Exchange of Realities

My game’s one of the things that taught me the most about the dangers of waiting for the proper moment. It’s pretty much inevitable when you’ve got a game full of people who all have latent hammish qualities, a wide range of typing speeds, and nearly no communication outside of the primary IC and OOC chat windows. Is it any wonder, then, that one person would wait for the right moment and the others would happen to do such things as would prevent the right moment from ever occurring?

One of the more notable examples of this was last week. The duplicate versions of the primary NPC had been a conundrum most of the group wasn’t entirely sure how to handle, and my newest player had gotten an idea for what sounded like an extremely nifty (if somewhat difficult to adjudicate) dreamshaping gambit that might give him an answer. The problem was, he wanted someone to come up with a line that could give the character the idea, and the players were busily talking about something else. Even in explicitly asking for a cue, he didn’t give them much of an idea what he was doing. I think they would have gotten to the right point eventually, but by that time one of the other players had come up with a considerably simpler strategy, in the form of a question he knew the fake wouldn’t have an answer to because even half the party didn’t know the answer. It was a pity; resolving the original idea could have been interesting.

The other major example of waiting for the right moment and missing it was mine, a few months ago. For various reasons, the group had found themselves in a place the center of which was a storm of magical energy the likes of which they had never before seen. To be exact, it was about on eye level with a tower they were walking into because it housed one of the machines that was creating the storm, one with conveniently near-360 picture windows. All I was waiting for was for people to look out said windows, since it’d seemed logical to me that they’d be concerned enough with the machine to have to actively look to see it.

For me, the problem wasn’t so much missing the moment as that everyone had the moment individually. One looked up almost immediately. Others, slightly later. Others, later than that. With the result that instead of one big glorious post in the IC window, I delivered that particular bit of exposition as individual posts in the different IM windows as the characters looked up one by one. At least, until near the last character, when I finally got sick of it and posted the whole thing in the main window just for the sake of record continuity. This despite having rather strongly (or at least, so I thought) hinted that out the window was where people’s attention should go.

The take-home lesson? If you’re going to wait for the right moment, be explicit about the moment you’re waiting for. They can’t give it to you if they don’t know what it is.

Usually, I love it when people in my games work with the Laws of Dramatics. They’ll kindly let the villain monologue at them, they’ll suggest awesome plot complications… you get the idea. Heck, every now and then someone will suggest and then facilitate something that scuttles his own plan because the alternative is just that much cooler.

But there’s one Law of Dramatics that just doesn’t work with a gaming situation, and that one’s the law of timing. You know, that one that says that a really nifty action or the like is best done when played off of something that sets it up. Writers rarely have problems with this, as they can set up their own cues. It’s not so easy with gamers.

First off, working off of timing assumes that someone is going to provide the cue, and that’s difficult at best. Let’s face it, even players who want to cooperate with the GM have an uncanny ability to find the one thing that would break the plan and then do it. Now imagine you’re in the game—as a GM or a player, it really doesn’t matter—and you’re just waiting for someone else in the group to do that one thing that would set you up perfectly. Ideally, they’ll get the idea and do it immediately. Realistically, it might never happen, or (usually in the case of epic scenery that people have to look in a direction to see) it happens in pieces rather than all at once.

Second, there’s the balance between sharing one’s plans and maintaining surprise. On the one hand, you’ve got the fact that people react more strongly to things they aren’t expecting, so you don’t want to give your entire game away. On the other hand, if the people around you don’t know what kind of cue to give you, how the heck are they going to provide it? Most people either go to one extreme or the other, sharing everything and losing the fun or sharing nothing and making it near-impossible to set them up. There are no mind readers here.

Third, there’s the fact that there are multiple minds on this, and they’re all thinking differently. The issue here is magnified when you’ve got a situation where people aren’t taking neat and even turns, like most problem-solving situations or an initiativeless battle; while you’re refining your grand, shiny idea, other people are trying to get to the end of the scene. If you’re lucky, they’re just going to do something that requires a rapid rewrite, and you’ll still get the gist of your idea through. But more likely, somebody is going to take down that enemy you were about to hit, or find some other solution to the problem, or otherwise find some way to render an otherwise lovely idea completely irrelevant. Most people who wait for the proper moment find it, all right—or rather, find that it was five minutes ago.

In a story, dramatic timing is easy. In a play, it’s part of the script. But in a game, sometimes it’s just better to get what you’re doing out there rather than wait for the scene to give you your setup. Why wait for a moment that won’t do you the same courtesy?

