revolution cannot get into his rectory. You Holy Bros will have to take him out.
- It was a frame job! Mindflayers stole your Hammer of the Forge Fathers, not Ghoul Town. Help us avoid war. Seek them out in the— [Damn, ran out of words!]
- We all burned and squashed if Themberchaud hungry! We provide zesty dipping sauce, you provide bread stix. Deal? Words left? How many? Butts butts butts.
Whatever flavor of intertwined narrative you opt for, however, it’s clearly going to take a lot of coordination. You’ll have to account for the fact that the PCs can never be in the same place at the same time during a normal session. You’ll have to plan special “crossover sessions” when you’ve got both groups. Then you’ll have to either enlist a co-GM or deal with a megaparty of 10 nerds at once. Or I suppose you could split them up by mixing the parties. Or maybe have special guest player appearances between groups. Or you could just run a West Marches game and let all of the above happen naturally. Or you could go for the mega version of this style with 25+ players and multiple GMs in a dimension-hopping you-can-play-anything-from-anywhere setting with interplanar threats threatening to destroy the multiverse.
Yikes! Now you understand why I keep talking myself out of this. As Street Samurai so rightly says, who the crap has time?
What about my gamer brethren out there in the great wide Web? Have you ever managed to pull off one of these “multiple parties affecting one another” narratives? Was it a mega-combat at a con? A collaboration between multiple GMs? How did you handle scheduling? Give us all your best tips and tricks for running one of these suckers, because it feels like a mammoth undertaking!
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My current GM is running the same campaign for two different parties, and though we don’t directly affect eachother (we’re going through the same adventure after all),there are more indirect crossovers. We all contributed NPC’s as part of our backstories that exist in both worlds for example, and retired PC’s can appear as NPC’s in the other campaign as well.
I like the shared NPCs idea. You wind up doing the same kind of interesting crossover with half the prep.
Huh. If the vampire twins show up next, I’ll actually have guessed most of the attendees of this little shindig… Groovy.
It remains a bizarre storytelling challenge to make this kind of “narrative through snapshots” work. Lots of fun though. Always appreciate it when the characters are clear enough that their actions make sense. 🙂
It’s a hypertech vampire city. ^_^ The current guests make perfect sense to me!
Sister, I can barely handle 1 campaign at a time.
Hashtag mood.
Oh goodness no. DMing takes a lot out of me; I need a long break between running games and that’s hardly conducive to running for multiple concurrent parties.
I wonder if two DMs (with their own parties, or the same party of players in differing roles of PCs/DM) doing their thing in the same setting would work.
Yeah. High degree of difficulty and all that. It’s for somebody like my “this is the entirety of my leisure time” pal who plays in four and runs three.
„Multiple Parties“ sound like a lot of fun, but that’s 10 people that need to consistently meet at regular intervals.
So even if I had the time to set a campaign up, I doubt I could get the players together and keep it running purely from a timetable POV.
As a practical matter, you would need a VERY loose connection between the interacting plotlines. I bet it would also pay to do episodic rather than saga style play so that players could miss a session or two without disrupting multiple groups.
Cool idea, but no. The closest we’ve come is on a couple of occasions where one player has been missing for an extended period (long holidays, parental duties, etc), the rest of us have run a short campaign somewhere in the same setting… usually with low-level characters who might be doing some minor adventure loosely connected to the main campaign. Actually interleaving two groups on alternating sessions… far too much effort.
Maybe low level and high level parties? Play as your own minions?
In the example I had in mind, the secondary characters were minor members of an organisation with which the main characters were loosely associated, though they never met. I forget the details now, but essentially, their successful mission led to the organisation staging a timely distraction which gave the main characters a clear run at their own activities.
But that did come down to fortuitous timing… the break in play in the main campaign came at a point where we hadn’t quite committed to the next step, so there was flexibility for the GM to change things to account for what happened in the secondary campaign. If you’re a really good GM, you could do that deliberately, have breakpoints for switching between campaigns and allowing room for them to influence each other… but I’m not sure I’d be up to it.
Minions could be a good way to do it, though. I can see that working out for something like 40K Dark Heresy, with the senior group centered around a full-fledged Inquisitor, and the junior group being the team who get sent out to follow up leads and deal with problems that aren’t _obviously_ important enough for the main characters.
