Troupe style play

[Reynard]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone out there use troupe style play. That is, a stable of characters available to whichever players want to run them that session without any ownership. Or, alternatively, where each player has a stable of PCs that they pick from for any given session or adventure.

I experimented with it once in a Star Trek style game where sometimes you wanted to be bridge crew but other times you wanted to be lower ranked specialists. It worked okay. I planned to do it with a super hero game using an Astro City style setting with lots and lots of supers, but it never got off the ground.

 

[Morrus]

Used it many times in many campaigns. It's a wonderful tool! Ars Magica, obviously. And I've done it with Trek style games, like you have.

 

[Arilyn]

We have done it very successfully with ARS Magica. Currently, we have a great Dungeon Crawl Classics troupe style game going. We have an informal adventurer's guild, with players each having a number of characters. The characters come, go, die, retire. It's a lot of fun.

I think super hero games work especially well with troupe style. You'll get that Justice League/Avengers vibe.

 

[aco175]

I tried it with a campaign where I thought we would have an extra player or two in and out. I thought of having an adventurer's guild where each week the PCs would be given a mission and it would wrap up each week. It ended up with the players picking the same PC each week to get some levels and the other players stopped coming after a month, so we branched off the main idea.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The second form was the default in my main group of 20+ years. We all had PCs ranging from newbies to just short of demi-gods.

 

[Richards]

My first 3.5 campaign with my current group of players ran with them each having two PCs. They were all part of an Adventurers Guild and they had been assigned in pairs, with everyone wearing a Guild ring that allowed them to teleport back to Guild Headquarters. In addition, if you touched rings with your "bink-partner" (that's the term we ended up calling teleporting back), you could "lock into the coordinates" of the place the other PC just binked in from. End result: the Guild would assign the team a mission, the team members would decide who to send out on it (the players would decide which of their two PCs they'd run for that adventure), and if a PC ran into trouble they could always bink back to HQ and get replaced with the other PC. It worked well for PC death, too, as long as another PC could activate the dead PC's ring to bink the dead body back to Guild HQ, which ensured the player of the dead PC could still continue to run through that adventure with their other PC.

Also, when 3.0 first came out, I started a campaign with my two sons as the only players. We had them run through each adventure with two PCs each, which isn't quite the same thing but kind of close. Our stipulation, since we were just first running 3.0, was there would be no returning from the dead; furthermore, there would be no duplicating character classes until we'd run through all 11 of them, so your new PC had to be the first of that class we'd ever run.

Johnathan

 

[Nytmare]

I had assumed that would be the format for my current hexcrawler, but it hasn't happened yet.

In Band of Blades, it's kinda baked into the system.

 

[aramis erak]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone out there use troupe style play. That is, a stable of characters available to whichever players want to run them that session without any ownership. Or, alternatively, where each player has a stable of PCs that they pick from for any given session or adventure.

I experimented with it once in a Star Trek style game where sometimes you wanted to be bridge crew but other times you wanted to be lower ranked specialists. It worked okay. I planned to do it with a super hero game using an Astro City style setting with lots and lots of supers, but it never got off the ground.

I've used it in Ars Magica.
It only worked because 3 of the 8 (not counting me) also knew the rules enough to run a story. Aside from D&D, I've not had a group of players capable of that. With L5R 5, I had 2 of 8 capable, but only 1 of those willing.

That's the hardest part of shared GMing is that all need to know the rules.

 

[Reynard]

That's the hardest part of shared GMing is that all need to know the rules.

I'm not actually talking about shared GMing.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm not actually talking about shared GMing.

That is the part of Troupe style as defined in 2nd and 3rd. Each player takes a turn.