Looking for opinions

[IronWolf]

As a player I do not like to play more than one character at a time. I would much prefer to play one character and play him well, focusing on him. In games I DM I would not like to see playing two characters per player a regular thing. When stepping in to play someone's character who missed that session, that is fine, but not on a regular basis.

 

[kenobi65]

Since you're down to 2 players, I'd at least let those players try using a 2nd PC, for the sake of keeping the game going. In one campaign I'm currently DMing, we're down to 3 players, so I'm running an NPC wizard just so the party has an arcane spellcaster. (But, I've been DMing for 23 years, so I know what I'm doing. )

IME, in another one of our campaigns, almost everyone has multiple characters, but each player picks one character to play for a particular adventure. Since most everyone has PCs at a variety of levels, the level of the adventure is usually a prime determiner on which characters people are playing in that particular adventure.

With the exception of the (very) occasional cohort / henchman, or "pinch-hitting" (picking up a playerless PC for a session in addition to your own), we don't let players play multiple characters at once.

 

[JoeGKushner]

The real solution is to find more players. Two players and a GM is possible, but as you mentioned that you're new, it's putting a lot of burden on the players to 'be good' when doing two characters at a time.

New players.

 

[hexgrid]

I'd make the extra characters more like cohorts, and have them be a cople levels lower than the PCs. The two original PC are the heros, and the extra characters are their faithful sidekicks.

I'd also make them pseudo-npcs- the players normally have complete control of the sidekicks, but the DM can override this when appropriate.

 

[Grunk]

i am currently running the Shackled City AP with 3 players. We started with 2 and so I had each player play 2 characters. The natural progression was that one of the PCs became more of the speaker and the other the strong silent type (works out well for the characters backstories). For example, one player is a Paladin of Heironeous. His second character is a Goliath Barbarian with low self esteem who isn't really comfortable around humans other than the paladin. So most of the time he just follows his lead anyways. The other player is a Gnome Wizard and some sort of planetouched Ranger (like trumpet archon) who can't control the volume of his voice and looks real freaky too. Again, one of the characters ends up doing a lot of the roleplaying (in this case, the gnome.)

The great thing about this situation is the increased use of tactics and also a sense of comraderie among the characters that is the result of being effectively controled by the same person.
The unfortunate thing about this, is that the individuals PCs characters rarely get to interact with one another and when they do, its slightly disturbing to watch a player talking to himself.

During character creation, i tried to make the PCs pick 2 classes that wouldn't have too much of a personality conflict though. Like I wouldn't have allowed the Paladin to also play a rouge (just too many missed roleplaying oppurtunities.) I would highly recomend this. Don't have an evil wizard paired with a cleric and for that matter it's best to have one spellcaster per PC.

The third player was brought in a little later so they are only playing one PC (the rouge). This also works out well because the player is new to 3.5 But, if all goes well, he may be playing the party cleric as well (prolly a neutral one.)

 

[Taelorn76]

Thanks for all the feedback.

Alot of you mentioned letting the players control the cohort npcs durring battle and me stepping in when need be to move the story along or provide character info to the campaign.

Again thanks for the feedback.

 

[Graybeard]

I would allow it for certain players. I once played in a game where all the players had at least 2 characters. Some of the players were good at it, some weren't. One in particular, the DM's wife, was really bad at it. Both her characters always knew what the other one knew. Even if one of the PC's was elsewhere. In general, she was really bad at keeping player knowledge and character knowledge separate.

I would say that based on our current group, I would allow 3 of the 5 players to do so.

Chuck