My world is living and breathing. It’s pure sandbox, allowing players to do whatever and seek whatever goals they want. I run everyone in the same world, and all their interactions leave impacts on the world that affect everyone else and the world at large. Is it easy? No. But I’ve found there’s nothing more satisfying for myself and my players than being able to say “Oh my god, this is that town we saved from demons and they built a statue of us four IRL years ago as a different party? I bet we can use that statue to prove that my char is the direct descendant of one of those guys and get the town to trust us!” Seeing someone’s work affect the world and be remembered gives a sort of meaningful weight to the experience, and it’s all the better when you can run into other peoples work too, or hear how someone else ran into yours.
It often requires running smaller groups, admittedly. Party sizes of 2 or 3, sometimes even solo sessions that turn into groups in a free-form sense when players meet each other in-world. The large 5+ party dynamics make it much harder to have the flexibility needed to both run the whole sandbox world and also devote an individual story for the characters at the same time. But in the end, I’ve ran something along the lines of 10+ friends through my world for about a decade now this way, so I figure something’s working! Lol.
Neat! Thanks for sharing.
My own mega dungeon with six players and a dozen PCs has proved a challenge in the way you describe. It’s hard to give everyone tailored story time when you’ve got so much to juggle.
Yes actually. I’ve done it twice with the same setting, but a different Co-GM.
The first GM and I came up with the idea of effectively military/spy agencies; one GM would take one group, I’d take the other. One group was for the more militant the other for the more investigative. The idea was the militant would investigate crimes they were suited for and the investigative would do the same.
We sent one half into one room while the other half stayed with their GM. The GMs kept a discord chat going of what people were doing.
The twist came in the third session when we swapped teams and sent them back on the same mission the other GM had just given them, but it wasn’t complete.
It took them 6 sessions to realize we had two worlds (alternate timeline) and their minds were somehow moving back and forth between them. Another session after that allowed them to do it on their whim. The only people affected by it were the PCs, but since the two worlds were very similar, they could use info from one in the other most of the time. As a result, the GMs had to coordinate a lot of stuff but continuity issues were brushed aside as “its an alternate timeline, what did you expect?”
I’ve run this twice and people found it interesting as hell. I don’t know if it was the setting, the nature of the unknown or the fact that each person’s backstory got a lot of attention (what’s different in the alternative timeline?).
I’d love to see your session notes. The alternate timeline stuff is an interesting way to explain around some of the potential pothole difficulties.
We ran it in 2015 and 2019, so the majority of the notes are long gone. We still have the notes on what powers did what and who got them, as well as setting details. I suspect I still have the pamphlets we made as well for the organizations, which was really silly.
Setting wise, its was WoD, specifically Hunter the Reckoning and Demon the Fallen. From Demon the Fallen, we took the Earthbound, Demons in objects that were crazy powerful. One of their biggest strengths was the ability to force worship off of regular humans, neatly explaining why armies couldn’t handle them.
But Hunters have a special power; the ability to say no to mind controlling effects. Their bodies could still be ripped apart, but they were immune to one of the first moves the Earthbound would do.
The setting was basically a post apocalypse in some ways. The “Old Gods” ravaged the world and now Hunters were moving to effectively clean up the remnants after the Old Gods were destroyed. The PCs were new recruits that had been IDed genetically; the “Hunter” genes were present, so they were recruited to give them skills before they randomly developed powers. We even told them their bosses weren’t sure they’d ever actually snap into full Hunter powers as they were missing a few other genes, but the “no mind control” was there.
The jumps originally happened in their sleep and we described a strange dream of falling up until they fell back down to their beds. Each time they travelled between timelines, a new power was added to the sheet, implying they were tapping into some energy between the dimensions.
For an example of the missions, the other GM sent them to investigate a potential cult activity in an old folks home. Team Investigative took point and ran into issues as one of the people there was convinced they were there to kill her and she was not going down quietly. The next session, we swapped them and told the investigative team their mission was an old folks home of suspected cult activity. As soon as they saw the woman, they took her down before she could get the grenades and started hypothesizing ground hogs day rules. The notes at the time were “describe the old folks home?” “three stories, her rooms on the second, here’s the description I gave”
The biggest note collab was about the PCs alternative timeline selves. We worked hard for everyone to be subtly different. One guy made a person who failed to save a teenager and blamed himself, plagued with self doubt. In the alternative timeline, he made it there in time and was lauded as a hero. That was all we changed, but the self doubt hadn’t kept his other self from success. He basically abandoned his original timeline for the new one in the end.
