Thursday, July 13, 2023

Some thoughts on an RPG session with different goals for each character

Earlier this week I was thinking: “What if I ran an RPG session in which the players did not have the same goal, but different ones that might conflict with each other?”

This concept was used in some of the first RPG sessions ever played, the “Braunstein” sessions. There could be a merchant trying to escort his goods to town, a thief trying to steal the goods, and/or a political revolutionary trying to blow some government building up.


This seems fun, so I thought up some bullet points for how this might work:

  • Make players pull roles, along with their corresponding goals, out of a hat.

  • Make more roles than there are players, adding an element of surprise for you, the GM.

  • Make people reveal their roles to you, but not to the other players, making it more interesting and realistic.

  • Make roles that could easily conflict with each other, as well as ones that could cooperate, like the thief and merchant mentioned earlier, or a knight and a noble.

  • This would probably work best in a somewhat small sandbox, like a small town.

3 comments:

  1. These are great ideas! So much like real life! And it takes it from a game where you have complete information (like chess) to a game where you have partial information (like poker).

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  2. It would seem like there are some good ideas. One of those things that you don't really know if they would work until you actually try out a couple of them.

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  3. Thanks, both of you! You make very good points.

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