Doubling up

[subplotkudzu]

I've been giving some more thought to the practice of players having 2 PCs per game to fill out the skill set and broaden the size of a small crew. It's been working well in Old Lives, Old Civilizations, and I know that whswhsdid it successfully in Hong Kong Shadows, his asian Mage game. Anyone else played with this concept? 

I know the original practice in Ars Magica was having each player with a Mage (really powerful) and a companion (not so powerful) with an array of Grogs (red shirts) for people to take over to give them a presence in the adventure. So far we haven't used any Grog/Red Shirt temporary PCs in Trek, though in our TOS format we certainly could. Still, I think Grogs work because of the rotating Mage and Companion concept - each adventure has one Mage, a companion or two and the rest of the players as Grogs, but that switches up every session or so. Not so in Trek where the Magi (Krik) and companions (Spock, and McCoy) are the same in every episode. 

Our format of having a starting number of points to split between the primary and secondary characters instead produced something closer to TNG - an 8 member primary crew of varying skill levels, four of whom got more screen time. For all that TOS developed 7-9 PC caliber characters (depending on where you count Yeoman Rand and Chapel), the show's focus on Kirk, Spock and McCoy makes it hard for me to see the dual PC thing working. If I had to stretch it I'd go with the following
Player 1: Kirk and Checkov
Player 2: Spock and Sulu
Player 3: McCoy and Scott

or, if there were 4 players
Player 1: Kirk (maybe with Nurse Chapel)
Player 2: Spock and Checkov
Player 3: McCoy and Sulu
Player 4: Scott and Uhura

Possibly with a lot of Grog use. But the player must have been really willing to let PC 1 chew the scenery and dominate play...

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Two variants I've used in current games:

Boca del Infierno has a Slayer and four scoobies, using the mechanic of added drama points for the scoobies to keep things in balance dramatically. But in addition, each player has a secondary character who appears when the main character is offstage, or for special episodes. The players of the scoobies have heroic scale characters; the player of the Slayer has a scoobie-level character. This has worked pretty well as a Buffy-style introduction of guest stars.

Manse has four characters per player. Attention mainly focuses on the four children of noble houses, who spend time together in school, and the four soldiers, who spend time together on and off duty. But there are also four adult nobles and four servants who appear from time to time. I'm getting ready to send one adult noble, two children of noble houses, and one servant on a "dungeon crawl" type of expedition, which will mix things up interestingly.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

First question: how were the point totals differentiated for the Manse characters? All 16 characters built on the same number? Each of the 4 classes built on the same number? Each player given X number of points to split between as they saw fit?

Second question: Do the players have control over which of their PCs get involved in which issues? Does any player want to keep bringing his higher point soldier into the problems where others use servants or children? Given that the game was designed for highly social role players I doubt it's an issue, but I am curious whether those sorts of in game social norms can reliably curb player abuse.

After all, sometimes the competence levels matter in player engagement. Especially in settings where everyone his broadly trained, it's easy to move from being sidekick to sidelined. I solved it in Trek by giving each player X points to split between their 2 PCs, so the player would have control of the same amount of competence. (Interestingly, it's the PCs who are further apart in power where the player gives each more balanced screen time.) Ars Magica settles it by rotating who gets to be the big kahuna, so the balance is maintained in the long run. I'm curious what other methods might work.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Each of the four classes was built on the same number of points for all members of the class. This differed between different classes; the adult aristos had about twice the points of the servants. Each class also had a few required positive and negative traits.

I really haven't seen a lot of intrusions of the sort you ask about. There wasn't that strong a motive for players to have adult aristocrats compete in doing school assignments, or finding desirable dance partners at the formal dance for the kid aristocrats. And while the soldiers were built on fewer points than the aristocrats, they were better combatants than some of them—the centenarian Glass People head of household wasn't going to be going into battle with anyone.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Those were about the answers I expected - each of the classes have such different concerns that the overlap would be minimal. I expect the concerns would be different if the campaign were more structured against THREATS (the way a standard game is) rather than cultural analysis - I'm more concerned about situations where a player refuses to ever trot out their Scoobie lest they not be the tough guy Hero, and other such nonsense.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There are a couple of ways to handle this.

In Hong Kong Shadows, each player had a mage character and a secondary character who was an ally of another player's mage character. The allies could do specialized things that the mages couldn't, from acting as bodyguards to doing feng shui to spending vast amounts of money. The mages themselves would seek out their allies on certain occasions, or bring them in.

In Heroes of 1889, all the PCs were heroes of roughly comparable power. But the players got to pick which of their characters would go along on a given mission. One mission might call for Superbman's superb strength, superb speed, and superb aristocratic connections; another might call for Raven's night vision and lethal marksmanship.

In Boca del Infierno, the normal state of things is that only the Slayer and the scoobies are present, and the scoobies get double the drama points to even things up, which works stunningly well. Indeed, one of the players has never spent an experience point on anything BUT drama points. But if one of the scoobies is offstage for some reason, that player's hero can show up. For example, when the Slayer, the half-demon, and the soldier went to San Francisco for the governor's All Hallows Eve ball, leaving the witch and the watcher behind, they met the Slayer-in-training and the masked thief.

You have to bear in mind, too, that my campaigns don't routinely have all the PCs on stage all the way through a session. I'm perfectly willing to bounce back and forth among different subgroups.

[(Anonymous)]

Hm. In Matt Stevens's Two Fisted Tales game, we all had two characters, one for street level mysteries in good old Heartland City, and one for globetrotting over the top adventures involving aliens, lost worlds, and the like.

In Cthulhupunk Plus 20, everyone had two PCs, one involved with the band Age of Consent, and a more powerful PC involved with shaping the new world and smuggling.

In Cthulhu High, it's less neat than that, but that's a play by email game, so the constraints are different.