Parallel Game

[strangebloke]

Hey all.

I'm running a campaign where the PCs are mercenaries during a war for the throne. I've got a whole subsystem set up for tracking the positions of various factions in the game, as missions occur and time passes. Also, to facilitate dead characters getting replaced, the premise is that everyone in the party comes from the same hometown. Future characters will also come from that hometown, which will make inducting new members very slick. The group gets together in person once every two weeks.

Like some here, I have way more people who want to play than I can fit into one game, and I'd like to play more often. But running two games seems like a ton of work.

I've considered running a second group through the same adventure. That seems fun, but I was also thinking... the campaign setup is perfect for two parallel groups.

Has anyone tried this? Where seperate groups are interacting, albeit indirectly? If so, what things should I watch out for? I couldn't get a second group together in person, so it'd likely be online.

[Lunali]

The biggest challenge for me with multiple groups affecting each other is pacing. One group will spend a session travelling for a few days while another will spend it on a single day or even just a few hours in town or a dungeon.

[strangebloke]

The biggest challenge for me with multiple groups affecting each other is pacing. One group will spend a session travelling for a few days while another will spend it on a single day or even just a few hours in town or a dungeon.
I see that as more solvable.

If the group gets way behind in timing, then they just get more downtime until their next mission. If they're way 'ahead' due to just spending time travelling, then they get a long dungeon crawl.

It's a war, so everything here moves at a pretty glacial pacing.

[Man_Over_Game]

As long as the groups don't directly interact with each other, it' doable.

Just make sure to add time skips so that they end up in roughly the same time areas.

[Skylivedk]

Hey all.

I'm running a campaign where the PCs are mercenaries during a war for the throne. I've got a whole subsystem set up for tracking the positions of various factions in the game, as missions occur and time passes. Also, to facilitate dead characters getting replaced, the premise is that everyone in the party comes from the same hometown. Future characters will also come from that hometown, which will make inducting new members very slick. The group gets together in person once every two weeks.

Like some here, I have way more people who want to play than I can fit into one game, and I'd like to play more often. But running two games seems like a ton of work.

I've considered running a second group through the same adventure. That seems fun, but I was also thinking... the campaign setup is perfect for two parallel groups.

Has anyone tried this? Where seperate groups are interacting, albeit indirectly? If so, what things should I watch out for? I couldn't get a second group together in person, so it'd likely be online.

I've done it a lot. More or less all campaigns, I've done, have been in the same world. Characters occasionally hear about previous/parallel campaign consequences (which usually draw smiles) including towns disappearing, product franchises and guilds started by other characters etc.

Distance is key (in time, space, alignment) to making it easier. I haven't had any direct interactions yet. At lower levels it basically serves to flesh out the world and foreshadows changes in a very believable way.

[EggKookoo]

So I had an idea for a high-risk campaign that I never got to pull off (maybe someday I will, but my plans to do it transformed into something else). Would have worked like this:

Each player gets a mid-level character. I was aiming for a decently high campaign so the APL was about 14. In my case these were the players' original characters (we had taken a hiatus) that had reached that level. They were actually a bit lower when we left off so I gave them all a bit of a boost during the break.

Each player also rolls a "trainee" that is half of the APL. The player gets to create the trainee including background and goals and things.

Each player plays their own main character, and the trainee of another player. The trainee is actually training under the player's main, while their own trainee is training under another player's main. Each player is expected to play the trainee according to the way the trainee's creator intended in terms of morality, goals, and so forth. But the trainee as a character is under the command of that player's main. Obviously a roleplaying challenge meant for experienced players. I had a rule of no pairs, so if you couldn't have your trainee train under the character of the player who ran the trainee under your character -- it had to be round robin or somesuch.

If a main dies, the player's trainee gets a field promotion and becomes his new main "whether he's ready for it or not." The player then rolls up a new trainee at half APL, and gives it to the player who had been running his old trainee. If a trainee dies, their player just rolls up a new trainee replacement. I suppose also if a main hits 20, he gets retired and his trainee gets the promotion the same way as if he had died.

The idea is the main must protect their trainees, since they're only half level to start with. But the trainees will also level faster than the mains, as EXP is shared and the trainees need less to reach new levels. The mains want to keep the trainees alive long enough to not suffer too much of a penalty if they themselves die. The campaign was going to involve warfare so death was always a threat and I expected a decent amount of turnover. It also let players become invested in their replacement characters, and maybe even create family lines if that's how they wanted to do it. I had no restrictions on class -- you could make both your main and trainee come from a family line of paladins, for example.

[Knaight]

Has anyone tried this? Where seperate groups are interacting, albeit indirectly? If so, what things should I watch out for? I couldn't get a second group together in person, so it'd likely be online.

The big issue is logistical - assuming you can get the pacing of individual sessions to line up (which is doable, if a skill that takes some practice) the game is still vulnerable to session cancellations on either side throwing off the other, which isn't ideal.

You're also not saving yourself any work with this. You still effectively have to do prep for two campaigns, you just also get to do bonus prep for the connections between them. The only overlap you really get is in some high level setting stuff, and that's not what tends to be time consuming.