In my Mothership open table, a character named Manny Vasquez recently died. One of the other PCs, Dürmig Ableton, decided to use one of his downtime actions to arrange a memorial service for Manny — a chance for everyone who had worked with him to share their memories and commend him to the wisdom of the stars.
I loved this idea, but it was also problematic.
Sure, we could play through the memorial service with the four players who were currently at the table, but what about the other twenty players who are currently active in the campaign and their characters? In fact, even Manny’s player wasn’t at this session! (Dürmig had heard the news of Manny’s death from one of the other PCs in the session, who had been working with Manny when he died.)
What Dürmig was really proposing was a communal event that, ideally, everyone playing in the open table could choose to participate in.
The problem is that I’ve tried organizing community events like this before — where a bunch of open table players all get together — and they’re pretty antithetical to what makes an open table work: The whole point of the open table, after all, is flexible scheduling so that you’re NOT trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules. Therefore, not only have I found that events like this often never come together at all, I’ve seen the efforts to coordinate real-world and game-world schedules actually wreck the entire open table and end the campaign.
(This may be difficult to understand unless you’ve seen it in practice. Basically, characters and/or players got put on hold waiting for the communal event to happen. When the event inevitably got delayed because of the logistical issues, people went into a “holding pattern” where they were waiting for the event to happen. Attendance dropped at the other sessions, which killed the forward momentum of the table and even caused whole sessions to be canceled. This caused players’ commitment to the game to flag, which increased the attendance problems while also making it harder for everyone to come together for the now much-delayed communal event, and the whole thing slipped into a death spiral.)
So with these practical and existential problems in mind, how did we handle Manny’s memorial service?
RUNNING THE EVENT
For context, here’s a few key facts about how this open table is being run:
- We have a dedicated Discord server where events are scheduled. The players’ also have channels for chatting with each other between sessions.
- This is supplemented with an e-mail list, which I use to let people who aren’t habitually checking Discord know when new sessions have been scheduled.
- Time is synced between the real world and the game world, generally at a rate of 1 week in the real world being equal to 1 cycle in the Tempest Cluster.
- There’s a system of downtime actions which we resolve at the beginning of each session. Among other things, this allows PCs to “catch up” to the game clock.
- In my campaign status document, in addition to tracking open table headlines, I’ve also found it useful to track Major Events and the date they’re occurring. It then becomes relatively easy to see, during downtime resolution, which characters are “passing through” a major event and make sure to insert it into their narrative.
With these structures in place, I then did four things to run the memorial event.
First, as I mentioned, Dürmig spent a downtime action getting the event set up. This was during a session, so we played through this and established the broad details.
Second, I asked Dürmig’s player to make a post to the campaign Discord detailing the invent and inviting others to join and (in this case) share their memories of Manny. I also promoted the event to all of the players in the campaign via our e-mail list.
Third, I included the memorial service on my Major Events timeline. It’s very different from the other sorts of events I’ve tracked there (e.g., a major terrorist attack on the station where everyone lives), but the key thing is that it’s getting “triggered” for each PC as they pass through that moment in time. This gives us a chance to play through (and likely add to) the event, making it a living part of the campaign experience.
Fourth, I encouraged those players — if they hadn’t already — to go to the Discord and share what their character does at the memorial service. (This can be a little wobbly if you ask them to do it after the session, so you may find it most effective to take a “break” so that everyone can hop on their phones and roleplay the moment immediately.)
The result is an event that plays out multiple times over multiple weeks (or even months) of real time. It naturally results in the event being revealed/created/built in a nonlinear fashion, but with each pass through the event the group is collectively adding layers of detail and interaction to it. Meanwhile, no one is left waiting for the event to happen, nor is anyone forced to skip the event unless they want to.
FINAL THOUGHTS
To date, I’ve only used this technique to resolve what you might refer to as “low stakes” events: Attending Manny’s memorial service, for example, is a communal event, but its outcome is not going to fundamentally shift the forward trajectory of the campaign. Things might be different if there was, say, a bomb hidden in Manny’s coffin or if the big, shared event was something like the evacuation of the station.
If/when such events arise in the future, I’ll probably use similar techniques of mixing nonlinear Discord resolution, but will need to experiment with other techniques to make it work right. A few things I’ve considered include:
- Special Event Session! I’d use this if the PCs can/should be positioned to affect the outcome of the event. The goal here would not be the futile hope of getting everyone in the campaign to show up on the same day, but rather to run a specially flagged session where the PCs who show up are the ones at the tip of the spear. (Other PCs may still be able to participate in the session’s “pregame” via the event’s Discord thread.)
- Default anyone not participating in the event by such-and-such a date as having been away from the action. (In the Tempest Cluster campaign, for example, we would just assume that they took a low-paying job off-station when the event happens.)
- Alternatively, with the canonical timeline/outcome determined (by a special event session or otherwise), we can now transition the non-linear resolution techniques described above as everyone else figures out how their character was affected by what happened during the special event.
- Multiple special event sessions. This can work if the event is designed in such a way that its outcome is being affected by actions taking place in significantly different places at the same time. For example, maybe every session in March is resolving a different facet of a crisis, with the outcome from all tables being synthesized at the end of the event
As I say, these are currently just thought experiments. But they do open up some really fascinating opportunities I’m looking forward to exploring.
FURTHER READING
