<snip> the group's been DOA for large chunks of that time. The recent
upswing in posts in the past month or two has been unusual (and welcome).
Well, OK, here's a question then. En Garde! doesn't have its own n.g. and I
have long considered this group to be rec.games.frp.theory in all but name,
so:
I'm running an En Garde! game for the Kingston Games Group. Now in my
experience, En Garde! seems to need at least ten active characters before it
starts to get interesting. With only slightly over half-a-dozen actively
interested players, I decided to permit each player to have two characters
just to keep the numbers up. In fact a couple of players have just advanced
to three characters, and as I have had a couple of dropouts this replaces
the losses. The game is being run as a face-to-face game at the club with
order forms submitted to me every other week.
Despite this, I'm finding running the game is a noticeable workload, and it
still feels a bit precarious - if one player pulls out and takes two or
three characters with him, the game is likely to fizzle, simply because En
Garde! relies on behind-the-scenes machinations, which requires a reasonably
large pool of players. And with multiple characters per player, we have a
constant risk of a plot against player A's character A hinging on the
actions of player A's character B. Even where the players can be trusted to
firewall, half the fun of En Garde! is not knowing what the other cliques
are up to. And when I get another job I expect I'll struggle to find time to
turn the results round in a week, which means the turns may become
three-weekly or four-weekly, and that's also likely to make the game fizzle.
Even if it doesn't fizzle, sustained long-term interest is unlikely to
happen. I'm starting to think perhaps I should aim to end the camapign after
about 9-18 realtime months, i.e. 3 years game time.
I did initially state that players were expected to keep their characters
separate - i.e. each player's character is an NPC as far as all the others
are concerned. If I reversed that decision and permitted them to be played
as a team, the plot problem would be eased (perhaps), but then some
character teams would turn out to be much more powerful than others, and
game balance problems would become an issue.
Perhaps the game needs a defined endpoint. I've set it early (1607); the
next Louis arrives in a few years' time. If I declared the game 'winnable' -
the first character to SL 18 is the winner, or the first to win a dozen
duels, or the first to amass 10,000 crowns in wealth, or the character who
has risen the most SLs by the time Louis arrives on the throne, then the
game could go out with a bang. Trouble is, what's a fair victory condition?
Highest SL favours the characters who started at a high SL. Greatest SL gain
favours the characters who started out low. A wealth target massively
favours those with the greatest income. Can anyone suggest something less
blatantly skewed towards certain characters, given that the game has already
been running for six game months?
The setting is a semi-humorous pastiche - sort of perpetual mid-1600s in
tone. Many characters - and all the mistresses - have silly names, and the
feedback newsletter is in a slightly comic Court Circular style, which fits
the tone of En Garde quite well. Link here:
http://www.simon-smith.org/en_garde/
The workload issue is not a huge problem at the moment, but it is
disproportionately time-consuming to give everyone their feedback for the
number of characters. If there were more characters, I would start being
able to cut-and-paste more results, but at present it takes a few hours to
do their feedback, and there is annoyingly little that I can recycle between
different characters.
I don't want to diverge too far from the vanilla En Garde! rules, but the
game probably needs a bit more meat to it than it currently has. I have
already considered - and rejected - adding options published in rules like
The Paris Tribune or various En Garde! games published on the web - such as
joining the Navy or the clergy rather than just the army, because I feel the
'game environment' needs to be small enough that characters are forced to
compete for limited resources - military posts, for example. This makes them
pretty big fish in a small pond.
So, what would you lot do under these circumstances? I know at least one
lady here has years' experience playing multiple characters. Any tips you'd
care to share :-)
--
Simon Smith
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