Re: murder mystery/investigation, I guess one option would be to have a mystery that gets solved within each session, or rarely over several sessions, but yeah, you'd need a lot of preparation and it's far from clear how thrilled most of your players would be. What about pitching Iron Kingdom 'troubleshooters'-- they see trouble, they shoot it. :) Sometimes it could be a mystery, but a lot of the time it might be just regular adventuring hijinx. And they'd get equipment and pay from their king/government, and training as well, so that could explain 'group progresses rather than individual players'. Plus they get to wear spiffy uniforms.
Re: Iron Kingdoms "Troubleshooters": Which problem are we trying to solve with that suggestion? (Not sure how to evaluate it.)
Anyway, my explanation for why everyone gets XP advances is ... presumably, even if a PC is "off camera," he's still doing *something*. He doesn't just cease to exist when the player isn't there. If there's an attack on the ship by a giant sea monster, we can guess that the PC is involved somewhere "in the background" in the fighting, but our "camera" just isn't focused on him right now. If the ship stops at a strange island with exotic ruins, then there might be any number of parties heading in to secure supplies to restock provisions, in addition to the particular "let's poke around the ruins" party that our present PCs can be counted on to join. I'm hand-waving a bit here, sure, but my supposition is that if a PC isn't present, he's busy elsewhere, and such business still leads to experience.
It was a player suggestion, and none of the players seems to see it as a stretch, so I'll give it a try.
Well, blending Gwendel's idea of 'murder mystery/investigators of the unknown' and Iron Kingdoms was my thought. So you have a natural reason for the players to be together-- they're assigned to the same maritime investigations unit-- and crew/equipment get replaced or repaired at the government's expense at friendly ports, drawing on a letter of credit they get issued. And you can start the campaign at arbitrary points, since they don't need to make an epic journey for some reason, they're going where they get sent.
Ah. Well, Iron Kingdoms isn't exactly the best place for murder mysteries. It's one of those settings where a bokor or necromancer could simply talk to the body/skull of the deceased, or any number of other divination options are available ... and the only countermeasure would be (of course) more powerful magic, and there's always the possibility that someone, somewhere, has a counter-counter-spell to further up the ante
( ... )
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Which problem are we trying to solve with that suggestion? (Not sure how to evaluate it.)
Anyway, my explanation for why everyone gets XP advances is ... presumably, even if a PC is "off camera," he's still doing *something*. He doesn't just cease to exist when the player isn't there. If there's an attack on the ship by a giant sea monster, we can guess that the PC is involved somewhere "in the background" in the fighting, but our "camera" just isn't focused on him right now. If the ship stops at a strange island with exotic ruins, then there might be any number of parties heading in to secure supplies to restock provisions, in addition to the particular "let's poke around the ruins" party that our present PCs can be counted on to join. I'm hand-waving a bit here, sure, but my supposition is that if a PC isn't present, he's busy elsewhere, and such business still leads to experience.
It was a player suggestion, and none of the players seems to see it as a stretch, so I'll give it a try.
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