Just this past Wednesday I wrote that I wanted to be better at checking in with the whole party during Exploration and Travel turns. For the uninitiated, “Turns” here refers to a fungible amount of time that’s used to measure the length of an action during different modes of play. Exploration Turns—often just ‘Turns’—are where my game spends the most time. It’s used most commonly while the players are exploring an adventure location like a dungeon. Each Exploration Turn is approximately 10 minutes, though it’s best not to try mapping turns onto literal clock movements. Travel Turns, or Watches, are used mostly when players are moving across a vast distance, or when they’re exploring a relatively safe environment like a city. They last about 4 hours, but again, not literally.
In both of these game modes the party tends to behave as a single unit. This is especially true for Watches (“We go North.”), but happens during Exploration as well. The party may discuss what they want to do, but often it’s only a single character who actually does something. None of this is necessarily bad. The only issue is that when the party works as a unit, more outspoken players unintentionally push shy players onto the sidelines.
While pondering today’s prompt, I was thinking about how John B. approaches teamwork. (A second reference in one week. John’s outsize influence on my thinking is well documented.) I’ve wanted to integrate better incentives for teamwork & assistance into my own games for awhile now, and it occurred to me that it could be done as a matter of refereeing style, rather than as a written rule.
When the players are in Exploration or Travel Turns, and a situation arises in which one member of party is doing something, the referee can quickly indicate the other members of the group and ask: “Is there anything you want to do to help them?” If they can come up with something good, maybe the person taking the action gets a bonus, or gains safety from some potential consequence. It may also happen that a player doesn’t have anything to do to help, but does have an idea about what their character wants to do while the rest of the party is occupied. Or maybe the players will simply say “no,” which is fine. Characters don’t need to be acting constantly, so long as players are given frequent invitations to act.
What qualifies as good help may be handled more or less seriously. I’ll end with an anecdote from when John was playing Doctor Trevor Science in my FKOS game, years ago. Another player was hacking a computer, and Dr. Science wanted to help. So as the other player hacked, he played some heavy synth music on his phone, and flashed the lights dramatically.
Obviously the hacker got a +1 to their roll.
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