Troupe Play?

[Higgipedia]

I discuss it in more detail on my blog, but I'm curious what your thoughts are regarding Troupe play, where the players generate multiple characters and in each session choose a different combination based on what you may need.

 

[aramis]

I've done troupe play in Ars Magica; we also used shared GMing.

I've run several Trek games where players had 2 characters, and picked which to use scene by scene.

For some groups, it works. For others, it's pure confusion.

 

[jatay3]

It allows genre shifts.

For instance the PCs are scouts that land on a deserted field. They find a lost ship. They open the log and they find out that...
The PCs are playing the parts of the crew of the ship that was lost.

 

[Madarin Dude]

For my smaller groups had players generate a shipboard character and an off ship character. So you have players in charge of the ship and doing the adventure stuff too.

 

[FreeTrav]

(This was also posted on the Freelance Traveller forums, where the OP also posted this question...)

OK, having read the entry... I'll be honest: It's not a new idea from my point of view; I've never known a small gaming group that HASN'T done this, or something similar to it.

This model - whether you call it "troupe play", "playing multiple characters", or whatever - has several potential benefits:

• It gives all of the players a 'change of pace' opportunity at regular intervals, where they can play a different character, and take center stage if they normally don't, or hang back if they normally are at center stage. Or simply try playing a different set of skills.
• It allows a party's skill set to be more filled out, without throwing the majority of the burden on the referee in the form of skilled NPCs, or requiring that characters approach munchkinhood.
• If the gaming group expands during the course of a campaign, it offers the opportunity for the new player to join right in with a ready-made character (taken from one of the established players' secondary charaters), and deferring until a more convenient time the possibly tedious process of generating new characters, and figuring out how to integrate said new characters into the campaign.

It does have some disadvantages, as well, though:

• The various characters played by a single person tend to merge together in the minds of the players - unless the person playing the characters has more than the usual level of acting talent, and can actually PLAY the characters as distinct individuals - something that is not common.
• More bookkeeping for everyone. Inherent in the model, and undoubtedly not unexpected, but still...

Obviously, like anything else related to gaming, you have to examine whether it's right for your group and your campaign. If it is, by all means go for it. If not, though, trying to force it can do serious damage to the campaign and to the group dynamics. Not a good thing.

 

[fiat_knox]

It has the potential to be overused, although it could be useful in a "big ship" sense, where characters play both the command crew and department heads of a capital ship or civilian equivalent, and crewmembers within each department.

During one scene, the bridge command crew could be engaging an enemy vessel; in the next scene, the characters are an Engineering repair crew, or medics in Sickbay tending to the influx of casualties and performing triage, etc.

Different departments, different stories and conflicts.