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<blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 6948282" data-attributes="member: 6779310">Firefly looks like a group of nine who only have 4 regulars, with the rest showing occasionally. Mal, Wash, Zoe and Jane. (I've a group that works that way now...) Trek TOS can be said to be Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty as regulars, and scotty's player not being comfortable with the limelight, with Sulu, Uhura, and Chapel as drop-in players who can't be there regularly, but are still &quot;Plot-immunity PC's&quot;...TNG, it's pretty clear that the captain is usually an NPC; perhaps his player is on call, because sometimes he uses the strap-on-porta-spine; Riker, Worf, LaForge, Data,&nbsp; Yar, and Wesley are regular PCs, with everyone having occasional attendance issues. When Wes' player is absent, he gets into trouble and has to be rescued; when he's solving the problems, his player is there. Only a handful of episodes in the whole run are &quot;1 character shows&quot;...&nbsp; those are obvious cases of &quot;no one else showed up&quot;... Future Imperfect comes to mind.&nbsp; And in Aquiel, Geordie's player was the only one not hung over... It doesn't of need require the number of PCs to equal the number of players... Many a Trek GM has players have two characters; one toff, one boss. Works great, so long as they don't have to be in scene together. Ars Magica 1e-3e does the same in a fantasy context... 2 PCs per player, and whomever is is not involved in the current main story is running 1 or 2 previously written NPCs from a pool owned by the group.That latter mode can work quite well, as long as everyone gets a chance to opt in to having such scenes. There are even RPGs where such scenes are surprisingly regular, but by virtue of mechanical scene scheduling, everyone can arrange one a session... (Burning Empires, for example.)Scene budgets can be a wonderful tool with a group that wants to have that &quot;lots of quiet scenes&quot; without it becoming one PC's story... of course, if everyone is opting to include that one guy, it becomes his story, even if he does nothing in those scenes...</blockquote>

[QUOTE="aramis erak, post: 6948282, member: 6779310"] Firefly looks like a group of nine who only have 4 regulars, with the rest showing occasionally. Mal, Wash, Zoe and Jane. (I've a group that works that way now...) Trek TOS can be said to be Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty as regulars, and scotty's player not being comfortable with the limelight, with Sulu, Uhura, and Chapel as drop-in players who can't be there regularly, but are still "Plot-immunity PC's"... TNG, it's pretty clear that the captain is usually an NPC; perhaps his player is on call, because sometimes he uses the strap-on-porta-spine; Riker, Worf, LaForge, Data, Yar, and Wesley are regular PCs, with everyone having occasional attendance issues. When Wes' player is absent, he gets into trouble and has to be rescued; when he's solving the problems, his player is there. Only a handful of episodes in the whole run are "1 character shows"... those are obvious cases of "no one else showed up"... Future Imperfect comes to mind. And in Aquiel, Geordie's player was the only one not hung over... It doesn't of need require the number of PCs to equal the number of players... Many a Trek GM has players have two characters; one toff, one boss. Works great, so long as they don't have to be in scene together. Ars Magica 1e-3e does the same in a fantasy context... 2 PCs per player, and whomever is is not involved in the current main story is running 1 or 2 previously written NPCs from a pool owned by the group. That latter mode can work quite well, as long as everyone gets a chance to opt in to having such scenes. There are even RPGs where such scenes are surprisingly regular, but by virtue of mechanical scene scheduling, everyone can arrange one a session... (Burning Empires, for example.) Scene budgets can be a wonderful tool with a group that wants to have that "lots of quiet scenes" without it becoming one PC's story... of course, if everyone is opting to include that one guy, it becomes his story, even if he does nothing in those scenes... [/QUOTE]

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