It’s Bigger Than You (Parties)

Nearly every FRPG game organizes the players / player characters into parties - groups of adventurers that work together, typically each bringing different abilities.  This is a standard “trope” of RPGs.

There are a huge number of role-playing plots that can be used if you put the party into something bigger than the party.  The main one that jumps out at me is the traitor.  How many really cool movies have you seen where the true action of the movie was about finding the traitor within an organization?  But if you try to do that with just the party, then you force the players to work against each other.  I have never seen that work out.  So if you want to have a traitor hunt, but the party won’t work, what do you do?  You make it bigger than the party.

By having the party work within a bigger organization, you can activate a traitor while still keeping the party together and working as a team.  This can be great for a murder mystery plot.  If you make one of the PCs the bad guy (even if he has good reasons) you will never get the trust back within the party.  Worse yet, you may never get the trust back with that entire group of players (friends).  They may claim to be adults and be able to work through it, but you can never fully separate player knowledge from character knowledge.

But what organizations?  It can be simple:  an adventurers’ guild, a school or university, an army unit, or a secret society.  Secret societies make the perfect choices for stuff like this because they are secret.  It’s tougher for another member of the adventurers’ guild to “betray” the guild, because there really isn’t anything there.  With a secret society, there are almost always rivals.  This gives something meaty to betray. 

Why push this line?  Because with a secret society, it is worthwhile to make up enough NPCs that could be traitors to the organization.  I like this as a first mission within the organization - You guys are not the traitors because you weren’t here / members when the first bad thing happened.  Therefore, we need you to find out who the traitor is.  Then when they succeed - they know everybody who is in the secret organization and those NPCs you wrote up are still of value to the campaign (other than the traitor who is likely dead).

That plan / plot works, but then the players don’t get the emotional hit of actually being betrayed, because they haven’t worked with these people before.  You know how to do that?  You roll it up like this, first mission and all.  The party finds and exposes the traitor.  But they don’t realize that the traitor they found was the underling.  The boss traitor is still active in the organization, and it will take a whole bunch more missions before they are able to realize that the mole is still active and then go find that one.  Now, they can run through the same group of NPCs but this time hopefully find the boss - someone who has been their “friend” for months.

There are countless traitor scenarios as well as others that require the party to have friends that are not PCs but instead NPCs.  If the PCs’ whole world is the party, then there is so much that gets left behind.  By making it bigger than them, you give yourself so many more plots to work with.