I think in a textbook situation of trying to separate the art from the artist, the best by far I have seen this done successfully is in Arcadum’s World of Verum Twitch games. The man is/was able to run interwoven games not only across groups, but also incorporated a fully autonomous living-world discord meta. The man is scum, but credit where credit is due, his GM abilities were on a whole other level!
Huh. Is it worth watching the VODs?
Or is the scum to scummy? I know nothing about the guy.
The VODs are definitely worth watching, but strap in; there’s HUNDREDS of sessions online! The IRL doesn’t really show in the games until the very end of the campaign wrap-up so unless you are already aware of the circumstances it’s almost impossible to tell. He restarted after a hiatus from being cancelled, but I’m still working through the backlog myself so I don’t know if the new stuff is as high a quality… Professional DM, actually overtook Critical Role as the number one D&D stream for a while. At one point I think he was running around 15-20 campaigns every week, plus the living world, plus employing another 5-10 full-time DMs for non streamed games. Man is/was a machine when it came to gaming. When he started working with bigger streamers on Collab though, things kind of went pear-shaped, particularly when he managed to get not one, but TWO separate V-Tuber groups going.
TL;DR – Yes. Just don’t research the IRL.
Le Map? Didn’t know Street Sam was Fantasy-French. Or are those the Aqua Vitaeans?
!!!
I didn’t even notice, lol. That’s Laurel’s home. I’ll have to ask her.
I don’t have much experience with multiple parties, but I HAVE tried running a rotating GM game around the idea of alternate universes: as the world switches, so does the GM. I’m currently on my third attempt at getting it off the ground.
What tends to bog you down? Scheduling? GM burnout?
The first was killed by lack of interest. The second was killed due to difficulties with the people running at the time. The third is going smoothly SO FAR.
It gets confusing because we have to update stuff in the future timeline when events happen in the past, but for a while we had two campaigns where one was just the other group in the future. I DM’d the future one, and the twist was that my warlock character in the past one had gone missing- her patron had begun destroying the world, and they had to stop it and reconnect with her. Alas, trying to schedule the same group for two campaigns meant both slowed down, and once things got slightly busy that slowed to a stop. We did a big multipage plot summary, me and the other DM, so that we’d still have some narrative ending for our alternate future (the main campaign was more monster-of-the-week).
There’s a reason we’ve done so many “scheduling conflict” comics. It’s a dirty shame that all these worlds crumble and fade because of IRL commitments. Friggin’ Nothing is a bag of dicks.
https://y.yarn.co/b8fe76b4-1c77-43d8-b707-ab280888595d_text.gif
Ha ha, absolutely not. But I do get a similar kind of feel from interweaving the plotlines of various different characters in a single campaign. One of the benefits of play-by-post is that it’s much easier to silo a single character in a private chat and take them on a mini-adventure without disrupting the flow of the main game.
Probably the biggest, most successful highlight of this was when one character decided to flee the rest of the party to find her father, changing the course of the campaign as everyone else went on a journey across the continent chasing after her.
One RPG I’ve been considering for a while is running some kind of antagonistic game across two separate forums. Like, maybe I run a D&D campaign on GitP where the players are dungeon delvers fighting a weird alien menace, while on Sufficient Velocity I’m running a Quest where the players control a subterranean eldritch hivemind. And then I just…don’t tell anyone about this gimmick until someone else who frequents both forums notices.
Sadly, I can’t consistently manage the time commitment required to run a normal game on one forum, let alone running two games plus whatever intermediate layer of hidden information is needed to make them interface properly. I hope someone else takes that idea and runs with it…
Oh, also there would be scheduling issues. One player hesitating in posting their actions wouldn’t just be holding up the D&D game, but also the Quest on another forum. And obviously if the two games were working on different timescales, it would just completely stop working.
Yeah, I can’t see that working well in forum play… those can be flaky enough even with one group, with players who can’t commit to keeping things moving. Having two such groups dependent on each other… difficult.
