Entrepreneurial
Adventuring is about more than adventuring. When you spend your free time inhabiting a fantasy persona, it’s only natural to wonder what Tormog the Mighty gets up to when he’s not decapitating kobolds. That might include such pastimes as crafting, communing with familiars, running a rumor mill, ordering about a cadre of peons, or even leading a kingdom. Suddenly you’ve got more to worry about than keeping watch and hunting for your next magic item. You’ve got responsibilities, and the character of play changes radically.
The real trick is gauging your party’s interest in this shift. Some people love nothing better than busting out the graph paper, calculating time and material costs, and micromanaging their brand new gelatinous cube-based sanitation department. If you’re one of the people who helped make Matt Colville the proud owner of a “top 100 of all time Kickstarter,” chances are you know what I’m talking about. (And if you’re into 5e and haven’t heard about Strongholds & Followers, you should go and give it a look.) For other players, the shift in style is an unwelcome intrusion. This conflict of interests in not easy to navigate.
I remember a particularly impatient rogue from a few years back who suffered from this dilemma. It was a hex crawl game, and we’d been tasked with mapping our kingdom’s unsettled wildlands. After coming across the standard set of haunted ruins we busied ourselves by cleaning up the site, fortifying the citadel, and making the place ready for settlers. By the time we’d finished renovating the ancient elven bath house, the rogue was ready to burst.
“I heard there was a dungeon nearby. Have you guys heard that rumor? I’ve heard that rumor. We should probably go and do that. Like a family. Like we used to.”
We needed to show off the new digs to our king though, so we decided it would be best to set up a tournament for the purpose. We sent out the call, painted some landing strip illusions on the ground, and waited for Hippogriff One to arrive.
“Seriously guys. There’s a dungeon. Can we please explore the dungeon?”
Intrigue followed. Questing knights poured in from all quarters. Our resident fighter disguised herself as a mystery knight, the better to surprise her disapproving mother by winning the tourney and making a grand reveal.
“I guess I’ll learn how to make poisons,” said the impatient rogue. “Yay.” It was a sarcastic sort of ‘yay.’
This all leads me to my question of the day. When you’ve got a group that’s split between entrepreneurial players—the sort that are eager to start businesses and manage kingdoms—and others who just want to get back to adventuring, how do you go about pleasing both sides? Is this an irreconcilable difference, or can you make the business owners and the impatient rogues happy in the same campaign? Let’s hear your ideas it in the comments!
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Ah, I’m actually running into this very problem now. I myself am a planner; while I can improv as needed if there’s a chance to coordinate something I do. One other member of my party is less interested and would rather keep things moving forward in the direction of plot or danger. The funny thing is, he wants to keep going forward but doesn’t want to get into more danger than e can handle, whereas I wish to take time to plan so we have a conceivable idea of how to deal with enemies above our weight class.
For example we recently discovered the presence of a young dragon in the ruins of a village. He’s nesting there with a dragon’s horde that would no doubt entice adventurers. Of corse because it’s guarded by a dragon, he wants nothing to do with it; better that we take on a goblin fortress than a dragon in his lair. Fair enough, then let’s plan our attack carefully. Nope; he wants nothing to do with the dragon or it’s treasure. The rest of the party is too passive, they don’t mind to help me since I have a plan, but they don’t want to get in over their heads either. It becomes a conflict between me and him.
The GM is of little help. Of course he doesn’t want to make the decision for us, but it doesn’t help that he makes vague comments about the dangers of a dragon, even a young one, and even though I am more than willing to spell out my plans I can’t help but feel he’s going to try and screw with gebplan just to ensure it won’t be a clean getaway. Perhaps that’s just my own paranoia. But I’d rather be wrong with my paranoia then right about it.
Additionally there was some trouble I ran into when I mentioned wanting to somehow improve a village we had to work out of. The problem was relatively simple enough; the mayor was corrupt and let a gang of bandits essentially take over the village, so I figured it would be in our best interest to have him replaced so we don’t gave to worry about him double crossing us out of fear down the line. Of course the same player was just no help; he figured that since this wasn’t his town and weren’t going to live there, what happens there is t his business. Which of course is easy for him to say since we just cleaned up the mess the mayor made, and now all we have is his belated promise to never don’t again. Which I doubt.
It’s almost gotten to the point where I have to start doing this stuff behind the scene because most of the party is too indecisive to make their own decisions, and the GM only listens to complaints, and one person is impatient. I hesitate over stepping my bounds and calling them out for fear of being an aggressive e power player, but frankly if they’re going to twist my arm what else could I do but either let them bully me into submission or stand up for myself?
I suppose I could always just leave too, but isn’t that too just a power move to get my way in the end, even if that means never going back?
Standard first question: Have you and the impatient player talked about this? Dude might not even know it’s a problem if you haven’t tried to talk to him about it out-of-game.
The other thing I might suggest is bringing it back to in-character. It could be a fun dynamic if you guys did a “my way / your way” coin flip on these sorts of disagreements.