Epic scenery tends to get a bit of a bad rap, particularly in role-playing games. Sure, they ask, it’s big and pretty and all, but are you sure you didn’t put it in just for an excuse to show off your ability to create the stuff? And most of us, being honest people at heart (or figuring this is a good opportunity to look honest at heart), look down and shuffle our feet a little and admit that yeah, that might have had something to do with it.

In itself, I don’t see much wrong with lavishly described scenery for lavishly described scenery’s own sake (or, as TVTropes puts it, “Scenery Porn”). Even I keep a few stashes around here and there. But some people get bored with the amount of time devoted to the background, and even the people who like the extra detail and the pretty scenery are likely to get frustrated when it’s plunked down in the middle of a tense, terse scene and messing with the pacing. And this is likelier to happen when all the scenery is there for is to look cool, rather than serving a purpose. So how do we get beyond scenery porn?

Use the scenery to build up a character, either by parallelism or by contrast. Imagine, for instance, stepping into a description of one of those lavish courts where just about everything is designed to be lavish, gorgeous, and downright deadly, and on top of that you’re approached by someone who fits in perfectly with this place, like she could very well be part of the scenery. Wouldn’t that say something about her? On the other hand, there’s the contrast as well: a single person moving in a world tinted red and strewn with corpses is either a survivor or cause to run, and one who seems completely unaware of the dead is downright creepy.

On a somewhat larger scale, when you’re dealing with manmade-epic, you can use it as a way of characterizing the creators. After all, they have to be the types who would have made something like this, and had the ability to do so. Even better, along with the cultural exposition it provides, there are ways to add a little contrast and bring in an individual; imagine, for instance, one of those mountain-sized statues, weathering the ages, so on and so forth—and somewhere in the folds of its robe where the carved cloth brushes the ground is a tiny bit of scrawled graffiti.

Let the scenery be an obstacle. Those mountains may look impressive, the storm of magical energies outside the window may be spectacular, but along with how cool they look there’s the realization that one has to cross the mountains or dissipate/travel through/control the storm, and that brings in tension. Now the pretty matters.

Make it not quite what it appears to be. Mountain ranges that turn out to be enormous sleeping creatures may be on the verge of cliché, but they’re common because they’re spectacular, particularly when they’re not too obvious about what they are beforehand. (Explicitly saying that a mountain range looks like a sleeping dragon is one thing, but describing structures that in retrospect map one to one with the anatomy as the critter gets up….)

Do combinations of the above. Sometimes mix and match is more fun than just using one potential use of the scenery.

And every now and then, just let it be there for the pretty and admit it. It’s your job to have fun too, isn’t it?

Into any story, a little epic scenery seems to fall. Okay, not fall exactly. More come crashing down into view at just the right moment to make everyone use it and take the audience’s breath away. Either way, it’s pretty much a staple of stories in general and the speculative fiction genre in particular. But what makes epic scenery?

Sometimes it’s scope. Think the Grand Canyon. Mount Everest. Any of a number of waterfalls known for height, width, or number of cascade-points on the way down. What gets our attention about those sorts of ’scapes is that they’re enormous, and compared to them, even our viewpoint seems miniscule. (This is also why I’d take third person limited over omniscient voice when looking at these things any day; omniscient has a tendency to seem bigger.) They’re a panoramic view, stretched out as far as we can see them—the kind of thing that in movies you try to get in widescreen if not going the whole way and seeing the Imax version.

Sometimes it’s complexity. Consider the Celtic knot, an artform that seems to exist entirely for the sake of seeing how many times you can wind a set number of strands around themselves and each other and then link the ends together so there is no beginning. Now imagine a tree with three roots that manages to do that over the span of about four hundred square feet. Pretty staggering, isn’t it? Complexity implies if not effort than purpose, and if not purpose than truly amazing happenstance. The bigger and more complex, the more impressive.

Occasionally it’s unreality. We’re all used to forests, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t impressed by forests where the trees are made of something that isn’t wood and sap. Swimming creatures are beautiful; creatures swimming in substances that aren’t water edges towards epic. When the laws of physics don’t work the way they’re supposed to, when even magic or pseudoscience can’t explain it, it feels like it shouldn’t be possible—and mystery is fascinating.

