Group Decision Making in Solo Games

As I noted in the last write up of The Ever Expanding Dungeon, I tested out a mechanism for handling how the group makes decisions.

My rationale is that, as the only player in charge of 4 or more characters that make up the party, I need someway of making non-obvious decisions account for the individual desires of the various personalities, without sitting there arguing with myself. The latter, for all of the role-playing joy it would give, doesn't really remove my own preference from the equation.

In cases without a clear majority in favor or against an idea, the method I used, which emerged from the comments on this post, was:

1. Add up the CHR scores of those in favor, i.e. "yes"
2. Add up the CHR of those not in favor, i.e. "no"
3. For those that are 50/50 because I just don't know which they'd choose, but I believe they'd side one way or another, roll on the Mythic Fate Chart for 50/50 and then add their CHR to the appropriate side.
4. For those that are truly 50/50 because the character themselves wouldn't have a preference, ignore their CHR.
5. Subtract the smaller sum from the larger and the result becomes a modifier on the Mythic Fate roll. Add the value if the difference favors the "no" side, and subtract if favors the "yes."

In play, it's fast and easy to use, but being a typical gamer, I can't help think it could use some tweaking.

Primarily, I'm bothered by the fact that it doesn't really account for the strength of the preference. A "Very Unlikely" and a "Somewhat Likely" have exactly the same weight.

Here's an idea that struck me while riding the train to work this morning. It uses the following chart to modify the base Charisma score:

• Impossible: Charisma + 5
• No Way: Charisma + 4
• Very Unlikely: Charisma + 2
• Unlikely: Charisma + 1
• 50/50: Charisma does not get included in the test*
• Somewhat Likely: Charisma
• Likely: Charisma + 1
• Very Likely: Charisma + 2
• Near Sure Thing:  Charisma + 3
• Sure Thing: Charisma + 4
• Has to Be: Charisma + 5

*For those who are 50/50 but I roll for to find out their preference prior to rolling for the group - they are treated as Likely or Unlikely. That's arbitrary, but it seems to work.

Then just follow the steps 1-5 above, but use Charisma + modifier instead of just Charisma to account for the weight of their preference, in addition to their persuasive ability.

Normally, weighting is done with multiplication but with whole numbers, that resulted in some really huge modifiers that didn't seem at all correct. Using fractional weights worked well, but would necessitate the need slowing down to do the multiplication by hand or using a calculator, plus rounding the result (before or after the summation?).

I played with a couple of test scenarios and different CHR values, and simply adding whole numbers is far faster and gives a good result that I can work with.

One final option that I haven't tested:

If the PC is wounded below 50% of HP, then +1 (or +5?) to whatever they would choose. I figure, if someone who is badly wounded wants to continue, or to fight, or to run, or to rest, it seems like the party should give them some additional preference. After all, they're most likely to die if things go wrong.

Of course, this assumes a primarily Lawful or, at least, Neutral, party.