Does "The Party" limit D&D?

[jdjarvis]

I've been wondering if "the party" model popular with D&D is utimately messing up D&D. Sure the party model of multiple players and their characters acting together for common goals and mutual gain is a geat and even unique feature of D&D (and RPG) but it's limiting. The assumed party dynamic forces how adventures are written and what an entire campaign can focus on.
I mention this here because OD&D and it's immediate proto-games made competition between players more of a feature than is seen in most modern campaigns.
Some of my most memorable experiences playing D&D have been when only 1 or 2 people played PCs at a time. I played a couple years in another campaign that had gone on for years where the PCs might have been allies from time to time but in the mean they were all lords of their own domains and in competition.
I have to wonder if a looser framework that could accept competition between players would promote more frequent play for a longer and more diverse campaign?

[Vile Traveller]

I like it.

In the Real World, moving away from the mandatory party adventure also means that we'd still be able to play when only half the players can make game night.

[Red Baron]

The most memorable games I've played are those where I was isolated from the party. It's completely terrifying.

[scottenkainen]

Cooperative play is one of the most unique and engaging elements of D&D and RPGs in general. If you want competition, you can forgo the campaign model and just play a series of tournaments.

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

[jdjarvis]

Like redbaron some of my most exciting adventures were when I played solo with a DM. No party ever would have been dumb enough to tackles a purpleworm at 1st level, but me alone as Braddoc Baidin...why not? Would a party only a couple levels higher sneak into the imperial palace to steal a the emperors sigil-ring just to cheese him off?

When you are the lord of a realm you really can't be a co-lord with 5-10 other guys. Maybe that's why so many modern players don't care for "the end-game" because it isn't cooperative?

Many of the tales of early D&D that stand out are about the exploits of 1 or 2 characters. Tricking other players with a magic mouth spell on the great stone face, travelling to mars, finding the quick way to the 12th level and marking the way with arrows all the exploits of. 1 or 2 characters, not mobs.

[Finarvyn]

The party model clearly is more social, but if the party is too large then no one gets to do anything. Individual adventures (or in pairs of characters) is probably more like the majority of the literature, but is limiting since only a few get to play at a time. Running multiple individuals on different quests at the same time would probably drive me crazy.

[Chainsaw]

Interesting topic, jdjarvis. I have played often with 1-2 players, often with 3-5 players and rarely with 6+ players, except at conventions, and really enjoyed the small and medium groups, but for different reasons.

I think the small groups offer a lot of flexibility to the player(s). If you want to play a jewel thief, engaging in capers all over town, or an assassin, executing dangerous missions through stealth and guile at the King's Castle, then you can. If you want to want to hunt down the dragon, you can do that too. Now, you'll need to hire some help or approach it in a way that plays to your strengths, but you can do it. I think there's a ton of room for guys to really "get into it" and sink their teeth into their PC. It's nice not having to worry about the needs of the other players or PCs. Plus, scheduling flexibility is at it's maximum. If I'm not mistaken, EGG ran games for RJK solo many times. In my experience, the downside is that the social experience tends to be lacking.

With a medium-sized group, the social dynamic plays a greater role. You get guys making jokes, cracking up and creating more memories as friends, which is really important to me. You also get more coordination, inventiveness and "I would have never thought of that - great idea!" moments. The downside, I think, is that whatever the "mission" is needs to be more aligned with everyone's interests. Plus, of course, scheduling can be tough for adults with jobs, families and more limited free time. Everyone might have six free hours a week, but it might not be the same six free hours.

Anyway, I would say that the party format doesn't necessarily limit the game per se, but it limits what kinds of games you can play. Ultimately, I would say it's nice that D&D so d**n robust. You can really do whatever you want with it.

I would have no problem running in or playing a loose game, where the group size fluctuates from week to week and the game type varies accordingly. In this sort of game, I'd probably have the players running multiple PCs in the same world, playing different ones according to the format for that week. It can definitely work.

[Deleted]

OD&D was indeed meant for "friendly rivals". Without player independence, you lose the entire end game of D&D when the players become great lords. There is only one Lord per castle, we are not an autonomous collective.

And as pointed out, you play with whomever shows up.

