Philosophizing
It was late in the campaign. I was playing a bombastic sort of PC t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶i̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶o̶f̶ based loosely on Dr. Orpheus. I’d been struck permanently blind by an evil cleric.
“Nooooo! Mine eyes! Tell me true: have we emerged victorious?”
“Yeah. The cultists are dead.”
“By the black river that flows betwixt here the hereafter… We live to tell the tale!”
“Sure man. Whatever. You want us to take you to a temple or something?”
“Pray do.”
Up to that point in the campaign, I’d been a decidedly neutral sort of PC. I’d cast animate dead enough times to raise a few eyebrows, and had a near-miss with a paladin that took exception to my methods. I figured that I was being generally heroic enough to keep from slipping into full-on Evil, but the question of animating dead had been a quiet presence throughout the campaign. I guess my GM was paying attention to that character arc, because the closest temple belonged to the campaign’s death goddess. She wasn’t much of a fan of undeath.
“Why should I restore your sight?” asked the temple priestess. “You who commit such blasphemy deserve no blessing from the Lady of Graves.”
I’ll spare you the drawn-out conversation that followed. You’ve probably seen threads like it elsewhere, along with the super-interesting and very-original idea of using undead labor for the common good. Suffice it to say that Kant, utilitarianism, and Star Trek quotes all made it into a lineup of Greatest Hits from Philosophy 101. In retrospect, it wasn’t a very interesting conversation. The rest of the table was getting antsy to move on to the next adventure, but I was super into-it. It was a spotlight moment. Major drama! Here was a chance for my character to make a Moral Decision.
“Very well. Henceforth I shall forswear the use of such fell magics.”
“Then open your eyes,” said the priestess.
My GM described the miraculous process of my vision coming back. The first sight I saw was of the temple’s magnificent stained glass windows, and in-character, it was a moving religions experience. It was also the moment where my own self-importance met the rest of the table’s irreverence.
“Ye gods!” I cried. “When I first came here, I was truly blind. But now—”
“Dude, are you really quoting ‘Amazing Grace’ right now?”
And thus my balloon was burst. There’s a reason that I identify with Wizard. I’m not too salty about it though, because I think I was going just a tad too hard on the philosophizing. You see, even though RPGs can theoretically handle any subject matter, I think that you’ve got to be careful when you’re going in for the heavy topics. It’s incredibly difficult to be deep and meaningful on the spur of the moment, and doubly so when the rest of the table just wants to stab the next monster.
In the typical D&D-style adventure game, I think it pays to go for introspection and profundity retroactively. Write a blog post. Do a bit of in-character journaling. At the table, make your character moment quick and painless, and definitely keep the Philosophy 101 stuff to five minutes or less. As with so many things in this hobby, it pays to know your table and read the room.
Question of the day then! Have you ever run into philosophical questions in your game? Did you dwell on them for multiple sessions and multiple hours, or did you yadda yadda your way through in order to get on with the adventure? Let’s here all about your accidental im14andthisisdeep moments down in the comments!
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The BBEG of my last campaign was a being of conflicting emotions and warped viewpoints. As such, it was possible for him to be redeemed; I imagined that, if the players went that route, that it all culminate into an emotional sequence of events, and get the players both thinking and feeling. Instead, it ended up being one player and the BBEG discussing philosophy for an hour, while the other players occasionally chimed in with their two cents.
I usually don’t go in for highly-mechanical takes on RP, but this strikes me as exactly the sort of setup where an Exalted-style “Social Combat” could work well.
https://exalted3e.obsidianportal.com/wikis/social-combat-cheat-sheet
The deepest philosophical conundrum I’ve ever had to debate (admit only for a few minutes in the session) was that of the typical “needs of the many vs the needs of the few” when it came to wiping out a few cities to stop a zombie apocalypse. The long story short is that we had three nukes we could use to eradicate three various horses, however if we used them too early when they were en route, we wouldn’t be able to get all of them due to how scattered they were. So the plan was to let the zombies surround and besiege three major cities to gather them all up, then nuke them.
