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Kesnit
2013-01-28, 07:10 PM
My wife and I have run into a problem with our gaming group. First, the people involved...


Me: Me, duh.
S: My wife.
JG: My best friend and the person who introduced S and me. He was the best man in our wedding.
V: My wife's best friend and the ST of the game in question. She was the maid-of-honor at our wedding.
JA: V's long-time boyfriend
JH: A former co-worker of my wife.
K: A school friend of V and JG.

The gaming group has been playing together (except for K) for at least 4 years. My wife and I played with them until we moved away for 3 years. They continued to play together, and we rejoined the group when we moved back to town.

When S and I started playing with them again, JG was finishing up a Mage: the Awakening game that he had been running. He wanted to take a break from running and asked for volunteers to run a new game. V said she was interested in trying to run (she's never ST'ed before), and started a Changling: the Lost game.

The game was a little rough starting out, but V was a new ST and we gave her the benefit of the doubt. JG and JA got a lot of facetime, which meant the rest of us sat there and did nothing, but V was learning, and we weren't slapped down or anything when we stepped in. Plus, JG and JA are enthusiastic players, so they pushed their characters forward.

As time went on, though, V got a lot better at including everyone. There were still times when the party split and she had to switch back and forth between the groups, but she did a god job of balancing the time she gave to everyone. She also asked for goals our characters would have and intentionally wrote plot hooks to give the PCs a chance to fulfill their goals. (For example, my PC's goal is to become the Winter King. So V set it up that the old King was a Loyalist and the crown was lost when he was discovered. The Winter Court agreed that whoever found the crown would be the Monarch.)

Then there was the last game... JA had said he wanted to get involved in organized crime* in the city, so V had him meet a low-level thief and set up a job with his network. Turns out, the planned theft was of an art gallery where JG's character worked as a night janitor. There were some funny parts to the scene (like where JA could not attack JG's character, even though JG was attacking, because of the Motley pledge). But for the most part, it involved V running a scene for 2 hours with only 2 PC's involved. (The rest of the party had no reason to know what was going on, so had no reason to be there. S ended up playing with her phone. K and I read books. JH dozed off.)

When the scene finally ended, we jumped to the next day. V, to her credit, tried to get the rest of us involved. (JG and JA walked away from the table briefly to make sure V focused on us.) However, S and I both said what our characters would do would involve the whole party. JH didn't really have anything he wanted his character to do. (He is a rather passive player. He goes along with what everyone else is doing, but never really takes the lead.) K did have something for her PC, but that scene was very short, and also her alone. By the time we got all the PC's together, there wasn't a lot of time left to play. (Our game night is Wednesday and everyone has to get up early for work, so we can't play too late.)

Thursday morning, S and I sent V a message giving her some "constructive criticism" on the 2 hour scene. Hopefully, that kind of thing won't happen again, but I'm not too hopeful. V was getting better about including everyone, but JG and JA are aggressive players and put themselves out there as much as they can. (S runs a Vampire: the Requiem game on alternating weeks with the same group, and JG and JA play the same way in her game.) JG is also a bit of a munchkin and likes playing a social PC, both of which can lead to him taking a leading role. I really don't think the attention V pays to JA is connected to their RL relationship.

Does anyone have any tips for what S and I can do if this sort of thing continues? Leaving the group is obviously not an option. They are our friends outside of gaming, and our group is the only nWoD we know of in this area.



* Joining the Mob is not a problem. Most of the party are either on the wrong side of the law, or dance the line. My PC is a drug dealer. S is playing a stripper. The party broke into a crime scene to steal evidence about an investigation that is the overarching storyline.

Gnomish Wanderer
2013-01-28, 07:18 PM
Hm. It sounds like you're doing a good job with communicating to the Storyteller that you'd like to be included more, and it sounds like she's hardpressed to try to do so. You do have a lot of players, which makes it a little harder to include everyone as is. So I'd say she's performing admirably for a new Storyteller.