[Vile Traveller]

I agree that cooperative play is one of the 'features' of tabletop RPGs, but I have noticed a distressing tendency in the groups I play with these days to require a quorum before a session is confirmed. We used to just make do back in the old days. Dropping characters in and out of a game comes easy when you're used to old-school low-level character death rates ...

While I like my comfort zone of 4-6 players plus referee, I think one of the things games these days could concentrate on is providing for more flexible party size - or just emphasising that it's not always necessary to have everyome around the table every time you play. If anything that's even more relevant today with online games spanning lots of different time zones.

[tkdco2]

I have run simultaneous adventures using a different system for a group of folks whose characters often did their own thing and sometimes worked against each other. It could be challenging at times, especially when I had 5 or more players. If I run for a large group, I'd make sure they had a common goal.

Nowadays I DM for two players, so it's manageable, especially since the characters are working together. Small groups can be more flexible, depending on the players. I have a bit of leeway on the adventure seed, but I take the players' desires into account.

[Finarvyn]

Aug 17, 2014 0:08:02 GMT -6 Vile Traveller said:

I have noticed a distressing tendency in the groups I play with these days to require a quorum before a session is confirmed. We used to just make do back in the old days.

My current group is like this. We send out e-mails asking who can play, and if anyone can't make it there is a decent chance that we won't get together.

In the old days we just played. If one person was there or six, either way we would just get out characters and run an adventure. I wonder if the "module mentality" has impacted the "all or none" way of thinking, as modules are rated for XX number of players at YY level. I know that modules have been around for a long time, but our group never used them back "in the day" when everything was more sandbox for our group.

[Vile Traveller]

I don't know, even when I ran homebrews I used to have referee's notes detailing creatures, treasures and the like - if my players were fewer than expected (or more, in theory, although that never happened), I'd just adjust as I thought appropriate. I mean, I tend to do that all the time anyway - if it looks like I badly misjudged the difficulty of an encounter during play, I'll dial it up or down to keep the excitement going. So modules don't necessarily restrict that sort of play, but I guess there is more of a tendency to take recommended party sizes and levels as gospel now.

Anyway, I think the advantage of keeping party size flexible is that, in the end, you get a lot more campaign time in.

[Merias]

Aug 17, 2014 0:08:02 GMT -6 Vile Traveller said:

...or just emphasising that it's not always necessary to have everyome around the table every time you play. If anything that's even more relevant today with online games spanning lots of different time zones.

I am in a weekly barrowmaze hangouts game where this works perfectly - the trip to and from barrowmaze is half a days' travel, and the party almost always goes back to town at the end of each session. So it's no big deal if not everyone makes it each week. Your character is just deemed to be hanging out in town. And if you do miss a week, when you return it is fun hearing about the last excursion - who died, how much loot, etc. It's much more of a living campaign.

This does not always work, however. In my own OD&D (also via hangouts) campaign, 2 of the 4 players have missed the last few sessions, and the party is in the middle of exploring a dungeon 3 days' travel from the nearest town. So my choices are to NPC the stranded characters myself, or have the other players run them. We opted to just play other one-shot games while we wait, but obviously if the players bow out of the campaign they can be killed off or creatively removed at that point.

[Chainsaw]

In my twice-a-week AD&D game that ran from 2011-2013, we handled absent players this way: If the group was between missions, then the absent player could opt to have his PC sit out that session, but be "zapped" back in next time he played. If the group was deep in the dungeon, the player's PC was run by the other players as a hireling. He received a share of treasure/XP, but also faced greater odds of death - no one plays your PC like you do, right? I found this tended to discourage frivolous, repeated absenteeism but also didn't totally screw things up for the other players. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to handle it, but this worked for us. At the end of the day, I think you have to find something that works for your group. There's likely not a universal solution here.

[jdjarvis]

Aug 17, 2014 0:08:02 GMT -6 Vile Traveller said:

I agree that cooperative play is one of the 'features' of tabletop RPGs, but I have noticed a distressing tendency in the groups I play with these days to require a quorum before a session is confirmed. We used to just make do back in the old days.

The quorum seems to be an issue with The Party being the unit required to play the game where the party exists as some sort of entity beyond an association of present palyers and their characters.

[jdjarvis]

Aug 16, 2014 23:10:02 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

OD&D was indeed meant for "friendly rivals". Without player independence, you lose the entire end game of D&D when the players become great lords. There is only one Lord per castle, we are not an autonomous collective.

