The group template can be especially helpful for groups of PCs that want more between them. If you have a group that already knows each other, or plan on making an adventuring company/group, or "persistant party".
When I was LARPing in Kingdoms of Novitas with the Mohawk Valley Gaming club there were 70 of us, and the 3 day weekend was divided into shifts. Everyone had to NPC at least one shift. Some PCs were "independents" but most of them sooner or later fell in with a group like The House of Cherry Blossoms, Guardians of The Sacred Truths, The Pindedale Sentinels, The Lost Wolves, or The Oddfellows.
All of these groups were PCs who were on the same shift and bunked together in the same cabin. They all represented different interests, but it was easy to write plots for a particular company, clan, or party and you knew who was going to be in it, what level they were, and when they were going to be playing. I see Adventuring Companies, or player organizations as filling a similar role.
Sample Group Template
Blank Group Template
- The Group Template Questionnaire (To Help Fill The Template)
Sample Group Questionnaire
Blank Group Questionnaire
Here is an Archived post from Monkeydice.wordpress, now defunct. Its an excerpt from an entry discussing the Group Template concept developed by Fear The Boot.
The group template, for those who don’t know, is a simple concept, but one often overlooked by many groups (including my own). It works like this: Before character creation goes down, you all figure out how it is your group knows each other. This eliminates the “you all meet each other in a tavern” scenario that is such a cliche in most RPGs.
Let’s face facts: Almost every game you or I have ever played in began the campaign in a tavern. It’s true. The first Star Wars game I ever ran began in a Cantina. The first D&D game I ever played in began in a tavern. The first Serenity game I played in began in a bar. Even mixing up the cliche by having the game begin “in media res” in a barfight is only slightly bending the cliche. It’s overdone.
Also, how often has a group of PCs fallen apart, due to infighting, arguments between characters, and a general lack of the character’s gelling together?
So the group template is a method to fix that. I’ll show you how it works:
In a Star Wars game I ran a few years back, the players all expressed interest in playing a new game. I suggested a smuggler type game, and told them to come up with members of a crew. Each one found something he liked, and we ran with that. One was a hacker/droid mechanic, another was the guns of the operation, another the captain, and another the pilot. Now, they began planning their relationships. The “Big Guns” owed a life debt to the captain, not unlike Chewbacca, the pilot was the former owner of the ship, before hard times forced him to sell it to the current captain, who hired the former owner on as pilot, and the hacker was a former crewmate of the pilot’s. All of this was planned out in about an hour before character creation began.
