So, there I was sat on the Bedford Commuter train from Brighton to, umm, Hell, via Purgatory and Tedium when my phone resonated and burbled tunefully into life. It rings so rarely (I’m more of a text person) that I’d forgotten I’d changed my traditional phone ringtone to a funky sliced MP4 Mark Ronson tune the other weekend. God I’m so frickin’ hip it hurts! And Vincent was on the end of the phone with an apologetic tone. As a DM of many years I can sense when someone is pulling out of a roleplaying gaming group in about, oooh, several nano-seconds flat. But hey, Vincent has done a stirling job as a playtester for the past 10 games or so, and he’s landed himself another activity that he’s been wanting to do for a while that just happened to clash with our game time.
So just to say thanks to Vincent for helping out with the playtesting. His character ‘The Bastard’ as he is fondly known has led the playtesting party from the first game and has been a great source of intrigue and plot development in the course of the main group sessions. As we are mid-game, I plan to take him over as an NPC and ‘stow him on ice’ so to speak. No that doesn’t mean I’m going to shove him into a deep-freeze, but I intend to place him more in the background as an NPC rather than as the lead figure he has been in the earlier games. In this way he can be available for when perhaps we change gaming days and Vincent can return to the group if he so continues to want to. Until then he can be absorbed back into the cast of thousands that the DM regularly dips into. Of course, this presumes that he survives being run as an NPC in the current ‘haunted house of the Hirinian’ that the party are currently exploring. I can’t rule out that he might succumb to some grisly death or other, but hopefully not.
Meanwhile, the second playtest group are ready to join in, and there are other possible players waiting in the wings to boost the party size up to a decent amount. Starting next week, we should have a party of 4 players, and we’ll see whom else we can accommodate from there. In terms of a good party size I’ve found in the past that once you get up to about 5 players, things start to go pear shaped for every other PC you introduce from there on in. Just too many to deal with, if the party splits at 6, then you are effectively running two whole RPG groups simultaneously in one session. 4 is a good number, enabling decent party splits and can be bolstered with judicious NPC’s for stand-ins and DM leverage. At 5 or 6 you start to lose the value in adding in NPC’s and they become a liability. In which case you lose story-telling leverage and also the cushion factor of back-up characters for PC’s to step into if they lose their primary character.
