Playing Multiple Characters: Tricks of the Trade

[Dracos]

Hum, This is hard.  It's something that's always been kind of difficult to do from my perspective due to the difficulty of splitting the role responses without getting leakage or overwhelming the PCs.  I generally find I can tackle three roles simultaniously if they are interacting separately with different characters, two if they're interacting with at least two characters, and have trouble doing two opposing each other in live time.  In forums, it's easier, as there's the ability to pull back for writing the shift, but it's difficult I've found doing it in actual time.

So, in the interest of getting this section a bit more kicked off, what are some ways you guys have thought of on dealing with this?  Of figuring out ways to separate role playing character personas in a direct environment as we GMs often have to do?

Dracos

[Anastasia]

A few semi related thoughts as I mull this over.

The simplest way I've found is to begin each character with an unique, defining trait and build from there. It helps when I have a relevant cluster and focus to work with.

In the case of multiple live time NPCs, the best thing is to let the PCs take the early lead if possible, and let them define the segment until you've found a comfort zone with the NPCs involved, then slowly pick up the pace. It's not always viable to do so, but when you can, it helps. Also has the side effect of giving the PCs a sense of moving things and running things with their work.

[thepanda]

Players should never play multiple characters in the same scene.

Ever.

Even with the best of players, it's a formula for disaster. And lets be honest, most people don't fall into the 'best of players' category. As Dracos mentioned above, the GM already has the dubious honor of juggling a cast of None Player Characters. It becomes that much harder when both the GM and the player has to keep track of who said what to each player character, not just the player. If you aren't able to do so the characters blend, causing all kinds of trouble stemming from OOC knowledge from one PC to another. I have yet to see a situation where the pros outweigh the cons. Even familiars tend to have OOC knowledge bleed over. In their case, though, the role of familiar pretty much pigeonholes them into a spot that knowledge can do minimal damage.

Simply put, players should stick with one PC in any given scene.

[Brian]

In a Mage: the Ascension game I played in once, the GM asked me to play a secondary character.  My Primary was an Etherite with a collection of psych. flaws that made him the bumbling absent-minded professor (with an energy gun and an amphibious car, not to mention the space-ship, which never got used).  There were few players, and the GM wanted the cast to be more rounded out, though.

I offered to play a non-Mage support character, and we settled on (of all things) a werewolf.  So Gary (the Mage) and Jeff (the undefined werewolf) are going to be played by me.  The way I saw it, it would be easiest to either play them at separate times, or make them partners, so I'd already know how they'd react to one another.

I did some tweaking with merits and buying both characters as Allies of one-another.  The werewolf had to be a Ragabash and a Glass Walker to work well with an Etherite, and then I gave Gary the Spirit Magnet merit at seven points (the max value).  I figured the spirits that Gary attracted (he did not have spirit, and was unaware of them) wanted to guard Gary because of who he was in his former life (echoes, etc.).  The spirits then told the werewolves to watch out for Gary, but the only ones that would listen would be Glass Walkers (or Bone Gnawers) and the only ones that would actually do it would be Ragabash.  Handy, that.

There was a lot of synergy between Gary and Jeff, but much to my surprise, they actually ended up not getting along very well.  Gary was slowly becoming a Maurader, and Jeff was slowly being driven insane by Gary's antics.

This culminated in Jeff running away to live in the wilderness as a wolf for a month.

I suspect that my accounting of character interaction is not the norm, but generally, I played the two off of one-another.  It wasn't hard, and the players were designed to do different things.  Gary was a thinker, who would labor for days to build devices that did things even he didn't fully understand, but he could reverse engineer any device ever made (aside from those he created himself).  Jeff was a character who interacted with people and fought hand-to-hand when he had to.  This might have been unfair to other players in the party to have a fallback character when we encountered a problem that one was useless against, and the other was designed to handle, but ultimately, it ended up working out because of how the characters' flaws were played against one-another.

I wouldn't do it again.  I wouldn't suggest for other people to do it (unless every player in the game was doing it).

If you want to have multiple PCs per player, there are probably better ways to do it.

One of them is the 'specialists' option, where the players build a small army of characters (2 or 3 characters per player), and then put them all in some kind of guild/army/etc.  Each player gets to play one of his characters per mission/job/etc.  This can be interesting, but cumbersome.

Another is two have the PCs build (and play) two separate teams in the same gameworld that adventure in different areas or at different times.  They might report to the same liege.  I personally feel it would be interesting to have the two teams at odds with one-another, but I'm relatively sure that trying to get people to play that game is an invitation to disaster.  A better option is to have them travel in the same game world.  Perhaps, after a world has been around for a while, as the PCs grow more powerful, it would be fun to start new characters, running around in the uber-PC's old stomping grounds and taking care of whatever other odd problems popped up.  Of course, these would be on a level with the lower level PCs, and beneath the notice of the ubers.  They can even eventually meet up (now THERE's a way to EARN your henchmen!).

Hmmm.  My ideas aren't that great.  Anyone have any others?

[Carthrat]

It really depends on what sort of RPG you're playing, and how much emphasis there is on individual character identity.

Using the age-old scale of games, we can say there are two kinds.

There is the 'Drama' game, and there is the 'Dungeon Hack' game. Both sides can take wildly different forms, but the principals remain the same; in a dungeon hack game, focus is given to Completing a set task that has less to do with character identity and more what that character can do.

In a drama game, it can be much the opposite, because characters will focus on individual development and familiarity with the world at large. Because of the higher focus on personality and development in a 'Drama' game, it doesn't pay off to have multiple characters; the player *might* become confused, whereas the GM and the other players will almost certainly be.

In a dungeon hack game, the game is more like a puzzle or some such. As a result, having more characters run by each player can work fairly well, because the game is less about development than solving the mystery/puzzle whatever.

Games slide around the scale like anybodies business, so you need to keep in mind how much development you expect to occur in the game, how able you and your players are able to keep track of things, and how the seperate characters relate to each other.

And that's my paragraphs done. I'm sure there's some good points in there somewhere. :D