While logical for the rest of my party, I spoke out due to the obvious implications of making three entire cities full of people who we don’t even know condemned to nuclear death. I brought it up to the party and NPC’s but they all more or less said “I wish there was another way but this is the only most effective way we can do this”. We went back and forth for a while and eventually we were able to ace at least one city thanks to a massive magic crystal that juiced up my Leomund’s Tiny Hut to city-wide level, but it still haunted my character that we had participated in events that killed over two million people, and countless undead. I also ended up getting super cancer.
Another that, which while not explored in-game, was something that I still think about today, and that’s the “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” trope. In short, I finally managed to raise my Paladin sorcerer to level 14, ready to face off against all manners of demons and evil lords for great justice and all that. So as he party was getting their own stuff settled, I mosey on down to ye old tavern for drinks and stuff. Naturally there I hear problems suited for the low level adventurers: wolves attacking livestock, bandits harassing traders, evil fey damming up a river. Small stuff compared to the war that me and my friends were going to end. I didn’t say anything at the time but I wondered, as a warrior who own oaths told me to always lend a hand to the weak and to fight evil wherever it revealed itself, was it right for me to ignore these issues because I’m already involved in a much larger conflict?
OoC, my DM told me if I wanted to deal with them at my level, I’d have to roll very badly or do completely suicidal things to lose. I’m talking like these bandits have to roll thirty or so Nat 20’s to beat my AC, and I would need to actively use my weakest stats with weapons I’m not proficient with to not hit them with anything that isn’t a nat 1.
It would’ve been trivial for me. But is that not why I took these oaths? To pick up my sword so that I can defend the common folk from the common enemy? Again it was never explored in the game but OoC I always thought that somehow, I did something wrong by not helping those people out with what would’ve been a trivial matter.
This is what I refer to as the “Elminster Conundrum.” Yeah, you have enough power that you could solve these problems with no real effort, but it still takes time to go there and do them. Even if each individual thing only takes a few minutes, solve them for every person in the city and you’ll be there for weeks. Once you’re up to that super-high-level, fate-of-the-multiverse type stuff, it’s great to help out where you can, but you also have to remember that there are a lot of people that can help with those small jobs, but very few who can do what you’re doing. You have to accept that you can’t solve every problem for every person you meet because eventually you do have to get on with saving the world. Thus, why I call it the Elminster Conundrum: Elminster could teleport all around the Forgotten Realms killing every pack of wolves or group of bandits that the shit farmers in Literally Nowhere need dead, but there are also a lot of much less powerful people that can do that just fine while Elminster deals with evil gods and demon lords and things like that.
Yeah, that’s more or less how internalized it myself, but even now I feel like I did the whole “You’ve become the very thing you swore to destroy” since my characters backstory was essentially that she felt abandoned by the Paladins who she thought could’ve helped her in a tight spot, but they didn’t, and so she broke off from them to be more heroic. And naturally, she failed to live up to those expectations when presented to her, because like those Paladins she hated, she too had a far greater duty more important than the struggles of those beneath her.
I dunno, on paper I did the right thing, but it still feels like I’ve been so wrapped up in participating in battles well above the common man’s perception that I start to wonder if I’m even fighting for their sake anymore. Becoming dissociated from my humble origins is one of those things as both a player and a character I try to avoid even as I get to higher levels.
That would be a hella fun session though. Have a bunch of high level characters and see how many low level adventures you can just steamroll through before you have to rest.
That must have been very bad horses.
Clearly Horses of the Apocalyspe.
No lie, these undead hordes did have Calvary, and I’ve grown to hate them. A zombie’s usual weakness is their sluggish speed, but a zombie on a skeleton horse with a lance is a fucking nightmare to defeat if they’re being coordinated by a Necromancer (which these zombies were). Calvary Lances OP.
