How to bind a group of PCs together?

Hi folks, rookie GM here.

I've been working on getting a game together with a bunch of other users on this very forum. It's going to use a modified version of FATE, and this is the first Tabletop anything I've been involved with period.

However, over the course of my preparations as a GM, I believe I have run into a bit of a conundrum.

FATE has a strong emphasis on creating a story for all the players involved. It's written, more or less, with specifically that intention in mind- being a framework for the telling of collective stories. I have a rough outline of the P Cs and what their personal histories are, and they're quite a diverse group. So, as the GM, it's my job to take into account all of their individual backstories and personalities and, with that information, craft a scenario that brings all these people together and gives them a strong enough personal motivation to bind them together as a party.

But isn't there a kind of contradiction here? I need to come up with something that is simultaneously completely personal to each character- which will by nature mean the precise reasons will differ greatly between each character- but it also needs to be the same thing to give these characters a reason to travel together.

Do any of you veterans have some advice to offer? It feels like I'm in a bind.

Here are some suggestions.

1) Give the players a rough scenario.^note "You're all agents for group X." "You all grew up in town/city/country Y." "All of you visit place Z on a regular basis." Something vague means they still have plenty of room to craft their characters, while giving you that easy hook to draw everyone together. This is one I've used most often, and only rarely have I gotten pushback from players about it.

2) Take the backgrounds and fill in some gaps. This works only if your players trust you a little more, but since it's literally impossible for anyone to write out every detail on a character background, there will always be holes that you can plug things in. This means a lot more work on your part, since you will have to find something that fits with the character, and somehow ties into everyone else too.

3) Make it part of character creation. This is good if you have a character-making session. Have everyone describe their characters, then pass them to the right and on the sheet they just received, come up with a reason why that character knows theirs. Not a good idea if you've got the guy who always plays the Malkavian or the Chaotic Neutral.

4) Wing it. Find something you can play into every scenario and draw the characters together. If done well, you'll have a natural, organic way of the party coming together and becoming allies. If done poorly, you're railroading.

5) Pre-gen characters for them. This is something I only really recommend for one-shots or very short campaigns. If you write the characters, then of course they have whatever you need to keep them together, but it takes away the player ability to impact or micromanage creation to any significant degree.

The players, for the most part, all already have characters with backstories and whatnot. My challenge is writing the plot so that each of these characters has a personal reason to stick with the group.

All of these people are not exactly what you'd call the adventuring type. Just one of them is what you could call a mercenary, and even then only very loosely- he's a freelance aid worker. The rest are doctors, scientists, an actor, one marketing representative of all things- you get the general idea. I'm dealing with a wide array of backgrounds and personal histories, and they're of a nature that the usual plot hooks probably aren't going to work.

I've had a rough idea for a while now of how they all get pulled together in the first place- someone tries to kill them all, natch- but, beyond that event, my worry is that none of them will have much reason to stick together as a group rather than going their separate ways. That's why I feel like I need to write around each of their backstories and tie them into one broad thing, to give each character a personal reason to want to adventure together.

What's more, where I'm standing right now, "this person wants you all dead for vague reasons" sounds like kind of a weak way to introduce these characters to this conflict.

Scientists and doctors? If your setting is high magic or technological, they work for a company of some sort. (the actor does advertisements).

Another possibility, there's a plague in a region. The scientist is there to find the cause, doctor and aid worker are there to help, actor and marketer live there and have whatever motivations they have. Over the course of the adventure they realize they can do a lot of good or make money together.

edited 19th Aug '16 2:23:17 PM by Braincogs

That idea has it's own problems, as it would make the core of the plot center around just a few characters. The rest of them would feel superfluous, or would otherwise have very different reasons for being there, which could be a problem.

In any case the setting is sci-fi, with aliens and FTL and all that, though the 'verse generally has a hard-ish bent to it. At present, in the roster of P Cs I have a scientist, a doctor, a courier, a freelancer, an advertising rep and a thespian.

Oh yes those are all definitely people who could all work for the same company and be found at the same building. The planet's invaded they run into each as the some of the survivors.They don't even need to work for the same company for that.

