I recently ran a campaign for a group of ~15 rotating players. On any given night 3-5 players would show up and they were all bought into a frame story which has the players aligned as part of a faction.
I’m leaning toward to BitD for our next campaign as the faction system seems perfect for this style of play. Any thoughts on the pros / cons of using BitD for our next campaign? Any suggested hacks?
Other consideration – we’re thinking of having two GMs and are considering having two main factions that are diegetically aligned (perhaps sister organizations) with players either having a different character for each GM or the ability to temporarily switch factions.
Hm, for two allied factions, it seems like having characters help out the other group wouldn’t need to involve temporary changes – it could just be “[CHARACTERNAME] is available to help out your gang this session”. Would work especially well if you tie it in to heists that could make use of the guest character’s abilities.
As BitD is all about factions aligning than double crossing each other I’d think the latter idea of sister orgs could be interesting as long as you are ok with the two player factions fighting each other.
For lots of drop in and drop out, I created the gangs idea; instead of making a crew with an ever-shifting roster available, you play people contracted by a big crew, the Crows.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QtJxtygvG33wWTfUt14Z10RxHUIkVbAICznRwwHwt3Y/edit?usp=sharing
The advantage there for you is while the actions of the characters would reflect on the Crows, there’s an NPC leadership core to provide reactions to the “hired guns” in the crews. You still have stable leadership no matter who shows up, but the actions of the crew affect Crow faction status and other diplomatic relations.
The Job/Downtime structure lends itself very well to a “drop in and out” kind of thing. This week, one of my players wasn’t available, but it was very easy to say that his characters were off doing something else at the time.