Multi-party Campaigns

[Zap Dynamic]

Has anyone ever created/ran a campaign that was designed for more than one party? I'm picturing a group of agents in the field that are up to their necks in action while another team of lobbyists and support staff are back at the base, trying to get the OK from the big wigs and playing the politics game.

[Knaight]

Yes. That said, you want to use a system with incredibly fast character generation, and you need a group of players willing to lead. On top of that, you need to be able to improvise very well. With that done, multi party campaigns can be a lot of fun.

[Zap Dynamic]

I feel like PbP would be an ideal environment for it.

[Knaight]

I feel like PbP would be an ideal environment for it.

Absolutely not. Multi party campaigns are, by nature, long. Short campaigns really can't handle multiple parties, and you need lots of time. PbP, by contrast, is painfully slow, and as such works best covering the equivalent of a short campaign. As such, multi party campaigns in PbP is a problem waiting to happen.

[Terracotta]

There are a lot of ways of playing with this idea.

First and foremost, the "Evil party first, good party second game." In this game, you have the players make an all evil party, gain power, prestige, kill a lot of people, and establish an evil empire, cabal, what have you.

Then, after that campaign has ended, you create a second group of good PCs to fight against everything they created the first time around. (And anything you added as a DM during the inevitable timeskip.)

Secondly, there's the session on, session off version of this. You simply have two parties that alternate game sessions without every actually seeing each other. The tricky part is keeping them from simply meeting up and pooling their resources. My preferred method is of tow parties on different planes or in different dimensions sending each other things that they can't get in their own worlds, then culminating in a climactic battle with a yin-yang themed final boss who must be destroyed simultaneously in both dimensions to kill them.

It helps if you have players who are very, very good at segregating character and personal knowledge, of course.

When you get right down to it, this is basically replacing some of the NPC support characters with a new party.

[valadil]

I played in one. Best tabletop game I was ever in, hands down. But it was an incredible burden on the GM. He was unemployed at the time and still couldn't find time to write for that many players.

[Knaight]

I played in one. Best tabletop game I was ever in, hands down. But it was an incredible burden on the GM. He was unemployed at the time and still couldn't find time to write for that many players.

This would be why improvisational skill is critical. Otherwise, it is a veritable nightmare of planning.

[Funkyodor]

In several campaigns I've played in; once our main characters get up in level, we've switched gears and ran PC's lowbies through some adventures. Sometimes our DM ties them in to our Main PC campaign arc by hiring them for jobs. One eventful adventure our Main PC's used them as bait to flush out a powerful high-ranking hitman. Stupid trusting lowbies.

[Gnoman]

My current online campaign is basically multi-party, because only about half of them ever show up, so they wind up as several different sub-parties with different goals.

[Zap Dynamic]

There are a lot of ways of playing with this idea.

First and foremost, the "Evil party first, good party second game." In this game, you have the players make an all evil party, gain power, prestige, kill a lot of people, and establish an evil empire, cabal, what have you.

Then, after that campaign has ended, you create a second group of good PCs to fight against everything they created the first time around. (And anything you added as a DM during the inevitable timeskip.)

Secondly, there's the session on, session off version of this. You simply have two parties that alternate game sessions without every actually seeing each other. The tricky part is keeping them from simply meeting up and pooling their resources. My preferred method is of tow parties on different planes or in different dimensions sending each other things that they can't get in their own worlds, then culminating in a climactic battle with a yin-yang themed final boss who must be destroyed simultaneously in both dimensions to kill them.

It helps if you have players who are very, very good at segregating character and personal knowledge, of course.

When you get right down to it, this is basically replacing some of the NPC support characters with a new party.

This is definitely a cool idea, but I was talking about having two different groups of players playing two different, parallel campaigns in the same world. Something like what Gnoman is talking about. If you could find the right group of people, I'd imagine PbP would be a pretty good way to do it, just because the DM would have more time to sort everything out and develop plot (since it's so much slower). However, it could also work if you alternated player group week-by-week in the real world. That might work really well if the players in question couldn't make it every week.

Has anyone ever seen a published adventure for this sort of thing? A story big enough that it requires two parties?

[Terracotta]

Oh, I see what you mean! That makes a lot of sense.

They'd continually hear references to each other once they got to a high enough level, say. Or perhaps they'd end up running across the aftermath of one of the other party's battles, inadvertently affect each other, that sort of thing.

Actually, if you've taken the time to grid out your world and keep track of major NPCs and plot hooks across it, you only have to juggle one setting, so the planning part might not be as bad at first glance.

The only problems I can forsee with that are if they actually run into each other somehow and you have to run an 8-12 person session. Then again, if you're good a shifting on little plot rails when you have to, making two unconnected groups miss each other isn't too hard to manage.

