18. Directness
18. A fast introduction of a new PC or player?
If I know players are likely to come and go I’ll try to have onboarding options and avoid cliffhangers. Emphasis on try.
Some games and settings are better for this than others, mechanically and narratively.
Overlooking the old “why do we trust this total stranger walking up to us in the middle of a secret mission?” and the magic power of the PC Glow...
D&D style fantasy calls it “West Marches” when every session begins and ends with the PCs in their base and venturing out from it. That cuts off things like multi-session dungeons and heavier ongoing plots unless you use the old un-narrative kludge of teleporting PCs in, but it’s a good idea for an open table.
Star Trek (a setting where characters can just teleport in and out mid adventure) would do this if it were realistic about its Luxury Space Communism and faster-than-light travel. Ha ha. Star Trek Adventures makes you pay player resources to get specialist NPC crew to go on camera, which is the model-the-show way of dealing with this. Star Fleet Battles RPG Prime Directive goes the other way and has a completely different command structure for its variant universe.
Mission: Impossible on TV started with selecting agents with relevant skillsets. I’ve seen someone suggest pregens in dossiers before.
(Note that the films acquire a consistent team as they go along, leading to narrative issues like needing something for both the computer geniuses to do.)
Last academic year I had a large amount of player turnover in Vampire: The Masquerade and that isn’t ideal for it or how I run it. Even then, if I’d known I could have tailored the chronicle setup to PCs being part of a group that could explain PCs coming and going and make sessions less serialised. Not ideal for personal horror or slow unravelling of mysteries but I could give it a go. Hmm.
My most setting-of-the-week one-and-done game is Doctor Who, which also has fast character creation... but following the series model really expects the PCs to be the one point of consistency.
If I want to go full “jump in any session” open table, I might go with a light superhero game like ICONS with a big team. Fast character creation, largely self-contained adventures. I’m sure threads would reappear at some point, but I can juggle and improvise so we don’t end up with too many “this should be a Penguin adventure but Batman’s player isn’t here” situations.
A large kitchen sink also helps if I want to come up with a largely standalone adventure every week.
Hey, Buffy is a light superhero game too! Albeit one that also expects a consistent Scooby Gang.
