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]

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.