Forums » RP Discussion » RP Quandaries, and How To Do Boss Fights?

So my friend and I have been working on creating a Kingdom Hearts rp group, and we've run into a bit of a dilemma in trying to figure out how to progress story in such a group. Normally in KH there would be boss fights and things, but we're not sure how to implement that for a GROUP of rpers rather than just a handful.

We don't want to use the approach of writing events as if to one person, because we feel that it causes conflicts in rp interactions if everyone writes as if they are the one who did something even though technically everyone did it. Alone. Somehow.

We also don't want to just do boss fights by having a moderator character or NPC handle it, because we feel like people would feel robbed of the spotlight if we did that, and frankly we wouldn't like to be a player in that situation, either.

SO... in your collective experience, what would you say is a good way to handle this sort of thing?

• Is everyone progressing through at the same rate? Would it be reasonable to have people go through the boss in smaller groups, or to simply accept that only a more limited group of people will actually reach any particular boss?
• When you mention not wanting to have a mod or NPC handle the boss, do you mean run the boss? That you want to let a player be the boss? Or just that you want players to get to fight a boss themselves?
• How have you been doing other fights? Would it be reasonable to just do it larger scale?
• Would something like team turns work? Have a team go in, do some stuff, get driven back; next team goes in, and so on?
• Does everyone participate frequently enough that trying to include everyone won't stretch the fight out for months?
• Might your boss have a big ol' army to get through, so everyone has something to do?

Kingdom Hearts is a story that spans many worlds and will more than likely have many boss fights of various kinds. One idea I would recommend exploring is the idea of many many smaller scale RPs that each span their own world. That way, those smaller subgroups could tackle their own bosses in whatever ways they see fit. This will prevent the group RP from feeling like a giant free-for-all. It has the added bonus of feeling like the game, as they tend to have only one to four characters fighting any given boss at a time.

You can accomplish this by putting up multiple RP threads in your group and name each one after the world where they take place: Neverland, the Pridelands, Port Royal, what have you. Then have each place have its own big boss. After people burn through those bosses, anyone wanting to tackle a final Big Bad can group up and take on whatever final boss you have in mind, and at that point you and your group will hopefully have enough collective experience to make it work.

Okay, so a lot of these suggestions and comments are good ones and things that have been considered, however it is important to note that the group has not yet been started because we are tying to figure out how to do things BEFORE opening it up and letting people join.

The idea of using a different forum board for each world is one that we had been planning already to implement.

We also suggested having an army of enemies in place of boss fights, but that approach feels full of holes, because someone would still ultimately have to defeat the person in control of said army at some point, and we didn't want to take the glory away from the players by having NPCs or our characters be the ones to do it.

This past week I had come up with the idea of letting 1-5 players sign up for the missions for playing through the plot of each world (or just fighting the boss, maybe... it's hard to say what to do, because normally players would be able to take control of NPCs at will, but in this case it would make it difficult to progress the story that way? I think... It is very complicated...) And then just have the worlds open to general rp, but... it's... yeah, not really sure. It's a difficult theme to tackle.

NPCs are named such because players traditionally have no control over them. The system or the GM does. It's only leaderless rp take made player-controlled NPCs a thing. Plenty group still restrict NPCs, at least certain ones, to leader use.

I'm not understanding the issue cited in your 3rd paragraph, I'm afraid. Why would having an army mean regular players couldn't be defeating them...? It might require a mod to acknowledge the victories, but those victories would still belong to the players. Am I missing what you're trying to say?