Way back in column number three, I talked about how to set your gestalt up with roles and responsibilities early in development. But, just as no plan survives contact with the enemy, it's only a resilient team structure that's unchanged after running a game for a while. What might your gestalt look like after a few games, and what last few tricks can you use to ensure that this keeps your game going smoothly?
Time and Planning Constraints
"We have the venue until tomorrow afternoon. Do you want to stop to sleep early and then finish in the morning, or just push on past midnight and let everyone go home or sleep in?"
How much time do you have between games, and how many staff meetings do you fit in within that time frame? Can you generally predict how your player characters will react to most situations, or are you constantly surprised?
Both of these questions will determine how much of your work can be done in planning and how much must be done on the fly. If you're running a monthly game where the staff is spread out, you might need to plan less as a group and improvise more. If your PCs are prone to disagreement or possessed of powers that give them great ability to change the setting, you'll likewise need to plan to be spontaneous.
As discussed early on, the members of your team will have definite leanings towards planning or improvisation which you've hopefully identified long before now. Both of these types can have a useful contribution no matter how much or little pre-game planning you can accomplish.
In a game where there's lots of time to get together and make plans, and these scenarios aren't regularly invalidated by unpredictable PC actions, your planners will naturally shine. Yet the improvisers serve a valuable purpose even in a heavily scripted game. Have them serve as stand-ins for player ideas; get them to come up with the wildest possible PC reactions to game events, and then have everyone work together on what to do if those reactions happen. You might need to have a contingency, or you might wish to include new plans to that specifically encourage the coolest possible PC responses.
Conversely, in a game where there's not a lot of time to plan as a group, or your players regularly react in completely unforeseen ways, the improvisers will be in their element. In this type of game, your planners may find themselves working alone to come up with possible ideas and plots beforehand. Encourage your planners to write down all of their ideas as they have them. Regularly huddle your gestalt before the game and after significant PC actions or during downtime. Briefly discuss as a group what everyone's intentions are as far as plot ideas and changes go. Make sure everyone is in agreement, and understands what's going on. Even when games are handled on the fly, the staff needs to stay in communication to keep the players from receiving (unintentional) conflicting information and to keep the planners from feeling like their work is useless to the group.
Part of your planning vs. improvising situation will also revolve around the duration of your games. Do you run for sessions a few hours at a time? Are your games an entire evening or the better part of a day? Do they take up a whole weekend or even longer? Each of these will subtly shift your team dynamic.
Games that run a few hours are generally either smaller or tightly plotted. A small group can make a lot of progress and get a lot of GM attention in short sessions without anyone doing anything special, but a larger group will risk lots of players never doing anything fun if they're given too much free reign. In either case, staff communication during the game is less of a priority. In the smaller games, the staff members are probably regularly able to observe what their fellows are doing. In the tightly plotted games, each staff member can remember what's supposed to happen and doesn't have to worry about regular, significant deviation from the basic plot. You can generally trust the staff members to remember their roles without consultation, only huddling for truly unexpected player actions.
Games that take up an entire afternoon or evening push the boundaries of the shorter games. While your staff can still probably remember most of what's going to happen, every hour past the first few increases the chance that a GM's going to forget or not have time to put a crucial plot into play. It also increases the chance that a player is going to do something really off-the-wall that requires a drastic shift to the expected scenarios. If your gestalt employs a division of PC groups (e.g., individual GMs for distinct PC types), you can probably do without too much consultation. With a more refined focus, there's more chance that the group's GM can keep abreast of all changes. You'll still have trouble if players get unexpected information or resources through another GM.
A good rule of thumb is to let every staff member do his or her own thing for two to four hours of the game, and then have increasingly regular huddles as the game goes on to share information. If you have group GMs, this information can be as simple as interactions with one another's PCs, while a more holistic team needs to discuss potential changes to upcoming plots and scenarios.
Finally, games long enough that players will be sleeping at least once and then continuing to play require pretty frequent staff consultation. A lot can change in a multi-day game, and the longer the game goes, the more effort must be spent on making sure no players are getting ignored. Fortunately, long games include natural breaking points. The staff should plan to break for group discussions before or after sleeping and near or during mealtimes, with smaller huddles as needed. After all, there's little more embarrassing to a staff than an NPC coming into play to distribute clues for a plotline the players brilliantly and unexpectedly solved two days ago.
In short, make sure that changing time constraints also change how your team communicates. It's easy to forget that a strategy that works in one timeframe may fail terribly in a different situation.
Game and Player Resources
"So, what did you think of those text props? Sufficiently cool looking?"
"I copied the content down in a language that only my character knows and destroyed the originals so nobody else can steal my secrets."
"You what?!?"
