[d20 Iron Heroes] Situation-driven, party-based play?

[Ry]

Last night I had a sweet find in one of the boxes in my storage locker:  A Saga Companion (the dragonlance 5th age card-based thing).  Anyway, it's got a great chapter of background story stuff... things like "A relative or friend that was close to your hero recently went missing, and your hero is concerned about them."  There's about 100 of these (82, really, because of Saga's wacky deck) - and yeah, I know that there's a lot of different resources with similar background material.

But what I realized was that if I make things like this relate to more than one PC at once, it will nicely weave the party together AND provide impetus for adventure.  So I can have players roll for this table and then work out as a group how at least two of them relate to it.

[contracycle]

Thats sounds like a really good idea, although my reflex is to suggest that players be obliged to make two different reasons, but perhaps thats not really important. Anyway I agree that aiming to "hook two", rather than aiming specifically one character, seems like a good idea to me.

[Ry]

Yeah, that was what I was thinking, but wasn't clear:  One player has a missing relative, the other has some other hook to the missing relative plot.

[RPL]

Hi, I think that my experience my contribute something to this but I may also be off the mark.

I just recently started my very first D&D Campaign as a GM using the Dark Sun setting. Since I wanted to experiment the whole "here's an adventure brave heroes, go do something about it" D&D seemed like the perfect system for it, however I also something more from the context of said adventures in a way that the PCs would have a more invested interest in them than just killing random things, even if it's just for Colors sake.

So for that purpose I have the player build a relationship map for them selves, where they would have between 1 and 2 things that they would have, they would have some sort of relationship with and that they loved (yeah, this was unashamedly stolen from Hero's Banner). Then I would randomly pick one relationship from every PC and connect them in order to have the elements for the adventure.

This way I hope to turn the generic, Kill The Dragon / Save The Princess into Kill The Dragon That Destroyed Your Village and Save Your Long Lost Sister.

And this way every PC has something that hooks them into the Adventure Of The Week.

However I should warn that this is more Adventure-driven than Situation-driven style of play. I intend to write a full AP after we complet our first adventure with the results of this experience.

I also was lucky enough to get players that are interested in being more than just a random party, so they all have built in elements that they are related to: The Paladin is in love with the Cleric, the Mind Blade is the long time partner in crime of the Rogue who was sent to kill the Paladin before he was one - because of a debt he owed - and became impressed by his transformation and decided to join up with him. So cool stuff, but this ground was already covered in the posts above so it's in here just for reference.

Hope it helps.


Diogo Curado