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apprentice04 wrote:As a side note, how do you get the party together initially that doesn’t feel forced but natural and fluid?

I suppose this is forced, but my favorite cliche is the characters don't know each other, but all happen to be in the same area individually. There's an attack or some other significant mutual threat, and they need to work together to survive. Think Rio Bravo, Assault on Precinct 13, From Dusk til Dawn, Dawn of the Dead (2004), etc

A variation on that I'd like to try but haven't fleshed out yet: Each character gets a 1 on 1 introductory session where they roll into town for whatever reason of their own. They each have a run-in with the same annoying npc. Npc winds up murdered, and the pcs are all under arrest as suspects.This is when they meet up and play begins as a group. Here's the clever part I need to come up with: Each character got a clue during their earlier session, insignificant by itself, but when put together in comparing notes will reveal the real murderer, means and motive.
I'm sure it's been done before in literature, and I'd very much appreciate it if someone could point me to it.

apprentice04 wrote:I’ve noticed something as a player when participating under several Gms in my time. There’s lots of styles to what constitutes an adventure to each one. What are the components to your adventures?

What are the components to your encounters? Do you separate the two? Are your encounters adventures? Are your adventures different in feel and architecture to encounters?

I posted about this a few months ago but my biggest thing is Plot Threads . When I do random encounters I have a list of things that are just random people, items or events that may or may not have anything to do with that encounter but I can use it later.

apprentice04 wrote:As a side note, how do you get the party together initially that doesn’t feel forced but natural and fluid?

This was also discussed in How do your Rifts PC's normally meet? a few months ago. As I stated my current favorite is to make the players come up with connections to one another and then work with me for a group purpose.

Our group usually has two or three people start knowing each other. Then we run into each other in a number of ways. My favorite was the time when one of the group was wanted by the others. It was a fun dynamic having the "bad" one try to convince the others he wasn't bad and to not turn him in.


Once we met as people vying for the same apartment.

Once we were all friends of the deceased party whose funeral we were attending.

Once we were all transferred into the same company.

Getting the group together depends a lot on the group itself and the guidelines the GM sets.

The hardest groups to put together are the kitchen sink groups with very few guidelines from the GM. When the player characters come from very diverse backgrounds, I find that throwing them into some kind of disaster where they have to cooperate or die right from the start is a useful approach. Alternately, use one of the universal baddies in Rifts and make the player characters all prisoners in the same cell block.

Otherwise, the more they have in common with each other, the more natural it is to group them. I just use whatever they have in common to bring them together.

+Do they all worship the same deities? Divine intervention/holy crusade brings them together.
+Are they all Coaltion-based OCCs? Easy. Are they all fans of Erin Tarn? They meet at an Erin Tarn live reading/poetry slam (at which point I drop a bridge on the meeting).
+Are they from the same wilderness town or family? Cool, they grew up together and their matriarch just gave them a mission.
+Are they all enemies of the Coalition? Awesome. They meet in Tolkeen or in a CS labor camp.

Simplest way to get a group together in my experience, absent a condition like "it's a merc campaign so everyone will start in the same merc company," was always to just tell people the starting location for the campaign ahead of time and tell them it is there responsibility tp come up with a reaspn to be there. If they can't, then a reason will be supplied for their character at the start of the first session. In practice, having a few options for those who didn't work it out ahead of time worked a bit better to head off arguments about "player choice."

Warshield73 wrote:

apprentice04 wrote:This was also discussed in How do your Rifts PC's normally meet? a few months ago. As I stated my current favorite is to make the players come up with connections to one another and then work with me for a group purpose.

This. It has the potential of making things a bit easier for the GM since they don't have to come up with something that not only works, but that all the players/characters like. Let them figure it out, frees up your time and brainpower for other things.

TeeAychEeMarchHare wrote:

Warshield73 wrote:

apprentice04 wrote:This was also discussed in How do your Rifts PC's normally meet? a few months ago. As I stated my current favorite is to make the players come up with connections to one another and then work with me for a group purpose.

This. It has the potential of making things a bit easier for the GM since they don't have to come up with something that not only works, but that all the players/characters like. Let them figure it out, frees up your time and brainpower for other things.

I gave XP and then later my own creation of character points to characters for good back stories, connections between PCs and maybe an old enemy or goal for the future. Gives me a lot to work with when I am creating the campaign.