[DaMullet]

I'm reminded of a campaign I read about (I want to say on Thunt's [writer of Goblins] blog, but my google-fu is failing me) where the two parties met on alternate weeks, with the twist that they were cursed; they occupied the same space at different times, so each session would end with them blacking out and pick up with them waking up where the other party had left them. I don't recall if the parties were aware of the specifics of their curse, but I do recall that the two parties became antagonistic relatively quickly, eventually concocting plans to kill off the other party by, for instance, tying rocks to their legs and throwing them into the ocean just before blacking out.

I know this isn't precisely what you had in mind, since their adventures were very intertwined, but it seemed relevant to the general tenor of the thread.

[GM.Casper]

Head of Vecna is a hilarious story about a two party game.

[EccentricCircle]

I've done something similar to this.
It was basically a ten player campaign, the premise of which was that half of the players are a team of Inquisition agents, trying to hunt down rogue magi in a city where arcane magic is illegal.
and the other half of the party are a group of magi smuggling magic items and trying to change the system.

it wasn't entirely antagonistic, as the inquisitors were framed for a crime they didn't commit and had to go on the run. And by the end of the first "Series" of the campaign it was fairly clear that they were going to have to put aside their differences in order to save the city, but the clashing ideologies and approaches of the two parties made for some very interesting gaming, even when they were working together, which was far from always.

ironically enough by the end of the campaign the largest idealogical split was between two of the rebels, one of whom was a paladin of freedom who believed that anyone should be free to use magic to better their lives, and the Ultimate Magus, who wanted to become a lich and rule the city himself. they totally split the rebel party, which was already fairly fractured to begin with, and were never really reconciled.

Logistically we met once a week for around a year, the spotlight shifted as with a split party on a regular scale game, so everyone got a say at least once or twice in an evening, regardless of how many parties were running around at the time. It works fine so long as the players accept that they are not always going to be in the scene and are happy to watch the other part of the game taking place, and or entertain themselves some other way.
having two groups meeting at different times just wouldn't have worked, as although the points when the whole group was actually working together could be counted on one hand, the crossovers were so frequent and complicated that there wasn't a clear division.

on an unrelated note, all of my games are set within the same universe, and so people often hear references to previous campaigns. players who were in both obviously appreciate these references more than those who weren't, for whom they just merge into the fabric of the worlds backstory.
I've had more than one campaign running at once, but always in geographically isolated areas, so that they only really overlap if a player is actively moving from one campaign to another with the same character.

[Sliver]

I played in a PbP M&M game that after some time, the DM started another game in the same campaign running parallel to our game. Then he started another one but due to demand made two so it ended up being 4 games at the same time. Most of the original players ended up being in more than one team. It was really fun and we were all impressed by how he handled it.

[STsinderman]

Though it can be the most fun with one good and one evil parties, it can also work with two teams co-operating. There are many things that can go wrong or over complicate things for the DM, no more so than the when the two parties unexpectedly cross paths during one parties session. On the whole this can really just lead to more crazy shenanigans but when the subject of PvP arises is when the only game breaking problems can occur.

[Suddo]

I've thought of this but between not knowing enough people that I could rely on and not enough experience I though I should wait. That being said here's how I'd run it:
It would have to be a little RP heavy, little more sandbox (here's a world what do you do) and a little less hack and slash. I'd probably have to have like 6-10 friends, people I've played DnD with before and understand how I'll restrict limits, 3.X with 10 people means there needs to be some limits, they will essentially create their characters together, the concepts or their goals, and then we create 2-3 parties based around that, probably 2. I have an adventure with each party every other week, they alternate, this will be mostly combat and things that need everyone together, alternatively this can be done over something like skype.
Now we splash in the PbP: We have a forum going where we are allowed to post what our character is doing, if public, or post in a private subforums, if secret. This is why it would be more RP sandbox like than usual is that basically between doing long adventures to go take down a big bad they are at town doing things, versus the usual drop by magic-mark pick up things lets go.
The main concern becomes keeping everyone on the same in-game date. You don't want one person doing more things than another and the amount of time it takes being longer. This becomes a main concern if one of the in person adventures is combat heavy is that they might take a long amount of real-time to do something that takes very little in-game time and what's worse is that if you don't get back to town with party A then party B technically can't do anything till they get back or they would have more time, though travel time may help eliminate some of this problem as that can be played through quickly.
The skype could be used to roll a quick little encounter in private, meeting a noble with one or two PCs, or a quick scuffle in town.
Being an impromptu and flexible GM would be key as you now have 2 parties making choices versus just one.

[Notreallyhere77]

Has anyone ever seen a published adventure for this sort of thing? A story big enough that it requires two parties?

I ran across one. It was published by a third-party, either Green Ronin or Mongoose or something. It had two parties converging on one macguffin, an ogre artifact. It also spiced things up by making one of the parties all ogres, trying to reclaim their holy relic. The other party was a mostly-human generic adventuring party. Either party could be substituded with PCs, as long as the ogres stayed ogres. Conceivably, two groups of players could meet at the same time and have the adventure, substituting themselves for both parties.
It looked fun, but I didn't buy it and can't give you more info, but it does exist and there may be more like it.