Small Games

I've been giving thoughts to game concepts and ideas lately, mostly mulling things over in my head, problems of genre and possible solutions.

To whit: the fewer players a game has, the 'better' it is. This not only allows the players and GM to develop both characters and supporting cast more fully but makes for a more solid game all around. A smaller game is also more likely to survive one or more players going AWOL for various RL reasons and should be able to factor the player's absence into the game narrative or pause the game without that much difficulty.

Genre Conventions: If the PCs are playing police officers, they play police officers. They don't quit the force when then going gets tough, fight to be reinstated when fired and so forth. The implied player/gm contract needs to explicit regarding PC occupations and how this affects the overall game. Are the PCs jobs going be connected to the game and plots or is it just office work they go to for X hours a day that will be glossed over? If it's intended to be a buddy cop game, are the players willing to work together to ensure this happens? And so on, and so forth.

Teamwork: Assuming the PCs are intended to work together, is there some necessary extrinsic force promoting this? Is it necessary? What happens when one player can't make the session?


Thoughts for future games

I think I'd like to try a setup where the PCs are either paid for Plot/Game stuff or paid enough in Day Job (or, being wealthy, don't need one) to be able to gloss over the problems of what is done for a living. A game where the PCs are wealthy enough not to need to work can be done with only mild moralistic fun and games on the side.

I still think a game involving playing siblings and/or other family members could work in a small game (one could be adopted, perhaps). It creates a dynamic from the start and solves a lot of pesky problems regarding knowing each other and the like.

If the teamwork function of a game is extrinsic, making a game where the PCs have some some edge over normal people but not enough to take on Bad Guys without working together and so forth would be both handy and necessary: the idea of the PC as unique rather than Unique being a kind of selling point for a game.