Or you can ask your players how they know each other and what kind of adventures they are expecting. Doesnt FATE have a campaign creation phase where everyone works together to make the setting?

edited 20th Aug '16 5:11:49 AM by Braincogs

The setting is a custom 'verse that I've been working on as a separate project for a while before I pitched it to the players and they all agreed to it. What's been settled on so far is that all these characters are on this major space station that's a hub of trade for the frontier of space.

The problem is a matter of personal motivation for the characters, and how this appears to run at odds with the idea of a party that goes around adventuring together. A character needs personal reasons to go adventuring or they're boring characters with no good motivation. But, these reasons also need to sync up with the motivations of the rest of the group in order for that motivation to lead them in the direction of going adventuring with other people.

Our GM had a thing where our characters all got zapped by some dimensional mess-up thing that would, if things went badly, cause us to phase out and then phase in in rough proximity to each other.

Still didn't work because one of the party members was a bit too much of a dick and got sort of kicked out.

That's a very blunt-force kind of leash. Not something I'd want to subject my players to as a GM.

It was more of a destiny thing than a leash thing. It just sort of doubled.

Blue Ninja's first suggestion is normally how I go about things. Give them a couple pages of backstory, setting, and the opening scenario that they'll get together in, and tell them to make characters and tell you why they're there.

I think it's largely the player's job to come up with reasons their character wants to stay with a group. As GM you can provide an initial reason to bring a group together, but it's largely up to them to find in-character reasons to stay together.

Wouldn't I like to know.

You see: I've been playing in a Survival Horror GURPS game; my character is a Shell-Shocked Veteran and Failure Knight (part of her backstory is that she's the only survivor of her military unit) with Guilt Complex; and this other character is...not a team player. As in: we'd have all had at least a decent chance of getting out of a hellacious situation without anyone dying...except this asshole, when we've got a teammate who's been exposed to a paralytic agent and can barely crawl, decides that he'd rather rescue the pretty lady (my character), who's lost a leg but can still at least somewhat move under her own power (and who'd just saved his skin, and who's making it clear that the paralyzed guy is more in need of rescue). In fact, he cuts the paralyzed guy's hand off (that arm was pretty fucked up, and he'd probably have lost it anyway if he'd survived; but even so) in order to keep my character from towing him by it, for reasons that seem to add up to "thinks he's got a chance with the fucked-up veteran who probably subconsciously fears that she's a Doom Magnet, thinks that the other guy is competition, is wrong on both counts, and has a subpar comprehension of the Sense of Duty disad, the very concept of teamwork, or both." While we're on a timeframe far too limited to be manufacturing drama, no less.

So, of course, the paralyzed guy ends up dead. And remember: my character has the Guilt Complex disad (again: Shell-Shocked Veteran and Failure Knight). Which is to say that despite having a decent will score, and despite knowing intellectually that it wasn't her fault, she is nonetheless compelled to spend the next couple of days as a useless sobbing wreck over failing to save a teammate.

I mean, it was in character for Mr. Dulcinea Effect; the character was supposed to be both an amoral jackhole with no particular loyalty to anything except his own interests, and particularly vulnerable to said Effect. Nonetheless, my character (despite irrationally blaming herself to some degree, because Guilt Complex) now considers him a dangerous liability. As in: if he proves again that he can't be trusted to have his teammates' backs in a crunch, she may just put a .338 bullet between his beady eyes at point-blank.

Edited by FarseerLolotea on Jul 19th 2018 at 3:30:20 AM

A thing one of my GM would do is during background, he'd have us improvise how our character knows the PC played by the player to their left. The end result is that each PC has some sort of link to 2 other P Cs.

But I do agree that ultimately it's up the the players to decide why they stick togheter. It's the whole "Roleplaying" thing.

There's only one way to actually bind the party together - Crazy Glue. It's the only thing guaranteed to work.

In all seriousness, I'm fond of players running into things that will just screw them over if they're pointlessly solo - something that's too much alone, or needs a combination of abilities to overcome. Not necessarily fatal at first (unless you're just playing a meat grinder game), but with enough of a penalty that the player learns that it's cooperate or suffer the consequences.

Of course, if they don't learn, well, you can only do so much, and the player is making it clear that they're not a good fit for you.

Part of Survival Horror is learning to be a team player, isn't it? If you don't learn loyalty to the group then you generally don't survive. If you make yourself a permanent liability rather than an asset then yes, the team is best served by you leaving (or being eliminated). That's the genre.