I’m about to GM a new BoB game (super excited). I have 6 players. Two of them can play every week and four can play every other week. This gives me the following options:
A) Play every other week with all 6 players. Add extra threats as the book suggests and often try to split them into seperate groups taking on different objectives.
B) Play every week.
Week 1: Play the primary mission with 4 players.
Week 2: Play the secondary mission with 4 players. Do the Campaign phase.
Repeat.
C) Do something else I haven’t thought of.
I’m looking for any advice people might have on how to handle this. I’d like to do option B but I’m not sure how to balance the progression. It looks like option B would generate a lot more xp than the standard method of resolving secondary missions.
I wouldn’t do B) myself. It’d considerably slow down play, especially if any mission takes more than a session. It also unbalances the risks: resolving the secondary mission in one roll is rough, the Legion must throw resources at that to manage the risk and the attrition of legionnaires dying from bad secondary mission rolls is, I think, a key part of the campaign’s balance. Also, I’d want to ensure equal time for campaign phases as the downtime is really important to give the characters time to breathe and express themselves out of the heat. But maybe you expect to have that time.
My preference would be to run two separate groups of four. You could have different broken and chosen and roles.
But if you don’t want to run two games at once, I’d just run one game straight. If you finish a mission phase and a campaign phase each session, then you’re sweet. Otherwise, I’d just drop players in the middle of whatever mess the characters were left in last session; the two constant players can help bring everyone up to speed.
My suggestion would be to run the game weekly with all six players, but to alternate the sometimes so you never have more than 4 players at the table at once. Only do one of the bonus roles (Lorekeeper, Spymaster). In that way you get to run the game, as written, under optimal conditions. You’re just leaning in harder to the idea that who plays different roles will be played by different people at different times!
So, Week 1 you do the starting Mission.
Week 2 you do a Primary mission and roll the secondary mission.
Week 3 you do a Primary mission and roll the secondary mission.
Etc.!