Piggybacking, Part I
The other night we dove deep into our penultimate session of the Dracula Dossier. An unseasonable blizzard raged around the PCs as they had to climb up a mountain and down a waterfall. It was one of those roleplaying scenes where half the party had the skills to move the story forward, and half did not. (Athletics and Outdoor Survival in this case.)
This kind of scene happens in any kind of roleplaying game, from d20 fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons and 13th Age, to the Cypher System, to Call of Cthulhu. This is a problem with "niche protection," where everyone has a different set of skills so that everyone can feel special and get their spotlight moments. It can also cause the adventure to stall. When a party tries to infiltrate, but someone is sure to fail their stealth roll--when everyone must impress to get information at a fancy dress ball, but someone is sure to fail a social roll--when the group must climb in a snowstorm, but the hacker and the crime boss are sure to fall to their deaths--what do you do?
(Sometimes letting the crime boss in heels fall off a cliff might be what you want. This post is about when you want everyone to make the climb, but still keep it interesting.)
What do movies and books do? Han Solo and Chewbacca take their queues from Princess Leia when dealing with big-shots. People trapped in Jurassic Park follow the lead of Dr. Grant, dinosaur expert. Sansa escapes from King's Landing by following Littlefinger's plan. Characters without the right skills let the experts lead, but don't leave the scene.
You want the expert PCs get to shine for their skills without stoping the story because some PCs have holes in their character sheets. You let them piggyback.
Piggybacking
This game system (Night's Black Agents) is a GUMSHOE game, and it comes with a piggybacking rule built in.
In GUMSHOE you can spend skill points to add to your d6 die roll. The expert does that, while everyone else spends 1 point. For every follower doesn't have any points to spend, the difficulty of the roll the expert has to make is +2. If the expert succeeds, everyone succeeds.
So the expert rolls the big die, spends a bunch of resources (skill points in Night's Black Agents), and the followers spend some resources for the privilege of tagging along. Great fun!
In our game, we had so many athletics rolls climbing in that blizzard that the spotlight passed between PCs who had tons of points in athletics. They got their spotlight moments, but they didn't have to leave the hacker and the crime boss behind. They also spent pretty much every point of athletics the group had, and there will be no time to refresh before the next game, so they are sweating it. Perfect!
This works great in GUMSHOE, but what about other games? Let's see if we can steal piggybacking.
Next time we'll look at 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, 13th Age, the Cypher System, Call of Cthulhu, and see if we can come up with ways to piggyback in those systems. See Piggybacking, Part II.
