How many player characters should each character run? We've experimented with a lot of numbers but keep coming back to six (for a one-player campaign--I have never gone above two for a multi-player campaign and would be very reluctant to try). When we go much above six usually some of them do not develop adequate personalities. Much below that leads to brittleness. (I blush to admit that the record, back when I was younger and perhaps more foolish, was twenty-one. It was an interesting campaign, but I wouldn't do it again. We found out a lot of interesting things about how PC lethality scales with party size, and also about niche protection.) There is some tendency for parties to increase in size as the campaign goes on, whether by adding NPCs or by adding PCs or semi-PCs. Party leaders often try to cover perceived weaknesses by recruitment; also, sometimes you rescue someone and then feel impelled to keep them. The games run very differently from single-PC games; you need to compensate for having only a single player, and this requires tons of small adjustments. You might think that one player could coordinate better in combat than a group, but in my experience this is not enough to make up for having only one brain to think of tactics and spot mistakes. And the player generally needs a lot of support in handling within-party debates and discussions. Even in a multi-player game, though, I really like it if the system cooperates in niche protection. I have not, in general, found that attributes create niches. There are a few exceptions (the Big Bruiser in Feng Shui is defined by an attribute, Toughness) but in general I can't rely on it. The worst experience I have had with this was beta-testing Ysgarth, which has about 12 attributes--you might argue that it therefore has lots of attribute-based niches, but in my hands, at least, it had none. The attributes tended to get averaged together in twos or threes to generate the actual game mechanics, and due to "regression to the mean" it hardly seemed to matter what attributes you had. At most, it mattered whether you had clumps of related attributes all high. So there were really only three niches, corresponding to three clumps: physical, mental, magical. If you did not clump your high attributes you were just plain mediocre at everything--not a useful niche. Niches come from capabilities. Attributes are seldom directly enough linked to capabilities to create niches. Rarity might create a niche. However, in the specific case of making fast-casting rare, you are likely to fail. In every system where I've encountered it, fast-casting is so extremely powerful and useful that it's worth almost any cost. It will frequently decide a close battle, if your spells are at all powerful. A skill like this is liable to be seen as a defining professional skill--anyone serious about their profession will have it, because you won't be competitive if you don't. If you make it terribly expensive the result, in my experience, may actually be to discourage taking characters of that type at all--you can't make a "real" or "reasonable" mage on the given budget because you can't afford fast-casting, so don't make one at all. We encountered a similar situation with Wired Reflexes in our Shadowrun variant. If you make them affordable every fighters whose conception allows will have them. Anyone who doesn't will be screwed in combat. If you make them very, very expensive the players of fighters will be grumpy, because the NPCs will demonstrate to them that a serious fighter does have Wired Reflexes, but if they take it for their PCs the PC will be stunted in other respects and less than fun to play. Then you end up with whole parties of mages and adepts, to duck the issue. I have also seen this happen with Magery in GURPS; raising the cost of Magery didn't produce Magery-less mages, it produced parties with no mages at all. Perhaps it would be better to investigate an ongoing mechanical cost to using fast-casting. I don't know your system, but you could cut the number of spells castable in return for fast-casting a few of them; that might be balanceable, though it is painfully dependent on the daily encounter density. (Or whatever the refresh rate of your magic is.) In Shadowrun it might work to increase the Drain of a spell if it was fast-cast. You would still probably see most casters taking fast-cast skills, but at least this wouldn't lead to a world default that every spell cast in combat is invariably fast-cast. Alternatively, you could get rid of the slow-cast option altogether, but I presume you want it for flavor. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 12 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com