There's some of that, although I don't think of it in quite that form. I think of it, rather, as a faction-matching problem.
I have clumps of players who want to play together, and in some cases players who really *don't* want to play together. (The latter often being the more important cases.) And I have "factions" in the game, groups that are relatively strongly associated with each other -- heavily overlapping in a good game, but each faction represents a natural grouping from the story POV. Just to make it worse, the factions are fuzzy on both sides, especially on the player side, since they are generally expressed unidirectionally. (That is, Player A says that he wants to be associated with B and C, and not with D; the others may say something quite different.)
Ideally, I want the player factions to align as best as I can with the character factions, so that players who want to be together overlap along some sort of factional lines (and will therefore naturally wind up interacting in the game), and those who don't much like each other will be off in different parts of the story.
This really is the hardest part of the problem, and the main thing that makes it tricky -- balancing the factional desires with the personal fits is pretty tricky, especially since the factions are fairly small: typically 3-7 on both sides of the equation, so my options are limited. So I'm trying to produce a best-fit not just on the individual player level, but for the groupings as well, introducing a sort of graph-solving problem on top of the individual fits...
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I have clumps of players who want to play together, and in some cases players who really *don't* want to play together. (The latter often being the more important cases.) And I have "factions" in the game, groups that are relatively strongly associated with each other -- heavily overlapping in a good game, but each faction represents a natural grouping from the story POV. Just to make it worse, the factions are fuzzy on both sides, especially on the player side, since they are generally expressed unidirectionally. (That is, Player A says that he wants to be associated with B and C, and not with D; the others may say something quite different.)
Ideally, I want the player factions to align as best as I can with the character factions, so that players who want to be together overlap along some sort of factional lines (and will therefore naturally wind up interacting in the game), and those who don't much like each other will be off in different parts of the story.
This really is the hardest part of the problem, and the main thing that makes it tricky -- balancing the factional desires with the personal fits is pretty tricky, especially since the factions are fairly small: typically 3-7 on both sides of the equation, so my options are limited. So I'm trying to produce a best-fit not just on the individual player level, but for the groupings as well, introducing a sort of graph-solving problem on top of the individual fits...