Hey, if it’s good enough for President Thomas J. Whitmore, it’s good enough for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvQt-4YyeuU
GJ keeping the talk down to a few minutes. I find that when these differences of opinion come up in-game, it can spiral out to a morass of characters repeating their points of view without much progress.
As for the paladin, I think there’s a game-play problem built in there. It’s correct in-character to help the weak, but it’s not much fun to play. The rest of the table isn’t going to want to watch your dude beat up bandit camps or argue with dam-building pixies. I think that a quick and dirty solution could work: “Hey… Can I skip sleeping tonight to take care of these minor quests? I can save vs. fatigue or whatever, but I think my guy would lend a hand.”
Currently, I’m a player into a Descent into Avernus (this post will be spoiler-free). Our party consisted of both good and neutral PCs, and we had ended up picking up a few commoners during our daring heroics. The party ended up splitting up, one group going to get the commoners to safety, the others going to perform more heroics.
Alas, during the quest to get the commoners to safety, the DM rolled on a random encounter table that he found online, and so came forth a foe that the split party was too weak to beat. The random foe was willing to leave… but with the tribute of two sacrifices.
Oh, what a quandary! Truly, we must search deep within our souls, searching for the answer, searching for the least evil among terrible choices…
Except I didn’t get to do that, because I wasn’t there. In fact, all three good PC’s were part of the second group, around a kilometre away. So, rather than having some philosophical debate about what to do, the neutral PCs just decided that two dead<everyone dead, and sacrificed some commoners. One day, though… one day soon, with the party reunited, there shall be philosophy.
There shall be scoldings. Such scoldings!
YMMV, but I’m glad it was the neutral dudes in that situation. This is the kind of situation that, in theory, could represent a good character moment for your paladin. But it’s also the kind of situation that threatens to turn into a debate about trolley problems, and that mess isn’t why I sit down to roll dice.
If it were me as the paladin, and if I found out what happened, I’d be tempted to commiserate with the neutral dudes:
“I offer a sad smiles and say, ‘I only wish that I had been there instead. You did the best you could.'”
I think that kind of subtle self-righteousness has a better chance of getting through to a selfish character. Lecturing them and philosophizing at ’em is just going to cause resentment.
Of course, if that’s the character dynamic you’re going for, then play on. If I learned anything from the X-Men, it’s that in-fighting can be its own kind of fun.
Another way to look at it is that you’d be destroying the adventuring eco system. When the small fry newbies look and see every opportunity to make some scratch and get their name out there already taken they’ll move to greener pastures or give up entirely on adventuring, which means that should anything happen to you the people who WOULD have handled the small stuff are gone. On top of that it means that problems more your scale are being left unattended while you run around helping farmers. You stop a group of bandits meanwhile a cultist summoned a greater demon or devil, a necromancer is subjugating a town with the power of bones and a king is being impersonated or dethroned.
You gotta let the little guys learn and grow and earn their living while you make sure there’s still a world full of weak people to help.
As a DM the tone I go for is “Everything is puns, but everyone in-universe takes it completely seriously.” For example, the major Dwarven settlements are “The mountain of progress/Prog Rock”, “The mountain of wealth/Glam Rock”, “The mountain of tradition/Classic Rock”, and “The impenetrable mountain/Hard Rock”
I find that this tone results in players taking their characters very seriously, while doing things like naming their familiar “Dr. Hoot”.
I’m not sure Dr. Hoot is an owl: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/003/253/seriousmeme2.png
For some reason the wizard, whoes uncle was kidnapped by a exiled necromancer government/culture led by a mad wizard hell bent on getting his hands on the 5th element, which is capable of incredible destruction, was not a fan of the rest of the party wanting to kidnap one of their high ranking captains to get information on the wearabouts of his uncle and killing said captain.
I’m guessing that this was a subject of considerable (and lengthy) debate.