Speaking for myself, I have some sympathy for the whole “the GM is going to screw over my plans anyway” thing. I think that it’s best to have an outline of the way you’d like your carefully orchestrated dragon murder to go, but then go in expecting things to go wrong. It would be awfully boring if every plan went perfectly, you know? To that end, I find that spending more than 10-20 minutes on in-game planning can get old. I’m thinking of a notorious Shadowrun game that took 2.5 sessions to plan a simple car-jacking caper, and I was ready to pull my hair out by the end. Simple plans, few moving parts, and a short IRL planning time can help in this scenario.
Whatever you do, I hope it works out well for you. Good luck out there, and happy gaming.
The best thing to do when you’ve got split interests like that is to simply create a point where the managerial types have nothing left to do for a big event, or better yet, create a way to improve the party’s business by diving into a quest.
Maybe the king who will be coming to check out your castle really loves this specific colour of tablecloth, the dye of which has not been reproduced in over a hundred years, ever since the rare lavender-blooded ostrich went extinct. Luckily, there’s an old fortress from back when Lavender-blooded Ostriches were common nearby. It’s just a matter of clearing the traps and monsters, and acquiring the coveted Imperial Fuchsia Tablecloth! (The fact that the Ostrich has Lavender coloured blood has nothing to do with the dye, actually. The Dye is actually made from the ostriches’ pee.)
…Ok, that’s a silly example. But you can easily create adventure hooks in-between the business management, that ties directly to it to please both sides. The party’s supply train that they paid for keeps getting raided, which can easily open up into a grand conspiracy to stop cultists from destroying the world, which both satisfies the adventure lovers and the managers, as a destroyed world would really cut into their Q1 profits.
I think you and I have found the same solution. Check out the downtime rules over here:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/downtime/
I love the idea of a robust system that rewards interacting with the non-combat aspects of play, but in practice it was just too much bookkeeping for my group. I wound up using the price-guide for structures and the building-specific events tables…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/downtime/#TOC-Building-specific-Events
…as inspiration for quick in-town encounters. That seemed to satisfy the simulation urge without giving up too much in terms of flow. In other words, encounters rather than mechanical rolls became the go-to solution.
The advice I’ve always received is to handle downtime between sessions.
That said, I’ve never had a GM who gave downtime, and my GM is setting up a lot of pressing issues that we’re gonna need to deal with as soon as we get out of the eponymous Tomb of Annihilation.
This has been a big advantage for me in the megadungeon style. Players dictate the pace. Unless there’s some plot-specific event going on, you can rest in town and head down to the dungeon as desired.
I wish that more plot-driven games had that mindset. It’s cool to chase the villain and foil his plots in the nick of time, but giving a week or two between missions will make the world feel a bit more plausible. It will also allow all your crafters and kingdom builders to show off those parts of their characters.
Tension is all well and good, and you should absolutely be racing against a ticking clock some of the time, but the key is dynamics. If everything is rush-and-hurry in every single session, it becomes exhausting rather than exhilarating.
I agree, sadly, even though individual bad guys might take a vacation, evil as a whole is always up to something that warrants a hammer to the side of the skull.
Since I’m GMing Kingmaker atm, downtime is kinda baked into the whole campaign. Luckily all my players picked up some kind of downtime hobby by now, like raising a owlbear pup as their own son, and are fairly interested in the kingdombuilding.
We mostly do one session just kingdom turns every few weeks, and hexploration/questing the rest of the time, and that seems to be a good balance for everybody involved.
Do you do the kingdom turns at the table or as play-by-post?
We do them at the table, one 4 hour session and we managed about 15 turns. But you really need some kind of autosheet to automate the kingdom stuff, otherwise takes way longer and requires a lot more work
I’ve never played Kingmaker, but I’m under the impression that the system is pretty…mechanical I guess? As in, it feels very different from the normal course of play. Do you usually alternate kingdom building session / adventure session?
You’re supposed to. Or do a few turns of ‘kingdom building’ and then spend the rest of the session questing.
I thought about running it and was going to do kingdom building via email between sessions.
It works out to about one kingdom session every 2 month in a weekly game, the rest is just adventuring.
It took a few turns to get used to the Kingdom system, but after getting used to it it’s a lot of fun.
The expensive things that players most often end up acquiring via murder of its’ prior owners (As in today’s comic) in my experience tend to be ships, and forts.
My party just before entering the eponymous (Such a fun word) tomb killed the leadership of some Yuan-Ti dwelling in a ruined palace of a lost city, and had the underlings make peace with the other inhabitants of said lost city (Grungs and Kobolds meaning that the people we’re trying to get to cooperate for the good of civilization are Lawful Evil slaving poison dart frog-people, (Who we’ve convinced to kill their own leadership and abandon slavery) Lawful Evil tunnel-dragon people, (Who were transplanted there by a Lich to do maintenance, and are exclusively male meaning that it’s not the beginnings of a great Kobold civilization) and Neutral Evil Snake people (Who when subdued and questioned aboot what they’d do if spared within a Zone of Truth all talked aboot wanting to do things like start Bed & Breakfasts or sell candied eggs, so maybe they’re not so bad) our decision to not completely massacre our enemies, we may have planted the seeds of the wimpiest evil empire) so I guess instead of taking over a business, fort, or ship; my party got a city.
