Catching up on Jeff’s Gameblog , I found this post about introducing new PCs during dungeon crawls.
Jeff offers 4 suggestions, all of them sound — and if you run a fantasy campaign (especially D&D), you’ve probably run into this situation before.
Bring in the Replacement Adventurers
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i’m sure that i’ve used all four at least once. video game and solo adventurer are most common. a fun variant on solo adventurer is ‘adventurer who has just barely escaped some terrible event, which killed his former companions and the fallout of which becomes the party’s next adventure’. the prisoner rarely gets used, because i find it terribly cliched. brevet-PC got used once, a paladin was slain, and the player chose to start playing the ex-paladin’s squire. who turned out to be a much more interesting character.
One technique I like is the Wagon Train/Caravan/Base campsite npc. Similar to the Brevet NPC, this PC is assumed to have been part of the wagon train/caravan/base campsite. Players who “disappear” from one session the next are assumed to go back to the base camp for R&R while the rest of the party carries on.
Obviously, this doesn’t work in all situations, but I’ve found it doesn’t stretch credibility as much as having npcs pop out of nowhere.
drow: I like the “my troubles are now your troubles” hook — that’s solid.
Troy: I played in a Stargate campaign a little while back that used the base camp approach, and it worked really well. That’s partly due to the Stargate’s premise, which involves the PCs being part of a military organization with a central base.
Military organizations — heck, most large organizations — tend to work well for this kind of thing, which is one reason why they’re such handy background elements for campaigns.
This is a little off topic, but I only played Stargate once as a one-shot and enjoyed it immensely. How does it do as a campaign? Is it sustainable, or like many sci-fi games, get too bogged down in continuity issues?
Carolina: It was a great campaign. We played 20 sessions over the course of about a year,and didn’t run into any continuity issues.
Stargate may be better suited to that than some sci-fi settings, though — I don’t really remember any continuity issues in the TV show, and I watched the first 5 seasons.
Or do you mean something different by continuity?
Nope, that’s it, exactly. Continuity is less an issue with me than some of my players. When we game in a licensed world, they often seem disappointed if the game deviates from the setting they know.
In our case, our GM did a great job of using canon elements (particularly NPCs) without being slavish about it.
He also told us up front that he was weaving together threads from many seasons out of order, so there was no expectation on our part that our game would conform to the show.