Scenario 1: At the edge of the bonfire light, the players see white blurs emerging from the darkness of the sprawling field. Conversation stops, and those closest identify a half dozen individuals in full biohazard suits. The rumors spread, the disparate players move in to see the scene, and everyone is involved in the battle that breaks out when these mysterious figures try to set up quarantine with extreme prejudice.
Scenario 2: From outside the door of the student center room, the players see staff members crossing the brightly lit cafeteria floor. Conversation continues; at least until those closest identify the determined look on the staff members' faces. Quiet contemplation spreads from the door, but doesn't really reach the edge of the room before a staff member announces that the players see indistinct figures in biohazard suits. People still somewhere else in the building miss out on the battle as the mysterious figures try to set up quarantine with extreme prejudice.
Your tangible resources as a gestalt will have more than cosmetic impact on the stories you tell. A good team can work around limited props and non-atmospheric venues, but they must be conscious of the lack. A picture can be worth a thousand words and a good prop or setting can be even more valuable (since you can't trust all your players to pay attention to a thousand words).
If your team has an excellent prop-wrangler or can afford to buy a wide variety of props, you have a leg up on other teams. Take care, though, to use your props appropriately. Humans tend to suffer from sensory fatigue; a sign is a lot more noticeable when it is placed on a blank wall than when it is added to dozens of other messages. Even the noticeable sign just becomes an ignored part of the scenery within a few days. Props can work in the same way. If your NPCs are always immaculately dressed for their roles, your sets are always custom-built, and your handouts are always perfect, your players will begin to take them for granted. In many cases, you'd be better off using the minimum props that look acceptable, and saving the expensive, awesome props for the plots, settings, and NPCs that are intended to draw the most attention. Consistently used props can improve a game, but inconsistently used amazing props can spur it to the next level.
But you might not have access to such things. In many venues, excessive dress and props are a liability, even if you can afford them. It's a brave team that wants to explain the tapestry of bleeding flesh they hung outside the student center on Saturday night. Full face makeup is rarely appropriate staring from behind a GM screen in mom's basement. You could fix this problem by also upgrading your venue, but why bother if the student center or home works well enough for most of your purposes and is cheap and accessible to the players?
Instead, a gestalt without the ability to use lots of props, costuming, and set dressing must be constantly on guard to use other tricks to create atmosphere and interest. Verbal descriptions are excellent if you can ensure everyone that needs to see the scene is present at once and is paying attention. Conversely, it's probably not worth it to constantly break character to re-describe a setting as other players wander into the room. If you're going to have mobile players, or need to get straight to the action, keep your descriptions brief and plan how they can be integrated into the existing scenery. If your regular venue has a cool feature, figure out how to work it into your plotlines rather than editing around it.
The coolest thing about a game with limited tangible resources is that when you do bring in props, costumes, and set dressing they can have an immediate impact. When your players are used to getting item cards, a physical prop handout is immediately understood to be important. When you use a standard room for most scenes, minor changes to the lighting and cheap scene dressing can drastically alter the mood of the room. When most NPCs are identified with badges, the one wearing a full costume will be the one that the players remember for months later.
The Illusion of PC Control
"I thought I was the pack leader."
"No, you're actually the pack priest; sorry I didn't have your background ready last game."
"Can I switch my Leadership traits into Rituals, then?"
An aspect of big games that I've touched on in past columns is the question of pre-generated characters. The decision to pre-generate characters or have all the PCs be player-written will have a big impact on your staff responsibilities.
From a staff work perspective, it may be easier to let players make their own characters, at least at first. Writing a background that gives a player enough roleplaying hooks can take a page of text or more. You may notice that many RPG companies have taken to publishing books full of NPCs with these kinds of extensive backgrounds so home GMs don't have to; writing up a lot of disparate characters is a great deal of work. If the players write their own characters, you do not have to expend staff creativity and writing effort that could be used for setting details. It's sometimes painful to create an opus of character back story that will only ever be read by one player.
Yet this work can pay off. When players write their own characters, their background assumptions may not be anywhere near the story you plan to tell. It could take any number of games and staff planning sessions before the plots of the world are molded to hook the PC. This is especially true if the player's conception of his PC background doesn't match what the staff understands about it. With a staff-written character, you can put those hooks into the character from the ground up; placing background threads, relationships to other PCs, and even spelled-out character goals in the packet with the character sheet. The player develops the character from game start onward, but this development is based on a back story that the staff can count on to develop plots and NPCs designed to hook the PC.
Whether your players are happy about this will vary from game to game. Many players wish to be in charge of their PC development from the very beginning. Others are happy to get help choosing a character background that will fit the game. Honestly, in a story-based game, even player-generated characters will have their backgrounds subtly molded by the staff. When the GMs have a cool idea for a plot where your character's brother has joined the enemy, the character's background is getting altered in a similar way to if that enemy brother was written into a pre-generated character from the start. In a story-light game, pre-generated characters allow the staff to stack the deck with interesting player conflicts and goals that will keep the game moving without constant NPC interference.