Heh. I guess you’ve also got a solution to last week’s comic if you’re claiming ships. Well done that man!
I handle this issue via the ‘Campaign Contract’. Is the game I’m running meant to focus on adventure? Character intrigue? A mix of both?
Then the Players know in advance what they are signing up for.
I’m thinking of the 4e idea of tiers in today’s comic. The transition between heroic and paragon tier is where this sort of thing tends to take place. That seems to be part of fantasy adventuring rather than any one campaign style. In other words, I’m wondering whether the shift is baked into the hobby rather than optional on a campaign-to-campaign basis.
I don’t see any problem, in my D&D 5E game my curtains school wizard, has just acquired the purple curtains that match the queen eyes. Once the party gets the indigo drapes we will level up, and will get a check to finally fund our exploration of the dye islands, that is the kind of Design & Decoration 5E game i like 🙂
I think that you and Laurel would enjoy adventuring together. Any interior decorating-based campaign would get a thumbs up from her.
Well Design & Decoration 5E it is not that bad, some people still like 3.5E more, some less. If she wants to do a interior decorating based campaign she could check the rules about color’s palates in Pricefinder. A +3 bonus to ambient light is a really good thing. It may give her good ideas 🙂
I have a feeling that Horsepower may have a thing or two to say about this…
“What the fuck is wrong with you guys?”
–Horsepower
Well that joke’s made my day. Thanks!
😀
I’ve been in that situation during a Kingmaker game. To which you might say – why the hell were you playing Kingmaker if you don’t like downtime? Well, long story short, I was playing a one-shot with friends that was meant to develop into a full-on campaign. We voted after the one-shot for which adventure path to run and I got outvoted. Pro-tip: Never vote for the AP, kids. Make a uniform decision everyone’s happy with.
It wasn’t that I’m not a fan of downtime exactly – I just don’t like Kingdom Building. Particularly that kind of Kingdom Building. It was the 2 dudes interested in it that were talking with the GM about buildings and going through spreadsheets and lists for what felt like forever. Not the kind of roleplaying experience I’m looking for, to be honest. I would have loved to talk about what our characters were doing while the peasants were building our farms and taverns, but nobody else seemed interested, sadly.
Now I’m in a new Kingmaker campaign which is going much better – we’re doing Kingdom building less often and it goes by rather painlessly. Plus, there’s almost always a bonus event happening related to the story, so it’s always a treat at the end.
I like being able to point at the growing city map as “here’s a cool thing that I made.” But at the end of the day, I think I’m in the same boat. The downtime rules and the caravan rules were too much for me. I have a suspicion that kingdom building (if I ever got around to Kingmaker) would fall into the same category.
Cool bonus events loosely inspired by kingdom building projects however… I’m down for that mess all day every day.
My group had something like that going on. They had helped out a group of druids a while back, and one of their quest rewards was a recipe book for really potent alcohol. Naturally, they bought a seedy tavern in one of the shadier cities and sold it as “druid fluid”, which became so wildly popular that they opened up an entire franchise across the continent.
It was fun for a while, but as the DM I didn’t sign up to run Tavern Simulator, so eventually they handed off their empire to some underlings to manage for them while they adventured for more riches to feed into their business. It became a bit of a running gag that no matter how small or crappy of a town they tripped upon, it always had one of their taverns in it for the two and a half people who lived there. It became almost as amusing seeing what random path their underlings took managing the stupid things as it was actually starting it up in the first place.
On the off chance you were unaware:
https://untappd.com/b/middle-ages-brewing-druid-fluid/4724
Order some and blow your players’ minds!
For our group, we have a Discord server for keeping in touch between game sessions. General chat, review of the last adventure, etc. And that’s where I’ve found it’s much easier to do the entrepreneurial stuff, so that the gaming session can focus more on the adventure stuff.
We were awarded (optionally, but we took it) an apple orchard for clearing out a haunting there. (The original owner was dead.) So working out the details of running an apple/cider business in the background can be figured out in real-life ‘downtime’, and it’s just a minor note when we return to the actual gaming session. Same thing with the guild being run, etc.
As I write, I’m at a Super 8 somewhere in Nebraska, in the process of moving cross-country. I suspect I’ll be doing a lot more between-sessions stuff with my suddenly-online-only group in the coming months. Your apple orchard seems like a good model for the kind of interaction I’m looking for.
One of my players really, really likes going through the logistics for things, to the point of calculating precisely how much money a bandit clan should earn on a monthly basis with a protection racket, taking into account cost of recruitment, relevant skill checks, gear costs, the local economy, competition from other bandits, and viable territory boundaries. Luckily, I live with him and can make him do a lot of the heavy lifting on some of my GM work. Between that and the nonsense he goes through for his characters (three crafting-focused PCs in a row), as well as taking care of the group’s lumber mill and multiple farmsteads, he is kept occupied and the group has a steady source of income. Most of the sessions are actual adventuring, with just the occasional “It’s been another month, guys! Money time!”
So your rogue is crafting poisons huh… “Hey guys, the king has been murdered and the prince is looking for a scapegoat so we should probably skip town for a few weeks.”