I’ve run one mission four times and am working on a fifth iteration. The first two times, a team of NPCs served as rivals for the PCs, then that team served as a backstory (with RP and skill checks) for three new PCs said to be part of those failed rivals. The third time (different world), a 5th level wizard hunted for a macguffin in the complex and snuck out, trapping her intended foils in the dungeon. The fourth run, a 16th level fighter, a trained hellhound, and two sorcerers arrived to shut the dungeon down as an “attractive nuisance,” encountering and killing the evil party from the third run and frustrated at the lack of the previously-stolen macguffin. My primary player is positively writhing with amusement and frustration that Fighter’s team and Wizard’s team each have information that the other group would KILL for, but do not know each other. (Unless someone metagames, the two groups are unlikely to ever meet but keep having near-misses and oblique references that make sense to the players who connect the dots but mean nothing to the oblivious characters.
Years ago, I was part of a university RPG club. When I first joined, one of the older members started up a “Living Faerun” campaign, D&D 3.5.
The club would meet twice a week (at a student union building) and there would be a handful of DMs running different one-off adventures which were happening simultaneously.
Players could show up with their character sheet and just join a game.
I don’t recall being aware of any long-running, overarching plot but all the DMs would have to coordinate with the organiser.
It worked out for about a year or so, if I remember correctly, before all got called off. Long-time DMs wanted to take a turn at being a player; newer people wanted to play but few had the confidence to run a game; the number of players at each table started to climb; DMs started to feel burnt out.
At the end I think we were getting around 30 players turning up to any given meeting but didn’t have the 5-or-so GMs that would be necessary to handle them.
But it was a good time while it lasted.
One thing which I recall that “broke” was that one player picked out a feat called “Mercantile Background” (or something like that) which let him sell stuff for 75% of the buying price (instead of the default 50%) and he made a standing offer to all the other players to buy ALL of their unwanted loot for 60% of list price. Which he would then sell to NPC vendors for 75%. And there could be 3-6 tables of adventurers picking up loot each session.
So he ended up swimming in money. I don’t think he knew how crazy it would get. He eventually started selling (at a loss) “adventure life insurance” (that would pay for Raise Deads) because he figured it would be a way of divesting himself of the money.
Heh. Here’s one that never made it as a finished comic.
Title: Market manipulation.
Text: Meddle not with the economy, for it is fragile and easy to break.
Pic: Thief is set up in town at a sort of lemonade stand. She’s got two signs out front. One says, Will buy old ladders for 5cp. The other sign says, 10’ poles, 2 sp each. Thief is grinning ear to ear as peasants with ladders line up on one side of the booth and adventurers walk away with 10’ poles on the other. There’s a large pile of coin in front of Thief.
Dialogue: —
Scrollover: No refunds.
I’ve never done more than one campaign at a time, because I’ve never had mor e than one day to run games on…. wait a minute.
I have run VLARP for the Cam… that’s kinda like running “multiple campaigns of pitting parties against one another”, but it also has a lot of Players playing all at one time and usually more than one GM (like either a GM and tonne of Narrators or even multiple GMs). And I often collaborated with other Cam GMs in other cities and we had multi-part campaigns running across multiple cities since technically all games int he Camarilla are one big global game.
But there you have it: You use assistants and Co-GMS.
Kinda sorta! I ran two groups through the same campaign at the same time. Each character had a familial relation in the other group, and the justification was that the characters were alternate universe versions of one another. In timeline A, the crazy uncle went adventuring, but in timeline B it was his intrepid niece instead, etc.
The campaign was a small sandbox and the players could approach things in any order. They were allowed to share the best quotes of each session and a singular cryptic clue per session between the two groups. It was a lot of fun and led to rampant speculation among the players. It took surprisingly a lot less work than I expected because I was getting to run each area twice and use my notes on how things shook out. Scheduling played merry havoc of course, but it was still a good time and surprisingly viable.
At some point in my infinite spare time (HA), I’d love to run a co-DMed adventure. Specifically, two teams, live, racing through the same dungeon for the same Mcguffin. Lace the dungeon with crazy, party dispersing traps and watch as everyone gets shuffled about. Let a couple of the more devious players be Dopplegangers and admire the resulting chaos!