Individual Action

We all know the rule, 'don't split the party'. That's not what I'm about to talk about. After all, many games have times when it makes sense to split the party. What I'm about to talk about is what I consider a design flaw in certain games where, in order for one character to use their specialised skills, the rest of the party HAS to be sidelined.

Example: Deckers in Shadowrun, and their equivalent in every cyberpunk genre game I've ever encountered. Firstly, these characters are forced to spend the bulk of their skill points on things like Computer Use, which makes sense, but also makes them fairly useless outside the Matrix. When they jack in, the rest of the party gets to sit round waiting for them to do their thing.

Example: Astral characters in Vampire (equivalent situations occur in Mage, and some other games). Typically, only one member of the group will have Auspex at high enough levels to enter Astral space. This skill has, of course, been bought at the expense of something else, so you do want to let them use it. Yet when they do, the rest of the group is sidelined. (This is a weaker example than the others, due to the nature of play in Vampire, which tends to encourage individual action.)

Example: Starfighters in Star Wars (and equivalent). It's highly unlikely that all the members of the party are expert pilots, and it's also likely that someone in the group is. In any space battle, it's likely that either the group will be in a single ship (in which case no-one except the pilot and gunner gets in on the action), or some members of the party are in starfighters.

Of course, these all appear in the source material, where characters regularly go off to do their own thing. (Luke at the Battle of Yavin, Tank in the Matrix, Angel when he visits the Powers.) This goes to show, however, that what is good for TV isn't necessarily good for RPGs.

Anyway, it sucks to be part of the group that's left out. Probably more important, it's poor design for a game to be set up so that there are situations where the group HAS to be split in this way, and even worse if certain character types are set up so that to be effective they must be split from the party.

So, how does one go about designing a game where this isn't a problem?

One possibility is to have the players each run several characters, a primary character and a bunch of secondaries. These secondaries don't necessarily have to be valid PCs in their own right - in example 1 they might include daemon processes used by the decker PC. The secondaries also don't need to be lasting characters, allowing for high casualties in the starfighter battle.

The problem (in part) with this approach is that players will typically not care about the secondaries. Additionally, if the list of secondaries changes often, the GM will have a whole lot of extra work to do.

I think a better solution is to ensure that there are no areas in the game where any given character is totally ineffective, or unable to enter, at least by design. (If I want to put in a mages-only club in my D&D campaign, I will, but I don't want the game rules to assume this, thankyou very much.) Granted, different character types may not be as effective in all arenas, but there should be no areas that are absolutely barred.

Example: In Shadowrun, add non-intrusive matrix interfaces, allowing all characters to enter the Matrix without cyberware, and give the standard cyberdeck the ability to jack in many people at once. Naturally, ensure that the modifiers to a character's statistics are such that the decker, not the street samurai, becomes the dominant combat monkey. Also, allow easy entry/exit from the matrix for secondary characters, so that there is little fear of ambush when the whole group jacks in.

Example: Allow characters to easily 'cross-over' their allies. Make the secondaries reliant on the primary in some sense, but allow the option.

Example: Get everyone into a starfighter early and often.

Some of these examples stretch the premise of the game, mutilate the character concepts, or just sound bad. However, they also remove the problems inherent in a game with significant areas of the game world that are off-limits to some characters.

Note: In Star Wars d20, there is absolutely no way to model Luke Skywalker's role in the Battle of Yavin. At the point where he went into combat, he was presumably still low-level, and had never before flown a starfighter. Therefore, it's entirely unreasonable to assume he had the Starfighter Operation feat. Without it, he suffered a -4 penalty to all Pilot rolls, and even with a maxed Pilot skill, he'd have been suffering badly.

Of course, it's also impossible for Darth Vader to have severed his arm, to have blasted R2, or for Greedo to have missed, so we could just let that slide...