And as pointed out, you play with whomever shows up.

I played with one group for years where we weren't even all friendly rivals we were constantly raiding each others domains, sending assassins, and outright waged war on each other. When situations pulled together a few of us or our henchmen the rivalries diminished while the problem at hand was resolved. There were duels, debates, piracy, banditry, swindling and it was plenty of fun there were 10 or 12 players in the campaign but we almostnever all met at the same time.

[Deleted]

That's very much the way Dave and Gary envisioned the game.

[coffee]

I think the only limitation on D&D is the imagination of the group.

If all you can see, whether because of modules or whatever, is the group acting in harmony, then that's what you play. If you have a wargaming background where there will be only one winner, you might play more like Gary and Dave ran things.

At low levels, player characters are so fragile you have to work together. I've heard this compared to a special forces team; everyone trains together and works together to complete the mission. And that's all well and good.

But the guys who make higher levels have ambition; you don't just drift into such a thing. And those guys will want their own castle, want to be a Lord or Patriarch or whatever. I think it's just bad roleplaying to deny the character that fate.


That being said, the paradigm for the group I'm currently in (AD&D 1e), the DM specifically wants the party to stick together as one. If you can't make it, somebody else plays your character (who may very well die). We don't do 'upkeep', we pay for our inns and meals and supplies as it happens.

This does provide continuity, but can feel restrictive some times. I just miss the freewheeling old school of 'whoever shows up plays'.

[inkmeister]

I guess all play styles are limited. I will say that I vastly prefer small groups of players... 3 or less, and a ref. These days, my largest games consist of me, my nephew, and my wife. I think the largest group I ever ref'd had 3 players. I've played in 3 groups that had more players. Two of those had 6 or more players at least some of the time. I thought it was terrible. To my mind, it brings out the worst aspects of the game. I love comedy, but I don't want to play in a game that devolves into "Dumb and Dumber." I like my games to be about 80 to 90% serious in tone. Group play seems to flip that around to about 10 or 20% serious in tone. I don't like it at all, and have no interest in it anymore. On the flip side, I love the flexibility and intimacy of having one or two players (or being a player in such a game). I think my wife likes it too, since it feels that the game/world are so much less limited. My nephew is cool with it, since he's never played in a large group anyway.

[doublejig]

I never saw this work over a long running campaign. Instead, competition between members at the party level generated sometimes fantastic fireworks. The DM was usually minutely involved, picking sides, setting up scores, moving secrets, and then action would culminate in some event, side show, or betrayal, which may well have been - Best ever, but also led to the end of adventuring for that party. Long running campaigns are business like or the experience to high level doesn't get done.

[Deleted]

Aug 16, 2014 23:10:02 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

OD&D was indeed meant for "friendly rivals". Without player independence, you lose the entire end game of D&D when the players become great lords. There is only one Lord per castle, we are not an autonomous collective.

And as pointed out, you play with whomever shows up.

I as the ref am more than willing to play with whomever shows up. I have never gotten to play the end game as a player because even bitd (fall of '75 on) no one else wanted to play the end game. As a player I would love to play the end game and hope to someday have that chance. As a ref, I stand ready to ref the end game if I ever get any player(s) that want to do it.

Aug 17, 2014 9:58:16 GMT -6 jdjarvis said:

I played with one group for years where we weren't even all friendly rivals we were constantly raiding each others domains, sending assassins, and outright waged war on each other. When situations pulled together a few of us or our henchmen the rivalries diminished while the problem at hand was resolved. There were duels, debates, piracy, banditry, swindling and it was plenty of fun there were 10 or 12 players in the campaign but we almost never all met at the same time.

I have always wanted to do this, as player and as ref.

[jdjarvis]

Aug 18, 2014 8:05:10 GMT -6 doublejig said:

I never saw this work over a long running campaign. Instead, competition between members at the party level generated sometimes fantastic fireworks. The DM was usually minutely involved, picking sides, setting up scores, moving secrets, and then action would culminate in some event, side show, or betrayal, which may well have been - Best ever, but also led to the end of adventuring for that party. Long running campaigns are business like or the experience to high level doesn't get done.

There it is "the party" why did the campaign vanish with the party? (or am I reading that wrong?)

