D&D General Am I the only one who plays D&D with more than 1 character per player???

[Brak]

I don't know that I have ever, in almost 35 years of playing 1e - 5e, played D&D in a group where each player used only 1 character. Since most of our parties had 6+ characters and we would have somewhere between 1 and 3 players + DM, I have always played more than one character. Usually it was just me and a DM, so I would play the entire party. This has been the only D&D I have ever known. But after many years of reading D&D forums and articles I have almost never seen this even mentioned as a valid form of play. It is always just one character per player. There are single player adventures, but they are special adventures made for 1 character.

I understand that, for many, a big part of the social experience of playing D&D is "role playing" where a player takes on the role of a character and interacts with other players/characters. This inter-player experience is missing if you are the only player and perhaps diminished if you are controlling more than 1 character, but in my experience D&D is still a fun game without it.

Is this anyone else's experience or I am really the only one?

 

[iserith]

My campaigns frequently have multiple PCs per player but with only one active in any given session unless the active PC dies. I never had it where one player is running the whole adventuring party. There's been no need of that.

 

[Retreater]

Of the three games I'm currently playing/GMing, everyone has multiple characters. Two of them are OSR campaigns that rely on larger parties. The other is a 5e game that I'm DMing for 2 players, so to "round out" the party for the adventure they chose, we're doing multiple characters.
Works fine for me. Players tend to gravitate towards one of their characters for role-playing while the other character is mostly used to round out combat and skills.

 

[NotAYakk]

A the age of 10ish I killed many a dragon-turtle as a solo-party with my older brother DMing.

Sweet, sweet dragon-turtle treasure table.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I've done it before in 4e and 5e. Oddly, we didn't really do it in 1e, but we had a lot of players and could slap together a new pc pretty quickly.

I have found that allowing multiple pc's per player is the best way to get the pc count up when the player count is low. If you only have 2 players, 2 pcs per is better than 2 pcs and 2 npcs in the party. (the dm is busy enough as it is) With 3 players that brings you to 6 pcs - which is better for certain dming styles than 3 pcs. 4 pcs is usually enough, though, so at four players we usually stop doing that. Since 4e works best at 4-5 pc's, getting closer to that number is usually worth the added effort. 5e is a little more forgiving about pc's counts, but 3-6 is still the sweet spot.

I have noticed that some people can handle 2 pc's with no drop-off in how well they play them, and some people find juggling 2 pc's really hard - but this does not correlate to how well they handle one character in the first place. ie They might struggle with the rules, but not any worse when there's twice as many rules, (which surprised me). Some people find switching between roleplaying two characters hard and other have no difficulty - and this also did not correlate to how 'well' they roleplay either. It's just a different skill.

 

[Oofta]

There's no wrong way to play if you're having fun. I or a player will occasionally have an NPC companion, but it's the exception not the rule and has to be special circumstances.

 

[Haffrung]

We played AD&D with multiple PCs per play for year and years. In a game with such high lethality, and where published adventures were designed for 6 to 8 PCs, it made for an effective safety net.

With the changes to the zeitgeist of the game, we rarely have multiple PCs anymore. The biggest barrier is practical - modern PCs tend to be so mechanically complex that it's a headache to run more than one for any length of time.

 

[Quartz]

Having a combat character and a support character (e.g. Fighter + Wizard) could scratch a lot of itches.

 

[el-remmen]

The last time I played with more than one character was back in 2E days - before that it was not uncommon. I ran one game with two of my best friends when we were 14 and each had a stable of 5 characters and chose 2 to 3 to bring to each adventure!

 

[Marc_C]

Currently, in my 5e campaign I have a very courageous player who runs the wizard and the cleric at the same time. He uses spells cards. The 3 other players run 1 character.