Not exactly because it was 1 vs 3. Now he gets to pretend to be said necromancer to lead the rest of the group into a trap.
This is a complete aside, but I somehow read ‘going in for the heavy topics’ as ‘going in with heavy lockpicks’…
The heavy lockpicks: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/know-your-role
Colin my games are 75% philosophy, 25% fights and 25% plot. What i do to not get people bored is do like The Simpsons and bury the philosophy under a heavy cape of other things. We, our DM and me, manage the philosophy as it were Epic Theatre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_theatre Sometimes we manage to make the other idi… players think, sometimes not, but we try to not get them bored just for our liking of philosophy. Also no PVP has manage to surpass our philosophical PVP. Who cares that Rovagug is about to get released? We are discussing Hegel and i am hitting him with a rusty lead pipe 😀
I do have a question for Cleric, If in the HBoH the rulebooks are Gospel, then 3° party material is apocryphal? Does he consider it right to use it? Or is there lies the way to damnation? o_O
I suspect I would become a murderhobo at your table.
As for Cleric, there’s a reason that he burned Thaumaturge at the stake:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cessation-of-hostilities
Why the murderhobo? You have the power to become anything you like, just like barbie 😛
But that was for edition fighting. I was asking for third party material 🙁
You know how it feels to bring a new book to the table only for your DM to see it and say to you: https://pics.me.me/according-to-this-youre-a-heretic-34146906.png It breaks my little hearth 🙁
I think perhaps you’re forgetting Thaumaturge’s first appearance: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unbalanced
Oh, right, i have forgotten of that 😛
Cleric did well in burning him 🙂
Surprising amount happens in OOC. Most recent examples I can think of…
Do simulacrums, being perfect copies of you, have a soul on account of having a personality? Can they procreate?
Are undeads puppeteered by necromantic energy (said energy being the animating force and personality), or do they contain the creatures soul, or a fragment of it, corrupted and tortured into their evil state until destruction (not unlike a Horcrux)?
Does a Valhalla-seeker have to die in honorable combat, worthy/glorious combat, or any combat, no matter how impossible your odds are?
Can an antipaladin get around the ‘dont do good acts’ rule by the nature of pride and selfishness meaning any action of good can be done with intent of selfish or prideful gain (e.g. saving a cat from a tree so you can get rewarded for it, or gain the people’s trust for a better betrayal later)?
You see? I already want to get on to the next combat.
See, it’s a little different when you’re PLAYING as a simulacrum and somehow find out at Level 1 that you indeed have a soul (without dying in the process), then spend half your downtime asking the Pharasmin Cleric so many random questions about how souls work that said Cleric starts getting suspicious of you.
Reflection Versatile Heritage is fun! https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?ID=51
One example that is less philosophy and more morality featured in Rise of the Runelords (spoilers below).
Namely, an ancient magical building was powered by level-draining an ancient pit lord. The dilemma here comes in whether it’s moral to free it of its millennia of torment and let it return to its plane (which might bite the PCs or their next of kin in the ass due to their longevity and scheming nature, and spit in the face of any of its victims), kill it whilst it’s helpless and weakened (dishonorable murder), or leave it to its torment (which means the PCs cannot progress without a sacrifice of their own to power the machine, but it’s stuck unless freed by a third party).
This is the same AP that gave us the goblin babies in cages.
I don’t mind hashing it out in-character, since I care about characters’ perspectives. Arguing the philosophy of these questions IRL, on the other hand, is not my idea of a good time.
Which way did you guys decide?
I don’t recall the caged babies bit, and I’ve played through it twice. :O
As for choices, first time, freed, as we all failed the checks to activate the machine and it offered to show us how. Second time, with a more savvy group, we killed it.
The goblins babies was an optional encounter in Book 1. I haven’t run the AP, but my GM mentioned that it came with a caveat about “maybe this isn’t for every table.”