Sometimes it’s emotion. When your backdrop—or, for that matter, your current foreground—is such that it can be condensed to one single concept, one single emotion, despite having at least a decent scope to call its own, that makes an impression. Loss or futility gets us red-earth battlefields in which kicking a rock will invariably literally hit one of the dead. A sense of mystery gets us a world barely peeking out of a shroud of mist. Fear gets us Places That Should Never Have Been. Awe gets us things that are pure concentrated Essence of Cathedral.

I’ve mostly been using natural examples, but that’s not the be all and end all of epic scenery; man-made structures can carry it off just as well, using the same features. It’s just a matter of what one wants to get across. Epic natural scenery emphasizes the power and beauty of the world or of nature; this all happened, with or without help from the little naked apes with their delusions of grandeur. Epic man-made scenery, on the other hand, is a tribute to its civilization and to the human spirit; it’s a work of patience, great resources, possibly power and almost definitely a strong understanding with the laws of physics.

I’m sure I’ve missed qualities; what is it about a nice piece of scenery that makes your eyes want to pop?

Who says the world has to revolve around the heroes? Your secondary characters deserve a little time in the spotlight as well; if they aren’t doing anything, after all, why are they there?

For a writer, giving a secondary character a Moment isn’t too hard. Everyone has a set of skills suited to a specific purpose; you just need to set things up so that the situation requires those skills. Alternately, there’s putting them in a situation where for whatever reason—incapacitation, being needed for something else, just being too far away to react quickly enough—the main characters can’t do what needs to be done, and the secondary can.

It’s a lot harder with a game group, though. Time is already at a premium, divided between The World, The Group, and Each Individual Player; if someone’s thinking that they aren’t getting enough time as it is, and suddenly they’re losing time to this figment, there might be complaints. Moreso if the spotlighted secondary is somehow a threat to said player’s PC. (Situations like this are often complicated and, since the logic behind them is idiosyncratic, quite unpredictable.) But most players will cheerfully make room for an NPC getting to be awesome for a bit, particularly under the following conditions.

One: the NPC is a villain. A group’s awesomeness is determined in part by the kinds of challenges they overcome; what would you rather have credit for defeating, a local warlord with delusions of grandeur or a local warlord whom you actually saw hold off about half of the nearest city’s militia at the same time? That means the players are likely to cut you a lot more slack on taking the time to build up the villain’s image—it reflects that much better on them when they inevitably take the guy out.

Two: it’s a player’s NPC. I’m sure you know the type: siblings, love interests, mentors, friends, chosen rivals, so on and so forth. Many players consider them to be as much a part of the character’s image and panoply as her one of a kind magic sword or her unnervingly competent familiar. As a result, what the NPC does boosts not only her own awesomeness, but that of the PC to whom she is linked. (Blessed indeed are the characters who can be seen as the group’s NPC, for their awesomeness is encouraged by everyone.) These require a bit more care, since a player who gets shirty if the other characters get more screentime than his does is also likely to get shirty if other people’s NPCs get more time than his do.

When you’ve got a chance for a Moment, don’t spend too much time putting it together on the spot. Ever waited for someone to take a turn when they just couldn’t decide what to do? It’s kind of like that. Plan it ahead if you can; if you can’t, focus on making it fast rather than choosing your words or your images carefully. I find, though, that this isn’t as hard and fast a rule as it could be. In sidechat, or around a player/group that has been requesting that the character be more awesome, there’s a bit more room to take time to polish it up.

A side NPC’s Moment should be like a bell: strike, then fade. If you hammer it in, having your other NPCs talking about it at every available opportunity, it feels like you’re trying to shove it down the players’ throats, and they tend to push back. But if they’re impressed, they’re the ones who are going to talk about it or incorporate it into their approach to the world, particularly if you give them opportunities to do so. It’s better that way. The key here is not to push too hard.

Have you ever gotten a chance to give a secondary a turn in the spotlight? Tell me about it!

You may think this article is going to be about finding the time to make sure your plot’s coherent, knowing when it’s worth giving a character a full stat block vs a summary, a backstory vs a general impression. Or about balancing work and the rest of your social life and your game.

It’s not.

This is about metagame time management: balancing the time that everyone is getting within the game itself. It’s a tough balance, after all. You need to balance the PCs’ time with the NPCs’ time with the world’s time. Too little time with the world, and nobody gets how it works; the setting ceases to matter. Too little time with the NPCs, and they start seeming like cardboard cutouts rather than interesting characters. Too little time with the PCs, and the PCs start griping because this is their story.

