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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2892540" data-attributes="member: 32740">Back in the days of 1E we did it all the time.  Seldom did anyone NOT have more than one PC.  We always felt the more the merrier and wanted the larger roster for taking on bigger, badder stuff.  It was nearly a requirement as PC's finally advanced into mid/title levels.  They would end up having to spend a great deal more downtime establishing and running temples, strongholds, guilds, and small countries and thus having more than one PC (sometimes 3 and though rare even more than that!) meant that a player was able to always manage to get at least ONE PC into every ongoing adventure without having to burn TONS of in-game calendar time in order to assemble a quorum.  I've always thought it was how the game worked best.The downside was that when we were still less than fully mature roleplayers we all found it difficult to different degrees to keep characters seperate in both personalities as well as money and equipment.  We even developed the epithet "T-shirt character" for a PC that was sometimes created much as a mule PC would in MMORPG's - a character to simply provide support for the PC you REALLY cared about.  In nearly any adventure you had one PC that you favored over the other if you were running two at the same time.  You would always have a tendency to forget your lesser character and nearly everything the PLAYER said would be coming from the persona of the FAVORED PC rather than the lesser one.Additionally, when you created a second/third PC because your first PC was occupied with "downtime" stuff you ran the risk of suddenly becoming highly enamored of the NEW PC over the older PC, and suddenly a character that was careening headlong into becoming a world-shaking power broker would shrivel up as you redirected your main interests into other areas and other PC's.By the 2E era we recognized this behavior in ourselves sufficiently that we either chose not to create/run more than one PC at a time or could better keep up with the juggling needed to give multiple PC's equal attention.  We still often failed but at least we kept the problems to a minimum by being aware of ithe pitfalls.The 2E era also meant greatly reduced numbers of players for us.  The nights of having 10 or more players at the table were gone and we were lucky to get 5 to show up with any regularity.  Though this logically SHOULD have meant seeing more players with multiple PC's I think we just adjusted the adventures to also do more with less, so to speak.3E with its 4 PC standard worked perfectly for our now highly shrunken roster of players, though I would often run an NPC/DM-PC to fill roles and give me a constant conduit to feed hints to the actual PC's.  The roles of course were always just that of meat shield or more often the Rogue.  Nobody ever took the Rogue but everyone hated not having someone to simply check for traps and open locks.  From the dawn of 3E I've only had ONE player running two PC's at once - at that was only long enough to replace his current PC with that of a player who left the game whose PC had such great stats that he couldn't stand to see them go to waste after only 2 sessions of play.  His first PC had died and I turned him into a plot device for the overall campaign.  The second PC I appropriated as an NPC when he took up the third with the great stats.  He was later allowed to play the NPC as a PC again in the closing days of the campaign.Overall, I'd say that if you have mature roleplayers, or are just a bit more watchful for OOC behavior, the benefits can outweigh any drawbacks.</blockquote>

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