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View Full Version : Multi-Group/Table games like Assault on Singularity Base-how well does it work?



CoreBrute23
2017-01-14, 12:49 AM
So, Monte Cook released a stand alone adventure for their Cypher System called 'Assault on Singularity Base' (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/202739/Assault-on-Singularity-Base) where the players are a team of rebels trying to take down the base of the Empress. Pretty standard so far, don't know where the inspiration came from. :smallwink:

However, there's a twist. Your group of PCs are just 1 of 6 teams who are all hitting the base simultaneously, each contributing to the overall success of the mission. The idea is that you can run the adventure with 6 different groups of PCs, or even have multiple GMs run it with their own tables, pooling the results. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like a cool idea.

What I want to know, is has anyone tried Multi-group games like this before? Like, a campaign where in another part of the world a different group of heroes is holding off the armies of darkness while your group tries to drop the Locket of power into Frost Mountain, but at the same time anothe group is dealing with politics in a different kingdom to gather support.

Maybe not so varied, but I thought it could be a cool idea. Some of my friends and I here on the forum are planning to do a shared campaign world using Masks, but it's more like seperate comics in a shared universe, than everyone has the same final goal.

Thoughts? How has your success been in this area?

LokiRagnarok
2017-01-14, 07:50 PM
We did this with Paranoia twice, with 5 (?) groups simultaneously. The GMs communicated via group chat on their laptops, and players got switched between groups as their characterd rose/dropped in authorization tiers.
Our chars were all on the same space station, which meant that actions of other groups affected our environment. Eg levers already pressed, doors already opened, etc.

I don't remember how it ended the first time, but we had a blast.

The second time around, our group didn't even get to their real quest giver because of infighting (pretty par for the course in Paranoia). Then, some other group with higher authorization than ours put a nuke in the nuclear power generator and blew all the groups up. And the station to boot as well.
It was a pretty unfun experience, as it wasn't even "rocks fall, everbody dies" - it was "somebody else set loose an avalanche, everbody dies". Not sure how that could have been prevented.

GungHo
2017-01-16, 01:59 PM
My spin on this is that a co-DM and I share a world, and the group I lead is on one part of the "main" continent and the group he leads is on another, with different goals and themes. We alternate sessions. The two groups hear of the exploits of each other, and sometimes deal with some consequences (sometimes letting a bad guy go means he shows up somewhere else [though not necessarily as a bad guy]), but they've never met each other. They have worked together (without realizing it) to stop really bad things. It's a "generational" game, to boot, so some of these people are the descendants/students of prior characters, and cross-continent travel is not unknown, so it's possible for there to be some intermix that way.

For the board game, this sounds like it'd be something fun to do as a team building exercise or at a convention. In fact, we've done similar things (not board games, but roleplaying of a sort, nonetheless) at corporate retreats, where logical problems are bigger than the individual teams and must be assembled without folks necessarily understanding what the final product actually was.