But that’s not all. Then you’ve got to balance time between The Group and The Individuals. Some time is a group thing; everyone’s suited to the task, everyone’s on, and as a result there’s no real “star”. Then you’ve got time that focuses on individuals. Maybe someone’s getting the spotlight because something on his character sheet says he’s good at this stuff and the rest of the characters haven’t invested in skills good for this situation. Maybe it’s a situation that requires cunning or lateral thinking, and one of the players just happens to be particularly good at that, so she’s taking the lead. Perhaps the current plothook is something that inherently grabs one of the PCs more than it does the others, so he’s the one who’s getting the time.

And as if spotlight time wasn’t tricky enough, then there’s balancing between types of scenes. Unlike balancing between players, this one can be a lot more uneven, depending on what people like. If you’ve got a whole bunch of combat-evading social monsters who want to know how the world works, then social scenes and scenes that showcase the world can far outnumber combat scenes, and when you’ve got a group that’s all about finding new and interesting ways to bash their foes and look awesome doing it, having lots of combat and not too much of anything else is pretty much expected. But when people have different priorities, that gets trickier. Maybe one person loves combat and isn’t too fond of this whole talking thing, while another just wants to poke the world and see how it reacts, and yet another wants to see how their interpersonal dynamics with the other characters (both NPC and PC) works out.

On the plus side, there are ways to balance the factors. If most of your group are explorer-types, you can allow a lot more time for world, since they’re losing spotlight time but are getting Fun. If you’ve got a situation where one person’s the one the story follows most closely but another is better suited to the challenges being thrown at them, played to appeal to another’s metagame rewards, everyone gets something they want at once.

There’s no one true way to manage time in a game, but there are a few general rules. One: make sure you know what everyone wants. Is there someone who’s a particular spotlight hound, or another who doesn’t mind being support? What sorts of metagame rewards does everyone favor, and how many different ones can you sneak into one scene? Two: see if you’ve got anything that creates natural imbalances. Is there a character you tend to focus on, because their style is similar to yours or they make more connections with the NPCs, and how can you balance for that? Is there one who tends to try to take the spotlight when left alone? Do you find yourself giving particular amounts of screen time to a certain NPC, and if so is there a character that NPC is most closely tied to? Three: Watch out for overcompensation. Just because one character dominated the game a year ago doesn’t mean he’d still dominate it now if you weren’t taking steps to avoid that; in fact, you might be leaving him out because you’re so busy worrying about him you don’t realize how much you’re favoring another. Four: How much do your players care about the balance? Would they be having fun anyway?

You’re probably not going to be able to get perfect balance, but if you can find where the imbalances are and which ones matter, you can at least make an effort to try to rectify them. And how are you going to find them if you don’t know where to look?

Looking for more on dealing with a game group? RPG Blog Carnival this month is all about the community.

Just because we’re the villains doesn’t mean we always have to fight the protagonists. If you’ve already been defeated, if you’re trying to look like you’re harmless, or if they just plain aren’t aware you’re a Hand of Darkness, you may find yourself in a position to bargain with them. I know many of you think you’d never do such a thing, but think of it this way: it’s still a contest with them, they probably hate the idea as much as you do, and part of the fun is finding ways to make it advance your agenda without them catching on. And did I mention that there’s a considerably smaller risk of dying when making a bargain than in a direct confrontation?

The first thing you’ll need to do is get them used to the idea of making a bargain with you. If you’re fortunate, they’ll realize you’ve got something they need and come to you. Otherwise, you may have to go to them: find a problem they haven’t been able to solve that you just happen to have information that could finish, and offer it to them—for a price. The price part is important; if you just give away your information, you might find yourself drifting towards the Light, or they might start taking you for granted. Neither is a good thing. So make sure that you have a condition for everything. Even if it’s just information they could probably find on their own if they knew where to look, that can’t possibly be used against you, at least get a little money or a nice meal out of them.

Then start implementing useful prices. Beginners are often obvious about how they strike their bargains; the more a certain favor is worth to the protagonists, the more obviously their price advances their plans. While this is useful, it makes them suspicious—if you’re trying to seem like you’ve turned over a new leaf, that’s generally a bad idea. On the other hand, if none of your prices seem like they’d be of any use to you, the protagonists are likely to figure that you’re putting one over on them, and that gets them suspicious. The optimal balance is asking for something whose immediate value to you is visible, and that just happens to have an additional long-term value or isn’t particularly dangerous to you unless combined with other things. If you’re really lucky, and you get a non-cohesive group prone to approaching you separately, you can even have several things that are only useful when all of them have been done going at once; just make sure the group’s communication is bad enough that they aren’t comparing notes. I find this works best when they think they’re the only ones in the group making such deals.

