Sleeping in the same general location doesn't necessarily create long term bonds, either. And it's not like this is a community college, this is a university, students live on premises. So they survive the assessment together, and then they can totally keep in touch. It's not like they're scattered to disparate continents after the assessment. We're just arguing about the distance limitations of sleeping based bond fostering at this point. Your position is that they have to be within, like, 50' of each other outside of class. My position is that they will find each other in the library or meal hall or common rooms. But you know what? I'm really angling away from archetypes mattering mechanically at all. so fuck, I no longer care about archetype houses. It doesn't matter.Mask_De_H wrote:Risking your life once with people doesn't necessarily create the long bonds necessary for a crew unless they're able to keep in touch, via proximity or other methods. Sleeping in the same area over a long period of time allows people to create those long bonds.Prak wrote:Still don't understand what makes "you guys all sleep in the same area" more of an air-tight in-group determinator than "you guys all risked your lives together to get into this place."
Also, my friend with much more and much more legitimate collegiate experience told me that the friends doing fieldwork together model is actually pretty true to graduate work.
Ok, am I using the wrong term? Because I'm thinking "we need a celestial badger specimen, due next week, lets go to Celestia" and the players spending a few days there, like a typical dungeoncrawl.And fieldwork is a long process. You're with those assholes for at least three to six months and they have your (academic) livelihood at stake. There is nothing wrong with having friendship formed in fire, but motherfuckers need common interest and an in-group determinant too. If Alice and Bob are thrown into a dungeon and Bob gets eaten, Alice will be traumatized but she's not going to become besties with Carol and Dave just because they saw him die too.
But let me break this down, so I at least know people are evaluating what I'm trying to convey
-People show up to an Admissions Day and are sorted into groups for the Proving. Groups are 4 to 6 people, usually, and they work together on a written exam and then a low-level dungeon.
-Like real people do, the characters generally bond over this experience, and they at least now know a few other people on campus that they can hang out with and ask for help studying
-Classes assign fieldwork, with professors saying, for example, "Ok, next week, we're going to be studying the practice of summoning extraplanar creatures. Everyone needs to show up with the heart or essence of one such creature."
-Characters can then go two ways here- either they're all in at least one class together, and are a study group for that class, and will go off to carve the hearts out of celestial dire badgers or whatever together, or the players are friends who get together and say "well, I need an extraplanar creature's heart," "I need a plant that grows in elemental fire," "I need to observe magmins" and so they say "well, we can all hop over to the elemental plane of fire and help each other get shit done. Should take a couple days at most" (the university has a portal room)
But "you're all in the same dorm" is a stronger bond? I've been in three dorms. The first, all I had in common with the other people was that we were all art students and some kind of nerd. Most of them were movie nerds. The second, we were all art students. It wasn't until the third dorm that I actually had some kind of bond, and that was that we all played D&D. Hell, I had a stronger bond with another introvert from one of my classes and her boyfriend, and they had an apartment in the next state over.
My frame of reference for The Magicians is the TV show. So...You're putting the cart before the horse, is the issue here. Even the Magicians had Quentin, Penny and What'sherface grouped because they were skipping a grade together. They then set up Physical House, which is a frat that forms a common interest and gives the party something to do.
Ok, look, the way I see it is "we're together because we went through entrance exams together" and "the reason we stay together is because we have to go through dungeons and cut out celestial badger hearts so we might as well go with people we already know."You need a reason for the party not to just be together, but to stay together. And again, if the answer is "because I said so, hail Queer Satan" then why bother asking us for advice?
But also, the main advice I was asking for was thoughts on the specific variant rules I was working on to make D&D work a bit better for Wizard College.