2 hours ago
A lot of the campaigns I've played in and run have been set up as open tables, where there's a fair amount of variance in who shows up week to week, and stable play has always felt like a natural outcome of that playstyle. Any campaign where you can get laid out for multiple weeks from severe injuries, resurrection sickness, training time, or whatever also really benefits from it. I really like the dynamic it brings, where you're bringing different characters to different delves based on the overall party composition/expected challenges/etc.
I'm actually a little torn on how much to emphasize downtime activities. The open table I currently run is in a slot that's always pretty tight on time, often with first time roleplayers, and with very little discussion off-table between weeks. That's a game I really want to keep at the table as much as possible, and to keep what's at the table generally focused on communal action (so, usually dungeon crawling).
I initially thought the formalized downtime system of His Majesty the Worm was really cool, but in practice the fact that it was so systematized and every player was Making Meaningful Choices during it meant that it took an enormous amount of time to resolve. Which isn't necessarily bad--it's still play--but the fact that it was so single player meant that it dragged a bit for me.
I do wish my players engaged with the surface world a little more, though, so what I've been toying with is the idea of tying downtime actions explicitly to money. It's not that you get one downtime action per gap between dungeon delves, it's that you can spend your money to make major moves in the local setting and become a known regional actor--or maybe a better way of saying it would be that becoming entangled in the surface world power network costs money.
I think in general there's a big split within troupe play--are you doing troupe play because you have a set of regular players each controlling multiple actors within the world, or are you doing troupe play because there's a bunch of drop in/drop out characters at your open table? Things like home bases and emphasis on downtime actions work great for the first, but for the second I've found that you really want to elide a lot of the crunchy "did you follow the rest of the party when they left to go hexcrawling?" questions and just let absent players exist in a nebulous void. For the second style, troupe play is less active mechanic and more facilitator--I'm not really sure what to do to help it along other than not look at it too closely.
For the first type, with a tight regular cast of players, I've found that the best support is just including things in the game that require time to carry out. Injuries that take you out of action for a month and a half. A big enough map that when one character goes off to explore B1 they're out of action for 3 weeks as they travel, so you need to spend a week playing as someone else (in the big ongoing campaign I've played in a character once drank two potions at once and got magically fucked up in a way that required a 6 month travel to a healer, leading to every player having an "A Team" and "Success Team" character). Item crafting or spell research or training times that take you out of action for a month.
I'm actually a little torn on how much to emphasize downtime activities. The open table I currently run is in a slot that's always pretty tight on time, often with first time roleplayers, and with very little discussion off-table between weeks. That's a game I really want to keep at the table as much as possible, and to keep what's at the table generally focused on communal action (so, usually dungeon crawling).
I initially thought the formalized downtime system of His Majesty the Worm was really cool, but in practice the fact that it was so systematized and every player was Making Meaningful Choices during it meant that it took an enormous amount of time to resolve. Which isn't necessarily bad--it's still play--but the fact that it was so single player meant that it dragged a bit for me.
I do wish my players engaged with the surface world a little more, though, so what I've been toying with is the idea of tying downtime actions explicitly to money. It's not that you get one downtime action per gap between dungeon delves, it's that you can spend your money to make major moves in the local setting and become a known regional actor--or maybe a better way of saying it would be that becoming entangled in the surface world power network costs money.
I think in general there's a big split within troupe play--are you doing troupe play because you have a set of regular players each controlling multiple actors within the world, or are you doing troupe play because there's a bunch of drop in/drop out characters at your open table? Things like home bases and emphasis on downtime actions work great for the first, but for the second I've found that you really want to elide a lot of the crunchy "did you follow the rest of the party when they left to go hexcrawling?" questions and just let absent players exist in a nebulous void. For the second style, troupe play is less active mechanic and more facilitator--I'm not really sure what to do to help it along other than not look at it too closely.
For the first type, with a tight regular cast of players, I've found that the best support is just including things in the game that require time to carry out. Injuries that take you out of action for a month and a half. A big enough map that when one character goes off to explore B1 they're out of action for 3 weeks as they travel, so you need to spend a week playing as someone else (in the big ongoing campaign I've played in a character once drank two potions at once and got magically fucked up in a way that required a 6 month travel to a healer, leading to every player having an "A Team" and "Success Team" character). Item crafting or spell research or training times that take you out of action for a month.