Now, when you’re setting your prices, you may find yourself inclined to charge less when the heroes having the information or getting the favor is actually to your advantage. It’s very tempting, but it’s a very bad idea. After all, then they might realize that you’re making up the price somewhere else, and they’ll be suspicious. If anything, you might want to drive a harder bargain, and ask prices that are obviously to your direct advantage, for things you actually want to have happen—if the price is that high, or they need to work that hard to bargain you down to whatever the final price ends up being, then clearly there’s some reason why you don’t want them to do it. And they’re heroes; if you clearly don’t want them to do something, you know they’ll be doing it at the next available opportunity.

A good bargain is based on knowing more about their agenda than they know about yours, but appearing to know less than you actually do. To ease distracting them from your actual purpose or keep them from digging too deep, you may actually want to make one of your goals an open secret. It’s a perfect smokescreen; if they think that that’s the motivation behind each of your prices, the lazier ones might settle for that and not dig down to the other objective served by each of those deals. You can even get away with driving a lesser bargain on negotiations that serve that goal, just to throw them off further.

Bargaining with the heroes is tricky in every sense of the word; it gives you a chance to utilize your cunning, provides you with all the challenge and less of the risk, and increases your chances of ending up in a good career protagonist/antagonist relationship. Know what you’re doing, and there too you can find success.

Today may mark the first day that 100% of my group has had an absolute field day with the battle.

The stage was the dreams of an old enemy (or rather, the old enemy’s segment of the dreamscape of a friend—yeah, it’s complicated). I’d split the group up at the end of the previous session, partly so they could be negotiated with individually (the enemy is very convincing) and partly so as to set up another element. At the beginning of this session, the group came back together, and discovered in the process that there were two of their favorite NPC. Which in turn led to a rather complicated sequence of trying to figure out which one was real, and once that was established getting on with the fight.

You already know I love dreamscape battles, and this one had everything I could possibly want. For one thing, the players were all being crazy-inventive, taking full advantage of the lax laws of physics; for once, I found myself at a disadvantage trying to come up with stunts as quickly as they did. But hey, I could toy with the laws of physics as well, and I was getting as much feedback as they were on the awesomeness of my moves. (That’s one of the things that always made me prefer playing in battles to running them; it’s a bit of an uphill battle for the GM to get the proper feedback.)

Another was getting to both watch and experiment with something I don’t usually see: delayed-payoff stunts. In the case of the player engaging in that, I think I can safely attribute that to the dream format; the first part was creating the necessary materials, the second part utilizing them. (Of course, technically the session ended before the payoff could come, but I got to see a preview.) In my case, it was just that mine was too long for one round, so I had to divide it in two; I’m hoping the first half provides good setup for the second.

And everyone in the group got to show off in a different way, and hog the spotlight. One rewrote the laws of physics. One did crazy-symbolic things with his attack. One did crazy-symbolic things with his defense. One did “this is going to work later, but needs to be set up right now”. I played off of whatever tactic was coming in; my NPCs were doing just about every tactic, one way or another. But it’s easier, in dreams, to choose a tactic and stick to it; in the waking world, not all of those are necessarily possible, and those that are are often a lot harder. Mostly I see people stick to Big and Impressive, and that doesn’t have the effect on me I think they want it to.

Either way, this was fun, and I can’t wait to finish it off next week. If these people are scary now, just think what they might do with prep time!

With all the headlong pace on this blog, it’s been hard to take a moment and reflect. Now, though, is that moment, a chance to look back at the forgotten posts of just over a year ago, in October of 2008.

Body language was an important concept to me, as it’s one of the things that makes a live game easier than a play-by-IM, and has often vexed me about my own play-by-IM games. What better way to try to pep up the posture a bit than to write about it?

Two Things Every Character Needs was actually a response to a situation in the game I usually play in. We were on our third arc, I was having trouble with my PC, and I wanted to figure out why. When I found that what she was missing were the two things, the article just flowed from there.

What happens when you take me to a winery with a crowd of people a generation older than me and only one anywhere near my age? Imagined RPG battles, apparently. I may not have been the first to write about nifty places to hold a fight, but I’m pretty sure it was one of the more unexpected concepts.

