Any tips on adding new players to an existing game? Our group has just finished an introductory adventure; and now my players have some friends they want to invite along.
Anyone have experience/ideas/tips on how to integrate new players into the world?
Well, this has also been a problem in my games. But best case scenario is that through a liberal use of the resolve bonds rule you can open up enough space in the bonds for the new players.
But as far as injecting them into the game, have some fun with it, I have had players find the other guy in a box, at the tavern, in a box, captured by kobolds, eating a kobold. Really the sky is the limit for how many ways they can be in a box.
A warforged fighter in an eberron game I was in long ago was introduced in a box. It said ‘in case of emergency, break glass’ so we did.
His name and weapon were claymore. The bard (me) painted ‘Front toward enemy’ on his chest.
Jay Vee Stealing that for my next game
Sub
I had to introduce the Dionysian Cleric (the one who jumped into a volcano) and our Druid (who’s pet bear is now mayor of Dragon Island) in the same session. We started in the middle of an adventure, with Cleric in a cage merrily getting drunk on giant ant poison, the Druid incognito as a giant ant worker, and the rest of the party “wearing the scales of the giant ant corpses you found earlier pinned by that Kobold trap. The ants haven’t attacked you yet, but to your eyes you look more like humans wearing cheap cardboard costumes. It… seemed like a good idea at the time? Druid, you notice them immediately.”
If they’re the rambling kind of party, you can put them mid-ramble with the new player(s) already present on a different but overlapping mission.
We used Bonds to introduce new characters. The Barbarian had just been on a drunken bender and he had gotten back to the tavern, where he bumped into “old acquaintances”, a Ranger who had guided him and a Druid with whom he has a blood bond. Worked pretty well. Basically either stuff new characters into existing bonds or write new ones for the new characters. Go nuts!
Thanks everyone! Saara Pit, my instinct is to do what you did – have them exist within the world using bonds, and then just make the other characters run into them.