Necromancy has this issue a lot. How evil is an evil spell? Does casting infernal healing turn you evil, even though its healing is lifesaving and leaves no actual evil consequence (outside of social stigma)?
Why is animating the dead always an evil act? Even if you have full unbreakable control (i.e. it can’t go wild in your absence) or if you use them for good. How different is using a body of a skeleton from a golem? And why are there so few classes that can do non-evil necromancy? You have to homebrew them into marionette tactics or something.
How evil is an evil spell? Two strikes rule. Read the manual:
“Cast me once, shame on me. Cast me twice, shame on you!”
Exactly!
It’s a trip to go through the Paizo forums and see different folks’ reaction to this ruling.
“Thanks for spelling it out!”
“Why would you spell that out?”
“Only two castings? That’s way too low. I should be able to dabble with necromancy for a good bit before I’m evil.”
“Two castings? That’s way too high! A single Evil spell and you’re evil. Case closed!”
The way I see it, it doesn’t actually NEED to have a philosophical reason. Since good and evil are objective forces in most settings, all it actually needs to do to be [EVIL] is simply to attract evil karma
Since I play and run GURPS, no Alignments and very often with questions left unanswered by the metaphysics of the game and GM, philosophic and ethical quandaries come up very often.
My current group is sort of experiencing one right now… it was just revealed that my dirty High Elf Psagent (little bit of Psi, Sage, and Agent (Agents are Rogues that don’t thief or stabby-stabby)) recently revealed, quite accidentally, that he’s not a really a Psi, he’s a Cultist of the Elder Things! (Cthulhu Mythos elder gods generally not helpful to the prime mundus lifeforms).
So I expect shortly for a low level discussion to go on around him as to what to do about this. I expect the general consensus to be “ignore it and hope it gets better on own”, except for our Adept (low level Cleric in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy) whose God is not down with Elder Things existing let alone having his devotee palling around with one of their ‘worshipers’.
Should make for fun times.
Note, my Elf Psagent doesn’t worship YOG-SOTHOTH, they just made a deal a long time ago… also Jareth isn’t ‘evil’… but he’s not ‘good’ either. He’s a bit obsessive, a bit lazy, and has odd ideas about what constitutes threatening behavior on the part of the people and creatures he meets… I mean he’s on amicable terms with an otyugh, he traded pleasantries with hobgoblins that all but said they were releasing “death” to stalk the city streets… but Demons? Right out. He puts them right back in the hell dimensions where they belong. Buying and selling souls? Now that’s evil… (despite his repeated insistence that elves don’t have souls and thus can’t be hornswoggled by demons or devils)
I think that’s the key. You aren’t grabbing the spotlight and forcing an ETHICAL DILEMMA. You’re presenting a situation for other characters to reac to. If other PCs want to make it a big deal, then that’s on them.
Probably an unnecessary warning, but I think do think it’s important to point out the practical implications. If you are planning on betraying your part in the name of the Will of the Elder Things, it’s a good idea to make sure that the group is down for PVP.
There was that classic thing caused to us by bored feys where our characters were confronted by their own dark sides, but we had no way to destroy them in combat (hit points were meaningless, it was kind of mental dreamscape thing) and the way to defeat them was to accept them, but if you did that then they’d kinda merge back into you and affect your alignment while if you kept rejecting them they’d still plague your dreams. It all was kind of weird.
There’s a fun trope in Exalted where, if you want to visit the infernal city of Malfeas, you must cross a desert for five days. Doesn’t matter how fast or slow you travel. Five days of travel.
As I understand it, the demons in Exalted are created by powerful human emotion. Since the PCs are Exalts, I figured their demons would be more powerful than average. And since there happened to be five PCs in my group with a five-day travel play lined, it seemed like a good time for character development demons to appear.
Everyone had to face their own personal demon. Confronting that demon or accepting it was all about RP rather than combat. Was a good time.
So, it sounds like great fun was had by all involved which is the most important thing, far more so than any mere details of setting canon.
