Rotating Player Base?
Hi!
Our tabletop group is about 8 people strong and there’s little consistency to who can make sessions on a regular basis. Many of them are interested in playing RPGs but can’t necessarily commit to being available for sessions.
I’ve been looking for something that might be able to cope with a drop in/ drop out style of game play to accommodate this so that if a particular player can’t make the next session it isn’t the end of the world.
Seeing that the crew itself is the persistent character, and that player characters might come and go, do you think Blades in the Dark would be able to handle this sort of set up?
I understand that the world and crew might advance in a player’s absence so there would be some catch up involved.
This may be just what you need. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QtJxtygvG33wWTfUt14Z10RxHUIkVbAICznRwwHwt3Y/edit
Totally. I already do this on a smaller scale – I have about (it’s a long story) 6 players and as long as I can get three, we run. This results in people who show up more often being more “central” to the crew, but it works great.
Hey there! I played for about 3 or 4 weeks with a rotating cast of about 14 different players and it was awesome. The one thing you’ll need to be aware of is downtime activities for players who have missed sessions. Oh, and the coin gained from going up tiers for the gang.
It’s easy enough to hand out the stash for tiering up to people who aren’t there as long as they leave their character sheets behind. I tend to not give downtime actions to missing players though. Too much bookkeeping. You want to get stuff done, you need to show up.
I have 10 players total. Half of which are able to make a given session. Blades has been perfect at dealing with inconsistent attendance for the reasons everyone has mentioned. So far I’ve kept to single score sessions and it’s worked out beautifully.
Andrew Shields Thank you, this looks incredibly useful! I’m going to finish digesting the rules and the come back to this.
Mike Pureka, Andy Owlington & Nathaniel James, thank you for responses! This is what I was hoping to hear.
Once I’ve got the rules straight in my head I’ll revisit everyone’s comments and implement your advice.