Troupe style play

[Nytmare]

That's the hardest part of shared GMing is that all need to know the rules.

In some games shared GMing doesn't involve any kind of system mastery, and just has specific tasks usually left up to the GM that are passed off to one or more players.

In Band of Blades, you're playing the part of an entire regiment of soldiers retreating from a lost battle. At the beginning of the game, players pass the GM hat around and decide on which "Broken" they want to fight against, and which "Chosen" they march with, which dictates essentially which tropes and themes the game will and will not contain. Before each adventure starts, players adopt characters who are the officers of the retreating legion who, again, do some minor GM lifting. For example, the player playing the Commander chooses the specifics of the next mission and where the the adventure will take place, the Marshal directs which troops will make up the party, and the Spymaster gathers intelligence on enemy movement and activities.

In The Quiet Year, a map drawing RPG following the passage of a year for an orphaned community of some description, the entirety of the game's rules are read/learned/taught in the first 5 minutes of the game by players taking turns reading pages in a book. Each round, the role of GM passes around the table, as the player draws a card, chooses one of the two passages to read aloud and answer, and draws something on the map to mark the passage of time.

 

[Fenris-77]

Ars Magica and Band of Blades both do it really well. I haven't used it in OSR games, but I can see it working well in any campaign that has any kind of focus of hirelings and followers.

 

[Ulfgeir]

In the Tianxia-campaign I play in, we all made our own character (and we are spread out in five regions on a continent the size of China). The GM then made 4 extra characters per player that he portioned out to be the entourage of each others characters. Each if these GM-made characters are just as powerful as the ones we made. They do not always have goals that align with the rest of the characters. The idea is that there is to be a lot of intrigues, and mysteries. So we play a little bit in one region, then next session we go to a different one. So far it works well.

For example when we played last, in the region where my character was the "main" character, we had someone who would like to take advantage of my character and her family as they had money (my character has the flaw that she always gets to know the wrong persons. She is a respected scholar and has a reputation for always being honest), another was an assassin but appearing as a noblewoman of high bearing, one was an imperial spy, one was an excorcist monk, one was a 14 year old girl who was my servant. That one was the daughter of a disgraced general, and was extremeley good at figthing.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

How do you manage leveling?

 

[Ulfgeir]

How do you manage leveling?

Tianxis is a Fate-game. So no levels. You don't even get xp, but there are some minor swapping around of things you can do at end of sessions, and some more at certain miilestones.

 

[uzirath]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone out there use troupe style play. That is, a stable of characters available to whichever players want to run them that session without any ownership. Or, alternatively, where each player has a stable of PCs that they pick from for any given session or adventure.

I've seen the second version where each player has a stable of characters. That has worked well in my experience. I've seen it where each PC earns XP (or character points in GURPS) according to which adventures they participate in and I've seen it where all PCs are set at a given level of points (so even when characters are off-screen, they are progressing and can drop in at approximately the same power level). I prefer the latter; it seemed to encourage richer storytelling where each character was clearly Doing Things when they weren't in the spotlight.

I have not seen a campaign explicitly created to use your first variation of troupe style, with a single stable from which all players can pull. I have seen a few variations. With one-shot games, of course, players will often choose from a set of pre-gens. But that's not really the same thing. I've also seen it in games with larger groups where not all the players show up to each game. Other players may control the extra PCs. With a good group, this can be a lot of fun. I know that I look forward to getting to play a second character who is different from my main PC. It allows me to engage the fiction in ways that might be unrealistic for my own character. In this case, though, the original player still retains "ownership" of their character.

 

[Bohandas]

I'm not actually talking about shared GMing.

It seems a natural extension though

 

[Reynard]

It seems a natural extension though

Maybe but I think you see a rotating GM seat a lot more often than you see troupe style play.

 

[werecorpse]

I like the idea of it but when I’ve tried it in D&D I got pushback as some people had their favourite characters and didn’t want to spend time playing the also rans.

I’d like to give it a go with games where you heal more slowly and die more easily like CoC so backup characters are available if someone needs to sit out a while recovering

 

[Tonguez]

I have PCs define their connection to family and Factions in which they have influence. To track that I adapted the 3e Leadership mechanic (Cha+level). Using Leadership means I have a set number and levels defined, it also takes care of the level of the second PC (Cohort). Anyone starting with negative influence must begin as the servant/slave of another PC and influence can be used during Downtime activity. Including sending lower level followers off to do tasks.
Influence imc also acts as a Wealth mechanic.