What I would suggest is 'include yourselves'. It's really the only thing I think could make this work. It might take stretching the belief of what your character would do or outright changing small aspects of your character's personality, but help the new ST out. If there's a private conversation, have your character bring the other two along an walk into the room or something to 'grab your keys' and overhear the whole thing. If they're planning a heist, mention special talents your character has that could be helpful, ooc or not, and make sure they include everyone. Become a mini-storyteller yourself and help the game run more smoothly.

You could also ask if she could use some help storytelling and have one of the players drop out to actually become a second storyteller. That would allow you to run more than one scene at a time or at least help include the players getting left out.

Yora
2013-01-28, 07:43 PM
I think the best thing to do in such situation is mentioning that such adventures are great, but things that require the group to split up and playing seperately isn't really fun. Since time is scarce and it's a group activity, players often have to make their characters do descisions that may not be the most obvious thing for the characters to do in a situation, and instead go with the second best choice that works better with keeping the game running. It's the same thing with not stealing from the other PCs or trying to murder one another. It might make sense from a narrative point, but doesn't really work to make the game fun for everyone.
Depending on long you expect this to continue, the group could finish this one thing up and then not doing it again, or if it will probably take a lot more time, you could explain the problem and ask if they can speed it up to get the rest of the game running again quickly.

I thinking by putting out the open question "Could we agree that in the future, we won't do things that split the party for more than a short time?" won't offend anyone.

ArcturusV
2013-01-28, 07:51 PM
Well, we've all spent days/nights doing things we normally wouldn't just because a friend needed help, or could use help, or just wanted the company. So it's not even that weird ICily that you might ask to insert your characters into whatever is going on.

It can also give your group a natural rhythm which might help your Storyteller in that regard. Set up a sort of rotation of, "Okay, I helped YOU with ___... now you owe me one and I'm collecting tomorrow." or the like. It's a natural dynamic and it might force the two in question to take more of a passive role at least every other session or so as they are basically tagging along on YOUR quest and interests rather than you tagging on on theirs.

And there shouldn't be a problem with that, I'd think. But I do feel for you with the overly aggressive types who dominate sessions and take up almost all the time doing, well... things that don't involve you or that you don't care about.

W3bDragon
2013-01-29, 02:06 AM
But for the most part, it involved V running a scene for 2 hours with only 2 PC's involved. (The rest of the party had no reason to know what was going on, so had no reason to be there. S ended up playing with her phone. K and I read books. JH dozed off.)

My gaming group had similar issues when we played VtM for a while. The PCs would often split up for prolonged periods where it turned into a game of solo STing one PC and then another and then another. At one point, it was so bad that players would just leave the session once they finish their scene because they know they won't get to play for the rest of the night, and that the current action doesn't really matter to their characters.

We feel that this divergence stemmed from the style of game. WoD in general focuses on story more than anything. The Storyteller, as his title suggests, feels compelled to follow the story organically wherever it goes. In turn, the PCs also feel compelled to follow their characters' goals wherever they may lead. This dedication to the story tends to shelf normal tabletop gaming rules like "Find reasons to stay together." and "group fun over personal glory."

We never had issues like that with all of D&D's iterations as well as a bunch of other games we played. But whenever we went back to VtM, we'd run into the same issue. It wasn't until we came to this realization that our VtM gaming became more palatable. We hammered the "Find reasons to stay together" rule back into our heads, and things worked out.

Analytica
2013-01-29, 05:52 AM
We've had a lot of success particularly in WoD games with some co-storytelling/temporary characters stuff.

I.e. co-storytelling in this sense; when X and Y are doing their thing with the ST, players of character W and Z can either freeform how those characters hang out, do whatever everyday things they do, discuss the events of the game in-character, or even play out some scene from their character's shared part. Just winging it, and not doing anything which requires major ST approval. Pseudo-larping (i.e. doing character-appropriate body language) helps this further, as does props.

Temporary characters: the ST can include absent-character players as NPCs in the scene. Just give them one-line descriptions and goals ("you are courtier X who wants Y, and is actually controlled by someone to spy on this gathering"/"you are the prince's dutiful guard, the Jack of Hearts"). This can even include playing the voices in someone's head or just some sort of abstract commenting spirit of the situation.

It sounds weird, but works well for games with flowing time, i.e. not dungeon-scale time progression.