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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Mask_De_H wrote:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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.
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.
My frame of reference for The Magicians is the TV show. So...
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?
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."

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.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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Mask_De_H
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Post by Mask_De_H »

What's important is both the length of time in proximity as well as the degree of emotional arousal within that proximity, but your fieldwork example creates the necessary amount of both for this thing to work. Essentially you're making the students group like MMO Raiding parties or some shit.

It would be useful to keep people focused on the same "quest" for lack of a better term, but that can be done by staggering classwork arbitrarily or by having multiple students be able to get their proverbial ten bear asses in the same quest instance. That consistent bit of helpfulness/working together will create a sensible proximity bond.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Thu Sep 29, 2016 7:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

So, again, I wasn't conveying my full thought.

....I'm tempted to stop trying, given that, apparently I really do suck at communicating.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Zaranthan
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Post by Zaranthan »

Honestly, I think the HP thing would still work for your campaign. Much like you'd tell the players "okay, you're all in the same tavern", you tell them "okay, you're all in House Ravenclaw." Make the houses whatever you want, but make House <the party> something generic (or ask your players for motivations and find a middle ground) and slap them all in there. Make your six houses like you mentioned here, but be prepared to disregard any of those details in favor of party coherency, much like Harry was a Slytherin who got sorted into Gryffindor because Plot.
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Prak,

Part of what makes giving advice hard is that we don't have a clear sense of the types of adventures that you're going to have. If your players are all sleeping in the same place, when Dobby the House Elf shows up and messes with one of them, the others are going to be able to join in the action.

If the one PC that is visited has to write a letter to bring in the other players, you're going to have a really different play experience.

Finding reasons to put the players in proximity regularly is good because it gives you lots of ways to present hooks without fear that your party is going to split up. Every time your player is given a hook with the option a) Deal it with myself NOW or b) get my friends together and deal with it LATER, you run the risk of splitting the party and/or having a player die/get captured without the other players even knowing. So no matter what, you end up with people sitting around waiting to have a chance to join in the story.

Regarding your specific plan to have the players join 'field teams' together, that can work. But you have to decide on whether it is an entirely voluntary association of if it includes an involuntary element. Both are going to give you different ways of driving the story.

In Harry Potter, Harry has mandatory potions class with Draco Malfoy. They're going to interact regularly. Do you want your PCs to have to deal with someone they dislike, or can they completely choose to avoid them? You can 'split the difference'. For example, students are assigned to an adviser, with each adviser being responsible for 8-10 students. The adviser may break their 'charges' into 1-2 teams. Over time, the adviser could change (ie, a year sabbatical) which allows you to introduce complications if they lose an advocate and gain an antagonist. They could also have students 'transfer in' and get assigned to their adviser. The 'other team' could provide a stable of NPCs to pull in as necessary and/or allow the PCs to 'save themselves' by playing the other group sometimes. Advisers could be in competition with each other for recognition/promotion to dean, so you have a 'Mr. Johnson' for your teams that might be willing to gamble the student's lives to get ahead.

Instead of starting with 'magical universities are cool', you should start with 'how can I use a magical university to make some cool adventures'. The first is strictly emulative, and ultimately it is unlikely to provide anything more rewarding than 'go to class every day'. You need to find ways to get your PCs into crazy adventures that may or may not be similar to those experienced by other students. Figuring out how you get them involved matters because if this is a CAMPAIGN, rather than a one-off, you're going to have to get them involved multiple times. Making sure you have multiple avenues to approach adventure just helps with that.
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