[Deleted]

There is no "party" as originally envisioned... that's why Gary said "up to 50 players."

[coffee]

So, does anyone know when/where 'the party' as opposed to 'a party' came to be a default? Because I've played in a few groups where it was the standard, but I can't remember when that started.

[cadriel]

"The party" comes from sociological realities. D&D went from a game played by big groups of wargamers of college age to a game played by small groups of non-wargamers in their pre-teen and early teen years. When you've got males of that age, that they tend to form small, close-knit affinity groups. The model of a single, unified party playing continuously in a campaign run by a single referee mirrors these groupings pretty precisely.

You could write books about how D&D was played versus how it was written. In 2000, they figured out that campaigns ran for around 16 sessions with groups of 4 players, facts that had been the general trend for decades. (Yes, there were longer-running campaigns; statistically they tend to be outliers.) This meant that most of the D&D experience was of the lower levels played by mostly teenage players. The endgame doesn't even come into sight when you play for 16 sessions.

[inkmeister]

That was an interesting post, Cadriel. It makes a lot of sense to me. I'm curious where you got the information.

I've never played a campaign that lasted even 16 sessions. I played in a group that I'm sure went on to play that many sessions or quite a few more, but I dropped out before then, because I didn't like the game, didn't like the large group dynamics, etc.

I do like the concept of an open world with several players, but where they seldom all play at the same time. Take a campaign where there are perhaps 4 players, but only 2 or 3 show up at any given time. That seems pretty cool to me.

I do have the suspicion that the rules of OD&D, B/X, and probably all editions, are at odds with how most people tend to play the game. For instance, I've never played in a game where all, or even most, of the rules were honored. Mostly that's fine, but it is annoying in a game like 3e or 4e where you go to so much trouble to create elaborate characters, only to have the rules go out the window. Defeats the purpose.

[xerxez]

Excellent original post and very good replies.

I have envisioned running a Lord of the Rings Game with players playing notable personae from the books, both the Dark Lord's forces and the Free Peoples.

I pictured having a move before each turn that dealt with resolving epic scale events and then roleplaying and resolving individual combats with each player, and kind of trying to connect them through the tale. At times they would interact directly. Thus you could have three party members exploring a dungeon while another player is playing an Orc captain and yet another is playing Galadriel.

Don't know how it would work in practice, but have always wanted to try.

[cadriel]

Aug 21, 2014 10:19:09 GMT -6 inkmeister said:

That was an interesting post, Cadriel. It makes a lot of sense to me. I'm curious where you got the information.

Well, the changing demographics are a matter of D&D's history; our own @gronanofsimmerya was an eyewitness to the shift in age, but it's clear that by the time the Holmes Basic Set caught on big in 1979 that the audience had skewed dramatically younger.

The market research WotC did was discussed publicly by Ryan Dancey, who was head of the RPG division back when they released 3rd edition. It generally holds true for the history of D&D, although I'm sure exact numbers have gone up and down. I would think the "average" campaign length in 1982 and 1983 when TSR was selling over a hundred thousand Basic Sets per month was much shorter, probably only a couple of sessions, because of the massive number who would've stopped playing after one or two sessions.

You can dig on Dragonsfoot for exact numbers, but basically the RPG hobby had two boom years, 1982 and 2001, when sales exploded. The majority of gamers come from one of the two great waves in those years. (I'm an outlier, having started in 1994.)

[Deleted]

Cadriel has an interesting point there. When I started playing with Gary in 1972, Ernie, Rob, and I were the only players who hadn't graduated high school. Dave Arneson's group was all college age or older.

By 1981 when I was working in a bookstore, it was a game for young teenage boys.

And in 1981-1983, it was selling like mad. It was so popular Steven Spielberg included it in "ET".

By 1985, companies were talking about how to stop the decline. In point of fact the bubble had popped.

[Deleted]

I'm not sure how much you can blame the players since TSR never really talked about this. I can't think of a single article about what to do with players that don't show up or how to manage a campaign with a varying number of players. I was one of those people that started playing D&D cold. I had never played or even seen D&D being played before I bought the Holmes set and started being the DM. I don't remember exactly why but from the very first session I was under the assumption that the same people played every time. If one time we had a different group of people, we'd more likely just play a completely different game.