Life as an Old Gamer, Part 2
by Tom McNeil
We’ve had to adjust our games in several ways to accommodate our busy schedules. Frequently, not every player can be at the game.
The biggest thing we had to change was having major plot points that were derived from individual character backgrounds. Darth Vader being Luke’s father is interesting but if Luke only plays six games out of ten, then timing that big reveal is difficult. What if Luke went on a business trip after his training with Yoda and didn’t return until he knocked on the door of Jabba’s palace?
Encounters have to be scalable. The big fight against the gnoll horde might involve anywhere from two to five PC’s. The prescription for scaling a horde is easy – just add or take away gnolls as needed for pain. Scaling something like a dragon is not. Make it too small and, though it may be a tough fight for two PC’s, it looks too small to have been the big menace of the story. Make it too big and its breath weapon kills everyone in the first round. Sometimes you just can’t, or shouldn’t, scale an encounter. If you are setting up campaign’s big finish, you might have to tread water for a session or two until everyone can be there. The trick is to make it look like you aren’t really treading water. I often keep extra encounters in reserve in case I need to pad a session enough to postpone the big fight until next week. It’s hard to pull off without frustrating the players. If you drop in an extra encounter of some type, you have to make it look like it’s been waiting for them the whole time, not just something that appeared suddenly out of nowhere.
Every obstacle has to have multiple solutions. While this is true in general it becomes much more important when you don’t know which players are going to be there. Getting past the trap you designed for the thief is harder when said thief is stuck at home with a sick kid. You need to make sure that if there isn’t any way past the trap, the party at least has some other place to go. (Consider this another argument against using a railroad plot.)
Plot elements have to be short and portable. Having an encounter with the wizard’s long lost brother is fine, as long as you can drop it into any session and conclude it in the same session. If you span sessions, the wizard’s brother may end up wondering where the wizard went. This is easier in a sandbox style game, but the more linear your plot, the more difficult this becomes.
All these limitations may sound like they suck the fun out of our games, but they don’t. We wouldn’t put so much effort into continuing our gaming if we weren’t enjoying it. Next up, I’ll talk about how our games play out.