That said, canonically demons in Exalted don’t really have anything to do with human emotions (as a general rule, a specific demon/species of demon, might they are a variable bunch). They are depending on the circle: The souls of one of the creators of the universe (each creator have several souls due to how spiritually mighty they are, instead of just having two like a human. 3rd circle), one of the souls of said souls (…so mighty even their souls have multiple souls), or a spiritual species created by either a 3rd or 2nd circle demon. (1st circle).
In theory the method used to create a 1st circle species could involve human emotions, but that would be just yet another unique method of doing that among the uncountable other ways that has been done.
In general humans just aren’t that metaphysically important in exalted, sure they dominate creation now, but back before the divine rebellion they where just a minor species among many grander ones, who happened to be cosmic mistletoe. By which I mean they where so insignificant and so weak that the creators of the universe didn’t bother making humanity incapable of attacking them directly the way they did with all the actually powerful beings. A trait which came back to bite them when the gods shared their power with human champions, creating the Exalted, and suddenly humanity was powerful enough to win said divine rebellion and dictate the terms of peace, like for instance:
“Infinite desert, you are going to surround the rest of your fellows and keep them away from the world. Also since we might want to cross you to do stuff, or to force your souls to cross so they can serve us for a bit it’s going to take five days to cross you.
No, we don’t care that you are infinite, five days and that’s final.”
It still sounds cool as hell through, and like a neater use of the exactly five days travel time than just having a timeskip.
Won’t go too in depth so as to avoid spoiling anything from Curse of the Crimson Throne, but my character had the choice of standing by while our recently killed friend was reanimated into a powerful undead, which was very much against my deity’s (Ragathiel) alignment, or going against the group (a very chaotic neutral lot) and stopping the spell. This was a very beloved GM-PC that everyone in the group liked a lot and had strong ties with our characters, so this was not an easy decision. Ultimately, I decided that my character would not stand by and allow this to happen.
I think I’m finally bringing back my Crimson Throne campaign this summer. We’re only in book 2, so thanks for the no-spoilers on that one.
Ain’t nothing wrong with big deal Moral Choices. I like ’em myself (clearly). The important bit is to only go in-depth with the navel gazing if the rest of the table is equally into it. Otherwise you risk the eye roll and the checking of the non-existent wrist watch. From the sound of it, you made a dramatic choice and got on with it. S’ok in my book. 🙂
Warforged “Does this unit have a soul?”
Technician “Let me check the update log…..huh, there it is, ‘installed soul.exe’ so, yes, apparently”
Warforged “neat (pause) warforged freedom!”
Technician “Oh crap, I’m going to get blamed for this aren’t I ?”
lol. I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened.
The best rp in my Kingmaker campaign came from the owlbear trapped in the Stag Lords keep. Wizard (me) and Cleric had a lengthy debate on animal morality, and whether it was better to ensure that it harmed nobody, or to trust it would be avoidant of people from now on. In the end, we set it free, and it left peacefully, but I placed an Arcane Mark on it, to claim ultimate victory, should it return and kill.
Owlbears are known for their superb RP.
Funny enough… when I ran that in GURPS¹ I had mostly the same moral dilemma come up for the group. It was a party of 3 PCs a Ritualist², a ‘Druid’², and a Water-Bender² (and then some NPCs, only one of which took part in the discussion).
The Druid was all about freeing the incredible beast, maybe even making friends with it and experimenting on it, the Ritualist and Water-Bender declared it not only Abomination³, but a danger. The Merchant (NPC) who was ‘funding the campaign” thought it would make a fine rug…
The Druid reminded them of where from flowed all healing in the group and politely recommended they think twice about taking her new bestest beast-buddy away from her lest she decide to experiment on them when they next fell unconscious at her feet…
Future healed wounds won out over worry about future wounds coming from an enraged-experimented-upon Owlbear.
