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

[(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.