rgrove0172 said:
Perhaps the first of the group travels to a distant city, where he wanders for a few days, gets in a tavern brawl, hooks up with the local militia and goes out on patrol - during which time he meets the next guy in the group... etc. Such action would require at least an entire session in my book, and since we only play about once a month, it would seriously delay the entrance of the other characters.
rgrove0172 said:
I usually try a "Star Wars" approach when I start a new campaign with new characters.
That would work sure but it would be a bit tough telling a player that they would have to wait a month or so before they could join the game. Then another player that it would be two months etc.
Again, I think you're seeing it too cut and dried, and probably a little too linearly.
You dont'have to time it, and you don't have to already know that it's going to be a month of real-time before character A can possibly meet character B.
Look at the atchetypes tha are chosen. An easy example is Han Solo. Ben knew that they needed someone rugged to get them to Alderaan, so he went to the catina at Mos Eisley with Luke where he had a few contacts, namely Chewbacca, and old friend of his mentor Yoda. Further back, C-3PO and R2-D2 are together, then they meet Luke and tell him about Ben, which sets another mystery which quickly leads the three of them to Obi-Wan Kenobi, who now calls himself Ben.
2 character teams are a good bet. Usually I put the rougish characters together, the professional characters are loners. I also look at racial break downs to see if there's an interesting fit, or some hook that might have put a number of characters together to begin with. In other words, if my four characters are a Shemite Nomad, a Nord Barbarian, a Vendiyan Noble and a Zamoran Thief, how do I work the Noble into things? The Nordhiemer? What I dicided was that Zamora was in the middle of all of thier respective "starting points" so I made that the focus. It seemed more likely that a Nordhiemer Barbarian would have wandered south or been captured as slave and taken south (given she was female) and been abler to make a life solo. I pairedd her with the Thief for an echo of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. Then, I had the Shemite and the Noble. The noble was so far from home, and I like the displaced pricess motif, just like Leia or Sleeping Beauty, so I had her kidnapped and being taken to Zamora. The nomad became my "stranger". Like Old Ben or Han Solo, and maybe a little of Clint Eastwood's "mysterious stranger", she was a part of a caravan that had long since been ambushed, sacked and left for dead, but she had vowed to herself to never give up trying to hunt down those villains. Therefore, she wandered the area of the King's Road with this secret past and stubled across the Noble and her kidnappers at roughly the same to as the Thief and Barbarian.
The Noble sees that the members of the band are not Vendiyan traders, but Zamorans in disguise with a Vendiyan noble female hidden in one of thier wagons. The Thief and Barbarian see an opportunity, both in hitting the caravan and in kidnapping the noble for themselves. The noble just wants free, but also has infomation about her kidnappers that the others don't have that will lead them to further adventures, but they all have to learn to come together as a team. The initial combat starts, an attack on a caravan of imposters holding an exotic female captive, and nobody knows who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
That was the first session.
rgrove0172 said:
What Im hearing in this thread is that this too would be considered hedging. Why cant the guy take off down the east road and have grand adventures on his own? Shouldnt be too hard to just whip up a seperate adventure on the fly that down the road will bring him back into the groups somehow.
Easy? Yes, I suppose it would be easy to develop an adventure for him, but your job as GM, even moreso in Conan, is to hook the group together.
The Thief player above, boy...he was the same way,
and he fought incessantl;y with the other players, wanting to be in charge, dictate the path of the group, go off on his own, etc.
When he forced the issue, I let him. He went off on his own, ran into about 20 Stygian guards around a mysterious wagon. Still undetered, I decided to
let him get away with all the necessary hide and move silently rolls to get to the wagon and sneak in through the top, only to be attacked by the giant serpent within, failing the poison save...again all on convenient GM fiat for (ahem) dramatic reasons. The rest of the players were annoyed that he'd gone off, that I'd allowed it to happen and even more annoyed when they realized that now, somehow, they felt compelled to rescue him.
But how did they find out he was in trouble?
I allowed player knowledge to seep in and they just showed up to save the day. Also, they wanted a team, and he didn't. I showed him in under 10 minutes that wandering off without supoport is bloody dangerous, appealed to the rest of the group's sense of cameraderie and team-play, brought the group back together and, once they were done, had a connection develop between that Stygian wagon and where they all needed to go next to get to the bottom of things.
Afterwards, The players, in character, told the Thief that next time he was on his own. The Barbarian player got to say "And I'm getting tired of always saving your hide...you always wander off! What about our oath?"
I was dumb struck. There was no oath, but the player made it up on the spot to keep things on the track
that sher wanted and made it clear to the player to stick with the groupo, or at least the Barbarian, from here on out. It was brilliant. The Thief was still petulant with the Noble until she leveled up in Temptress, which we played as her finally revealing her hidden seduction skills learned in court. One manipulative sneak attack from her later and the Thief was locked in.
:wink:
