Our group is made up (as yours seem to be) of older professionals, many of whom are married, have children, have to travel for work, … and thus have complex schedules. Our solution is multi-part:
We have multiple campaigns running with multiple GMs (currently 3).
The less-available players are not normally in all the campaigns, so it’s possible for them to take Fridays (our normally gaming day) off when needed.
Before the beginning of the month, we ask for Friday conflicts and work up a schedule of games. If there is a day when two or more players would be missing in each of the campaigns, that’s a day off or a boardgame night. If one player would be missing, we will typically give priority to the players who play in the fewest campaigns.
If a sudden conflict happens later, we’ll play light if that would work or cancel the game.
If a player is missing, his character is normally just not there. “We’ve always been at war with EastAsia.”
We do not normally penalize a character for the player missing a night. Not getting to play is penalty enough. (If we were playing games that award experience like Hero or GURPS, that might change. The paradigm is different enough there that I don’t know that it would be as much of a problem.)
If a player has spent his entire career becoming unstoppable at his big thing, presumably that’s something he wants to be unstoppable at. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Let him have his fun.
For ways to handle the character who really is the best ever at his thing, the Amber series (and the Amber Diceless RPG) have some good techniques. For the player, the object will be to make all challenges nails to his hammer. For the GM, the object will be to give him, shall we say, screws?
On Pulp:
I’ll second the mention of JI/Pulp Hero and Aaron Allston’s Lands of Mystery. The latter is, I think, the best single game expansion ever. (You can see its influences in virtually all good supplements later published.)
For other pulp games, I’ll mention Space: 1889, which is a much better world than game, but which is a truly excellent world that really gets the pulp feel just right. And West End Games Bloodshadows does hardboiled fantasy (see Glen Cook’s Garrett, P.I. series for a fiction example) particularly well; even the Bloodshadows fiction is surprisingly readable.
What I do with scheduling is run everything once a month. Currently I have one campaign that meets on the first Sunday and one that meets on the fourth Saturday, and I play in one that meets the Sunday after the second Saturday. The first of these meets in the Inland Empire (Riverside, San Bernardino, and surrounding cities); the other two in San Diego County, though I play in the third via Skype.
Back when I lived in San Diego, I ran two or three campaign sessions a month, each with a different group of players. I handed out lists of idea, had people vote for the ones they liked best, and then picked some popular campaigns and assigned people to campaigns they’d rated favorably. This let me have a population of ten to fifteen players at any one time, and it gave me a steady reconfiguration of player groups.
Most people can make one session a month. If one person can’t, we play anyway; if two or more can’t, we may cancel, or do something like play board games.
My mental model of it comes from vanilla FUDGE, mostly; I never found FATE acceptable enough to try running it. Looking at my sample pages of FATE, I see that it actually has two levels down and eight levels up; I thought that four levels was already excessive, and obviously my brain just erased the eight-level setup.
I really don’t like aspects at all, either. And I just find any structure like the five-phase character generation process unusable; being asked to come up with things in that way paralyzes my imagination. That was probably the single thing that did most to unsell me on SotC.
There are two types of ‘unreliable’ player - those who know, ahead of time that they won’t be at the next session, and those who just don’t turn up on the night. The former can, to some extent, be planned around, giving some “in game” reason for their absence (we have had characters of players who are going off on holiday being captured/kidnapped, giving the rest of the party the objective of rescuing them in time for their return (and the GM the objective of not letting them do so before then!)
A player crying off at the last minute is more awkward. We usually assume they just fade into the background, resuming a more proactive role when they return - if their character is the essential lynchpin of the planned session (or if too many players are missing) then it’s normally time for a boardgame.
Alternatives like the Ars Magica “Troupe” style, or even just alternative characters (I’m pretty sure we did a Pendragon game way back in the mists of time where we all played squires when one of the leading Knights player wasn’t available) require a degree of pre-planning and a supply of alternative characters (not too much of a problem if it’s “Grab an archtype out of the book, and optionally switch in an alternate power”, more so if it’s a complex points buy system with multiple advantages & disadvantages to consider) - Maybe the GM needs a supply of Pre-gens for such an occasion!
Thinking about that hypothetical Mission Impossible game:
the GM briefs the players on the new mission
the players each choose whether to take their regular PC or a specialist, and what specialist packages are needed
(face-to-face session ends here)
players taking specialists go away and design them (based on current PC point values)
(face-to-face session begins here)
the players play through the mission
This needs a fairly clean template-based character-generation system, and I was thinking of GURPS Action 4 (which lets you assemble a template out of a 100-point basic package and multiple 25-point add-ons). I’d actually recommend it for main character generation too, though a pure Action template would also work.
I’d also want to use some sort of un-planning system, so that rather than go through everything in detail before the mission starts, it could be improvised when the trouble happens (“aha, that policeman is really on our payroll, but he has to put in a good show for his boss”).
If you want to see an interesting system for that sort of MI game, try John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors. It’s all about highly capable specialists planning and executing such missions.
Roger, that un-planning system sounds like Leverage. You can use flashbacks to retroactively create assets that have narrative and mechanical usefulness. It’s designed to simulate the show, where the standard plot structure is to show the heroes apparently failing and then flash back to how their failures were really part of the plan.
Yup - there are a couple of ways to do this in GURPS (one of which I wrote). I know that some players really object to the long detailed planning model - I don’t particularly, but it has to fit the style you’re playing, and I think an MI sort of game has to be fast-moving.
I ran a campaign, Fixers, about a group of “consulting criminals” who brought off difficult crimes that other criminals couldn’t make work. The first few sessions, we used the research/plan/execute model—and all but one of the players (the one playing the primary planner!) decided that it was so dull playing the “execute” part that they had no interest in continuing the campaign. So then we reconfigured it, with the research phase reduced and the planning phase severely reduced. Instead the planner got to make a planning roll (which I think was versus Leadership), with bonuses for other characters’ research, and depending on how well he did, he was allowed to say “That was part of what I planned for!” some number of times during the execution phase. These particular players were much happier with that, as it gave them some of the suspense and surprise of watching a caper film.
To summarise Wilderness of Mirrors, the planning component seems to consist of the players describing the opposition (within the basic brief, e.g. “rescue the ambassador”) as well as their plans to overcome it, and getting bonus dice for saying interesting things. Which… I can see it working, but probably not for me.
Played it once and it was interesting, certainly fun to try and an innovative approach. Like all John Wick games, however, it feels as though he didn’t finish developing it before getting distracted by something else.
In my list of pulp RPGs I forgot all about Hollow Earth Expedition. It uses the Ubiquity System, a fairly robust, traditional-style system - a count-the-successes dice pool with a hero point mechanic. Its main mechanical distinction is that because a success is any even number your dice pool can be made up of any kind of dice that have an even number of sides and an even distribution of numbers.
Setting-wise it’s a fairly standard 21st century pulp revival setting, leaning toward the weird science end of things.
See Also “Blades in the Dark” for the “cut to the action”/Use flashbacks where required style. One of the problems, of course is always getting players (and as a player I can be as bad as the rest) from still trying to over-plan, or avoid committing to the execution while trying to gather more information
I ran a campaign based partly on Justice Inc. (though I also used Champions, because I allowed stats over 20 and powers at double cost). It went quite well, though unfortunately I no longer have the character sheets or the protocols. We had Anubis the negro avenger (straight pulp hero), Blackjack (rebellious son of the Mafia with a talent for throwing), Doctor Delirium (stage illusionist with cinematically advanced tricks), Professor Machina (gadgeteer), and the Silk Siren (trained in Chinese martial arts, including hypnotizing men with her voice). I found the combat mechanics quite elegant at the time, though I would need to study it again before I could say anything about it now. But I have fond memories of the game, which had a nice feel for pulp sensibilities.
I don’t much favour the archetypal “zero to hero” RPG campaign. It seems to me that in games such as D&D characters start out being so feeble that they aren’t quite fun to play, and so low-spec that the rules are pretty clunky, that they develop through a fleeting sweet spot, and that they end up becoming so powerful that they aren’t much fun to play and are so high-spec that rules don’t work properly. I prefer to design the character that I want to play and then play it as a want it for as long as the campaign lasts. Absolute and relative power is often part of character concept, and I like characters who start and stay within concept*.
However, when I do run such a campaign, one of the things I do to make the characters feel as though they are getting more powerful, even while the opposition is scaling with their capabilities, is to alter the nature of the stakes. New, modestly-powered, unimportant PCs don’t have very much to lose, so they are motivated chiefly by opportunities, and are prudent to take risks. As they accumulate assets, interests, and allies they have more at stake, and may be more often motivated by fear of loss — they have to defend what they have already gained, protect their allies, prepare for contingencies, and husband risk. When they become very powerful and important they find that they have become strategic features: they aren’t directly challenged very often, and get few opportunities for gain significant enough to justify risking their positions, but their very existence is causing ripples in the stream, and others are taking advantage of it, or suffering from it, in ways they find untoward. Subtle friends and foes my manipulate their foes under the wheels of the PC juggernaut. The PCs are neither gaining much nor standing to lose much, but are taking a hand in the fates of institutions and societies.
* I once retired a character who was supposed to be a cocky and loud-mouthed private eye, cleverer than he seemed but not brute-forceful, when I reviewed my notes and discovered that he had killed 170 people in the course of the campaign.