1 – It was a Gamma World/Fantasy mashup where it was magic being wrought upon the world and literal worlds colliding that brought mutations (and magic and beasts and gods) not nukes and viral plagues.
2 – Ritualist, think Wizard with all the spells and the ability to ritually cast any of them, but with some more severe drawbacks on critically failed castings, and of course the more power spells take longer to prepare/cast. In practice, they tend to stick to a handle of very useful rituals each day (just like Wizards).
Druid in name only. Her ‘deity’ was the “Singer of Blood”, the Goddess of 1000 Harmonized Screams, Princess of Abominations, Mother of Monsters. Basically if a ‘Druid’ went all monster summoner/creator and monster “buffer” but with the ability to “buff” any living being by twisting it. Healing was a side thing, not her main attribute. The Owlbear was probably created either by her deity, or a mad-Ritualist.
Water-Bender is basically a GURPS ‘Sorcerer’, they have no functional limits on how many times per day they can use their powers, but it is tiring so uses per ‘encounter’ are functionally limited. This Character basically could create, shape, etc, water and other liquids. Yes, this eventually included the blood of his enemies.
3 – Funny enough, these three Characters were on this mission because the city they came from thought they were all Abominations in the eyes of the Good God… so for the Ritualist to literally say “It’s an abomination, it needs to be put down” was funny, as he was almost word-for-word quoting what his original sentence was for “practicing magic in Golconda* without theurgical licensing”.
Brevoy with a strong Abrahamic religion
I have found from my groups L5R games that it really helps with the problem mentioned in todays strip if the philosophical conversations involve multiple player characters but zero NPC’s.
That way say 2 players that are interested can have a neat conversation debating say aspects of honor/religion/philosopies and how it applies to past or future situations, while the GM is free to proceed with the matters for the more goal oriented players.
Transplanted to a DnD context an example could be that, the cleric could easily talk with the fighter about the merits of their different views on, while the wizard and the rouge first analyse and solve the magical trap on the chest with the treasure and then scout ahead for the next room. (The wizard through their familiar). Then whenever the next thing that involves the entire party happens, say the rouge+familiar returns from their scouting with relevant information, you just stop the conversation there and proceed with the game.
As an added bonus this also means that the scouters/general plot doers don’t have to feel bad about taking too much of the spotlight all at once and the GM don’t have to feel obligated to rush through it, or to interrupt the plot-stuff and jump around, to get back to someone else.
I’ll keep this uncharacteristically short because it’s the only thing I’ve found that works.
At the table, with the full group, there is a frustrating lack of time to explore RP interactions. We’re there to stab monsters and get goldz and exps! Not me or you so much, but the other players.
So any time there’s something that really interests me, I ask the GM if we can do a strict RP session-or just hold one with the player who’s story we’re caught up in at the moment. It sucks, there’s cool stuff we learn in those… but the rest of the table is either uninterested or LITERALLY does not have the time.
The line between being expecting your buddies to be a good audience for your “spotlight moments” and being a prima donna is a thin one. I second guess myself about it all the time. If RP never seems to happen though, then I think you’re probably right: extraordinary measures are in order, and a dedicated RP session might be necessary.
As a compromise, I have resorted to a little play by post on the group’s forum in the past. That way people can at least still see the RP that gets yadda yadda’d in-game.
Again, R20, the log is there for everyone to read.
The real issue is what it always is at tables. There are some players that are into it, some that are just there to kill monsters, and one guy who’s just happy to be there.
Going back to that other question about agreeing to game times… our game time is three hours a week. I really miss 6-8 hour long sessions in person with friends, but its how things are. In three hours… there’s not enough time to RP and do events. So shopping some of the extra RP out to bonus sessions with willing participants is the only way to do it.
Our GM incidentally is usually on board. He thinks it’s cool we’re interested enough in the world to participate more in it.
We had a discussion about whether the spell “rainbow blast” was gay, does that count as philosophical 😛