Anyone else had trouble getting players to use all their bond slots? Not a big thing (I think the groups I’m GMing for are over it now), but players seem to feel awkward when they write two or more bonds to the same PC. I’ve encouraged people to do it (in one group I run, there are only three PCs so most classes need to) but it doesn’t seem to happen naturally.
Anyone else had trouble getting players to use all their bond slots?
Anyone else had trouble getting players to use all their bond slots?
This has happened in some of my games as well. For one-shots, I don’t think it matters. For campaigns, I do two things than seem to help: 1) encourage them to fill one or two for each PC and then any open spots use an NPC, and 2) have a short sheet of pre-written general bonds they can use to replace bonds they don’t like or use as inspiration to write their own.
The players don’t need to use all of their bonds slots. In fact, in my games and most of the games I’ve played in, we only use one bond per other character in the party. I know that the rule intention, however, is to allow for the possibility of more than one bond per character. I do not believe that this is a requirement.
Also, keep in mind that you do not have to use the bonds printed on the character sheet. Players can freely make up their own bonds, even at the beginning of the game.
Rory MacLeod the problem with not using all their bonds is that when they come to roll Aid/Interfere, they’re rolling only +1 when they could be rolling more, and when a higher number might better reflect the intensity of the bonds between the characters. This is particularly acute for the bard, because they get 6 bond slots.
Contrast AW, which has the Hx stat for this.
I’ve not had this problem at character creation, but in our ongoing game (3 PCs) they started out resolving bonds and replacing them quickly but eventualy (6-8 sessions in?) stopped writing new ones.
Rob Alexander yeah that’s the counter argument for not using multiple bonds per character. There’s no way to get more than a +1 to Aid or Interfere. It hasn’t been a HUGE issue in the games I’ve played, but mechanically, it is a bit of a problem.
Maybe those unused Bonds could be a resource to be used in a move.
I would encourage to fill in an empty bond (or create a new wording for it) when they roll aid and only have a +1 but want more.
I also saw that behaviour and found it weird but letting them fill it in during the first session should be fine.