Long-running games that feature pre-gens usually have a balanced approach. PCs are written for a variety of play-styles, so new players can be handed a character that's similar to what the player might have written on his or her own. Players that announce their interests in your game early may even have characters custom-written to include what they want to play coupled with hooks useful to the staff.
If you go with pre-gens, your staff will need to devote extra writing resources to the creation of the character backgrounds. You can push back the release of setting notes, but it's hard to run a game when lots of people know nothing about their PCs. Ideally, the character creators will keep in close contact and try to create characters with similar amounts of back-story, hooks, and game traits. It can cause intra-staff turmoil if one member writes awesome backgrounds for characters but his PCs are ignored in favor of another member's characters that have higher traits, or vice versa.
Have everyone that will be writing characters agree on what a typical pre-gen will look like, and then compare characters periodically to make sure everyone is still on the same page. This will also make it easier if one writer burns out on making characters and the others have to pick up the slack.
It's also important to make sure that the staff has a good idea of character backgrounds during the game. With pre-generated characters, players are often afraid to state things about their characters' back stories that aren't at least implicitly written down. You may wind up fielding off-the-wall questions about points of the character background that didn't wind up in what the player was given. It's helpful to have someone that can give an appropriate answer on the fly, rather than always telling the players to make it up themselves; do that too often, and they might make background changes that the staff is unaware of and can't react to ("He said he's the baron of where?!?").
If you go with player-created characters, your staff will save prep work, but will have more to do during the course of the game. Be prepared to go over player-written backgrounds at staff meetings and come up with ways to mold the game to hook into the player's backstory. In general, players that write long backstories will be at least a little disappointed if their carefully crafted hooks never come up in game. Sometimes, the staff may need to elect a spokesman to tell the player that something in the background just doesn't fit the game ("Just so you know, claiming to be the seventh incarnation of the nation's god-king will probably be no more than a delusion on your part."). You'll also want to devote more time to just paying attention to the characters during the game; without a staff-written background, you never have a great idea of what will hook the character until the player tells you, explicitly (and sometimes, not even then).
The End and What Comes After
"So, what do you think of the new spin-off chronicle?"
"I think it's the near future of the main chronicle and we're all going to die in the last game."
"Damnit! You're too perceptive to be a player; we're going to have to bring you onto staff."
Ultimately, all games are finite, but some are more finite than others. Some games start with a completion condition; when the main story arc is all wrapped up, the game is over. Others have a light story with a mostly player-focused game, or just intend to seamlessly build new plotlines into the ongoing story like a long-running television drama. But even these games will run out of ideas or player interest eventually, and it's often preferable to end with a bang instead of a whimper.
When you're almost out of story, it's easy to gauge how much longer it will take to tell. When you're looking at an end due to burnout, it's often worthwhile to plan out one last arc to give the game a sense of closure in the minds of your players. In either case, you'll need to get together as a group and figure out what plot threads are still dangling and must be resolved. Do you need one more big game to conclude, or will it have more impact if you spread your ending over a multi-game series? Get your planning types to really analyze what's left and write up a checklist of plot points that need to get a final, on-screen resolution.
In any case, make sure your players are aware that the end is coming, if not of the exact time frame. Part of the joy of concluding a long-running game, for players, is getting to cut loose with resources and abilities that had been saved for a rainy day. You might not want them to know exactly when the last game is, in case they unload more resources than expected and remove any challenge from your game's climax, but it will make them happy not to have cool stuff that they never got a chance to use.
A good time to have a staff meeting about what will come after is before the dust settles. Are you done, as a group, with everyone ready to put the game on the mantle as a job well done? Or does one or more of your group have an idea for a new game building on the themes, setting, and/or players of the current one? If this game is going to move into a new one, which of the staff is going to stay on board, and how many new staff members need to be recruited to replace those that are finished? Getting all of this established, as well as some information about the new game, is good to do before ending the old game. You'll keep your dedicated players happy if they know that closure for one game doesn't mean they have to stop playing with the staff they've grown to love.
But you may be done, one and all, and have no expectations for a similar undertaking any time soon. You may wish to think about making your development notes and prop resources available to players in your game or friendly games in the area. Your game notes may serve as inspiration for a new gestalt that wishes to start a game of its own. Donating your props may be a stickier subject, but it's entirely possible that they'll have more value being used in another game than sitting in your basement. If you're truly finished, consider what you can do to make it easier for your friends to continue running gestalt games.
And that's everything I know about running games in a team (or at least everything I can remember and thought was important). Thanks for sticking with me for the past year.