There’s a tool that most GMs could use, and almost all of those would benefit greatly from, but most of them don’t. That tool is collaboration: finding a second person (or more!) to bounce ideas off of, get suggestions from, hear the “if I’m the MacGyvering PC, this is what I’d exploit” riff from before the flaw actually gets exploited, and occasionally convince to give a little bit of nerve-soothing flattery (particularly if it really is true). Back then, I looked at both the advantages and the hazards of a good collaborative effort.

Have you made a plan today? Do you think you need to? How do you put one together? Plans have always been one of my favorite parts of both gaming and reading (I have a bit of a weakness for a good heist movie, what can I say?), so it was pretty much inevitable that I’d get them into a riff eventually.

One of my favorite elements of fantasy is something that almost never showed up in the games I’d been in by the time I started this blog, and that’s wonder for wonder’s sake. I often see scenery that’s designed to be a battleground, and regularly run afoul of games where, if they were filmed as movies, the camera would be on the characters’ faces the whole time and you’d never see anything of the background. But rarely do I see scenes or places that are there just to make people whisper, “Wow.” …And a Sense of Wonder, and its companion article Where Does the Wonder Go?, were meant to fix that.

While I wrote a lot about undead in an attempt to get into that good old Halloween spirit, there was one article that really stood out for me—the one that the entire week was there to frame, so to speak. Vampire literature bored me; how many different ways can you handle someone who runs around drinking blood and being oh-so-annoyingly-attractive? So as an alternative to the love-bonds that are supposed to explain why a vampire and a human are in the same romance novel, or whinging about being undead, I started thinking about social convention among bloodsuckers, tied in the meanings of the context behind a kiss, and ended up with the vamp’s code of social drinking.

Did I miss anything interesting?

The thing about most RPGs is that they involve a group. Yeah, you can have solo games, but it’s usually designed not to, and then you lose a lot of the interaction and the unpredictability. But the thing about groups is that they’re made of individuals, and individuals have a tendency to want to do their own thing, and when “their own thing” doesn’t line up, next thing you know you’ve got a group that won’t operate. In my opinion, it’s pretty much everyone’s job to try to avoid that; a group that can’t work together decreases the fun for everyone.

Group cohesion. Party unity. Whatever you want to call it. I find that it’s one of the most important elements of a good game group. When you have it, there’s flow, and the game goes smoothly. Even if there’s a little bit of inter-character bickering, the party as a whole stays together. If you don’t have it, though, discord rapidly increases, and other otherwise small problems are magnified by the overall discontent. I already wrote about this back when I worked for the Census, but it never hurts to look a little more closely.

So what keeps a party together?

One way to hold them together is good old friendship. Whether they knew each other from before the story began, have a bunch of common interests that help them start to like each other, or have just been rapidly acquiring that peculiar bond people seem to get from spitting in Death’s eye in unison and then congratulating each other over the fact that all of them managed to hit. When you’ve got PCs who genuinely like each other, threatening one of them quickly makes enemies of the rest, so the GM can focus on hooking one and know that the rest will follow.

Another is working against a common threat. The characters may not know each other, but as long as they’re being pursued by a demon army, the order of the day will probably be dealing with the demon army first and worrying about why they shouldn’t like each other second. (Note that this isn’t completely reliable; sometimes, when you stick two people in trouble up to their necks in hopes that it’ll get them to work together long enough to get out, they’ll still bicker anyway.)

Yet another is working towards a common purpose. It might sound the same as working against a common threat, but it’s not necessarily; while working against a common threat is a kneejerk reaction to try to bring back a status quo (or at least to make the status quo include Not Dying), working with a common purpose is an attempt to actually change things. It’s something people tend to choose rather than to be forced into, and as a result, they will automatically have something in common: the fact that this purpose is important to them.

Then there’s having a shared boss. The characters might be peons in the same organization, associates to the same fixer, hired out to the same patron, serving the same god, even blackmailed by the same shadowy figure. But whatever it is that brings them together, it’s higher-ranked than they are and able to give them all orders. They may not like each other, but they’re under the same orders and going to get the job done (or can find common cause in doing something about The Boss).

What’s keeping your group together? If they don’t have one of those things going on, is there anything aside from “It would really mess the GM up?” that keeps them from going their separate ways? If your group’s getting a bit dysfunctional, it’s a good question to ask yourself.