Post by robosnake on Apr 27, 2016 17:05:37 GMT
I thought this episode was really interesting, in part because my start in RPGs was in small group games. I picked up Dangerous Journeys, the game Gary Gygax wrote after he left TSR, from a local bookstore. Read through it many times, and then tried running games for my friends, almost always for one friend at a time. Even later in my gaming, it was usually with one or maybe two friends playing AD&D or GURPS or West End Star Wars. So for years, basically until college, my experience with RPGs was with one or two players. For me it was weird to work on skills to have three or four or more players, since I was used to spotlighting a single protagonist. We ripped off ideas from novels we liked a lot, since those often had a single protagonist and a cast of characters around him or her, and that kind of storyline fit perfectly with the campaigns we were running.
My experience was that we got through far more story in a given session with one player than with a group, and I ended up having to improvise a lot more because it was hard to plan that far ahead. Also, I find one player to be more unpredictable than four. With a party, they'll discuss things and make group decisions, and the crazy ideas will often be walked back. With one PC, they can just go do whatever comes to mind, no matter how crazy, and there's no one (except the NPCs, who they'll ignore of course) to tell them otherwise. They set their own agenda and pursue it however they choose.
In some ways, I miss it. I like having more than one player because getting together with a group of friends is awesome, but I miss the intensity and focus of those one-player games.
My experience was that we got through far more story in a given session with one player than with a group, and I ended up having to improvise a lot more because it was hard to plan that far ahead. Also, I find one player to be more unpredictable than four. With a party, they'll discuss things and make group decisions, and the crazy ideas will often be walked back. With one PC, they can just go do whatever comes to mind, no matter how crazy, and there's no one (except the NPCs, who they'll ignore of course) to tell them otherwise. They set their own agenda and pursue it however they choose.
In some ways, I miss it. I like having more than one player because getting together with a group of friends is awesome, but I miss the intensity and focus of those one-player games.
