More than one PC per player?

[Zen]

I play and occasionally DM with a small group – four gamers total, sometimes only three. Since two or three players doesn’t allow for a very balanced adventuring party, we’ve gotten into the habit of each player rolling up and running two PC’s simultaneously –not henchmen, but full-fledged PC’s.

I’m new to the boards but it seems this is a rare practice. Does anyone else do this? If not, I’m curious to see how other gamers handle playing groups that are too small to field the usual party of adventures: does the DM scale the adventure for let’s say a fighter and a wizard traveling alone, or do you run a number of NPC’s so the party begins to resemble a ‘standard’ group?

-Z

 

[Patlin]

I play and occasionally DM with a small group – four gamers total, sometimes only three. Since two or three players doesn’t allow for a very balanced adventuring party, we’ve gotten into the habit of each player rolling up and running two PC’s simultaneously –not henchmen, but full-fledged PC’s.

I’m new to the boards but it seems this is a rare practice. Does anyone else do this? If not, I’m curious to see how other gamers handle playing groups that are too small to field the usual party of adventures: does the DM scale the adventure for let’s say a fighter and a wizard traveling alone, or do you run a number of NPC’s so the party begins to resemble a ‘standard’ group?

-Z

Yeah, I've done that if I get down to a DM and two players. Each player takes two PCs. With three Players, the DM usually just takes a PCish NPC of his own, or lets the party tough it out.

Fortunately, we normally have enough gamers that neither solution is necessary.

BTW - It's not the lack of a "balanced" party I object to. It's simply that two bodies are a lot more subject to ill fate than four. Makes the game much more random, which isn't desirable.

 

[the Jester]

My group has multiple characters in multiple groups throughout the game world, but generally we only have one pc per player as a main 'adventuring' character. Occasionally we'll have cameos from others, though.

In the old days we had massive parties where everyone played a half-dozen pcs two or three per adventure.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

My group has multiple characters in multiple groups throughout the game world, but generally we only have one pc per player as a main 'adventuring' character. Occasionally we'll have cameos from others, though.

Ditto. Indeed, I find groups of 1-3 players with 1 PC each to be when I'm at my best as a GM, and I love both playing and running solo games.

 

[milotha]

Yeah, we've done this several times, and it seems to work out just fine. I helps fill the gaps in the party lineup and it prevents a couple of bad rolls from causing a TPK. In addition, it helps if you balance the characters by having each player play a caster and a non-caster type.

 

[DanMcS]

The group I play in is running a game like this now; we're playing low level characters, and the theory is if one of them dies, we'll continue playing with our other PC until the group goes somewhere it could plausibly pick up a new member. First time we've run like this, and it's odd. But since we all have multiple characters, we've got a flock of healers and a larger group, and it lets us keep on 'crawling longer instead of the silly "two encounters, pitch camp in the middle of the dungeon" style of low-level D&D.

 

[The_Gneech]

For groups of 2-3 players plus DM, it works. Your best bet is to make sure that each player's characters are very different from each other ... i.e., a burly male human barbarian and a willowy halfling female bard -- so there's no blurring of characters due to ability/personality overlap.

-The Gneech

 

[Wombat]

I once had two people play one character...

Long story...

Anyway, the only games I've played where a player was allowed multiple characters were not D&D/D20. I suppose if you had a small group of players it would be necessary. I don't see anything inherently wrong with the notion, as long as the characters developed separate personalities.

 

[MarauderX]

2 PCs per player could lead to trouble. The cleric-fighter or barbarian-rogue player combo could wreak havoc at any level, but if you don't have min-maxers it could be ok. Still, in the role-playing side each player would have two 'personalities' and the one with higher CHA would likely voice the player's interests more often, and the other character would likely be a voiceless combat machine. Depends on the group I suppose, but the one experiment I had with it way back when was a lesson for me in how easily the PCs could 'work together'. And we didn't have a min-maxer among us.

 

[Mr. Kaze]

I had a group of two where they both had two characters. It sucked -- we effectively had two parties of two people that had no cohesiveness with each other.

So the next time I got down to two players (same two, actually) who wanted to play despite the lack of actual campaigns, we negotiated around a bit before giving them each an Ultra-Chibi Halfling-Half-Red-Dragon and that was a fast-paced riot.

If we do it again, I'll probably look up the gestalt rules for class mixing to ensure that they can fully keep up with the adventure as it progresses...