Title: Fly, my little fledglings, FLY!
A thing I've heard from a lot of the other GM's I know is that a big part of the role you play as GM is "reading your group", both as individual character niches / player styles, and, perhaps most importantly, how the whole mish-mash functions together as a team.
I noticed in the first session that my group didn't really have any brassy, instantly-take-charge types. There were a couple naturally more passive types (I don't think anyone would have bought a 10 year old character trying to be party leader), and I thought I could see where leadership would eventually come from once people settled more into their roles, but for the first few sessions, at least, it didn't really make sense for any of the characters (from a role-playing standpoint) to put themselves forward.
Now, in a more established campaign this wouldn't have been an issue, because people would already have developed the necessary bonds with each other to keep everyone in mostly the same place going in mostly the same direction. However, this party was just starting out, so I felt like a leader/catalyst was important.
My original idea was, I gotta admit, very heavily based on the 'choose your own adventure' books from back in the day. It always annoyed me when GM's herded characters around like sheep instead of letting us figure things out on our own, so I figured the best way to avoid that would be to develop a series of "proto plots", stagger them around the confined area I'd managed to wrangle my characters into, and then see what they chose.
This turned out to be a really rewarding exercise in and of itself, and I'd definitely recommend it to any GM's who are keen to start but don't really have any solid idea of what they want their campaign to consist of. Essentially what I did was come up with a series of story beginnings; one of them, actually, was in the last session where the Alliance stopped the shuttle the party was on in order to make way for one of their military ships. But none of my players seemed particularly interested in that situation, so I turfed it and focused my energy on creating story beginnings that could be 'triggered' by my players talking to specific NPC's in the hiring fair. To make sure that everyone ended up on the same quest instead of going to all different ones, I decided that once the first event was 'triggered', that is, once an individual player had decided to follow a specific lead, I would allow myself to 'turn off' the events if I felt that was appropriate. Basically, first come, first served.
Story fragment number one, I decided, would be triggered by the players going over to the garbage company, United Reclamation, booth at the hiring fair. This company was a large enough size to be looking for several different posts, I decided. Will, Molly, and Wren would all make good impressions on the company spokesperson, and because Todd was tied to Molly, and Cale had stuck himself to Wren, that would pretty well take care of everyone. Once they were all on a ship, things could happen to bring them back to the Alliance storyline I'd pseudo-introduced in the first session.
Story fragment number two would be a macguffin, specifically, a shipment that a courier company had had stolen from them on route to delivery. I decided that once a player walked up to the table, the front man would be only grudgingly interested but would be interrupted suddenly by a subbordinate saying that one of their ships was damaged and its cargo taken, and that the crew was injured and would not be able to pursue this immediately. Being unwilling to involve the authorities for his own reasons, and not having sufficient crew to man their remaining ship, the front man would then have almost no choice but to employ some mercenary-minded individuals to help retrieve the stolen cargo.
Story fragment number three, and the one that ended up being chosen, was The Mysterious Stranger. A mysterious, no nonsense woman with a ship and a quest who wanted a crew that wouldn't ask questions. She, of course, would die soon into the quest and conveniently leave the party with a ship and a bunch of mysteries they could solve for fun and profit, but, like the other 2 story beginnings mentioned above, would provide the necessary (if temporary) direction and leadership to mold the fledgling party into a cohesive team.
Each of the story beginnings above depended on a player actively going and talking to a specific person. I even staggered the event triggers around the space station so that the most 'urgent' one, #2, was in the far corner from the entrance and the players would have to pass the other event triggers to get to it. As a final backup, though, I decided there would be a 4th story fragment, one that couldn't ignored or walked by - a disaster. I figured, if it came to a point where all my players were wandering around the station being bored and disparate, one of Vera's Chop Shop ships up there for display could explode and funnel everyone into another ship for the evacuation. Once everyone was together, the ship would tragically suffer a navigational malfunction and the crew would end up landing only spitting distance away from the locale of the Alliance-centric storyline I'd originally envisaged.
As I mentioned, it was story fragment #3 that ended up being triggered first, just by virtue of what direction the party members started moving around the station. Cale and Wren went to the left and only spoke to a couple 'dummy' booths before taking off to look at ships, and Will had gone straight to the canteen. Molly and Todd, on the other hand, had gone right and, after hitting a couple dummy booths on that side had triggered the Mysterious Stranger event. Now, I hadn't really put too much planning into this event, besides 'mysterious stranger who will conveniently die and leave them with a ship', but Molly and Todd both leapt at this storyline and I obligingly 'shut off' the other event triggers and let everyone collect sort of naturally in the ship. I had to sort of ad lib a primary quest - I figured I should make it a "simple job that somehow goes sideways" type thing cus otherwise it'd be either too dangerous to sign up for or too boring to make an engaging campaign - and because I was mostly pulling names out of the air, the primary quest became an under-the-table cattle drop to Higgin's Moon, and within a matter of minutes my players were a group on one ship with one united mission. End of session 2!
For me, the big value in going the 'story fragment' route was that it helped me flesh out the universe I was creating for my players without getting a) too bogged down in details, or b) too attached to a storyline that my players had no enthusiasm for. Coming up with a series of different stories meant I had to develop different characters and different roles, and think of different methods to make my goals happen, all within the same universe. This meant that, again, my characters got to wander around and act and do things on their own without me having to narrate their decisions to them, AND I got the added benefit of having created a small database of stock characters/roles/events that fit into my universe that I could draw on later down the road.
In terms of the final effect of the group following The Mysterious Stranger, its main strength and its main weakness was the introduction of an NPC to take the leadership role. This was helpful because it herded the different characters onto a ship and assigned them roles on that ship; it gave them a united purpose as well as a group leader who everyone trusted to make decisions on everyone's behalf; and it kept everyone more or less together. However, and this is another reason this character had to die, it also gave the players an easy way out of developing problem solving or leadership skills of their own, and because it was me, the GM, talking for the NPC, it felt way too much like I was running the campaign and prescribing actions for the players to take. Essentially, it was like I was writing the story and then narrating it, and just feeding the characters lines instead of them being able to take a couple plot points and write their own story.
So, yeah. The Mysterious Stranger bit was fun while it lasted, but Kai Had To Die. It was just a question of how.
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