Troupe Play in GURPS

[Michael Cule]

This thread on rpg.net lead me to this post which I encourage you to read because otherwise the following won't make a lot of sense.

Back now? OK then...

Trying to establish a troupe style of play, probably in a campaign that is very much run sandbox style has certain difficulties in GURPS. The degree of preparation that is needed to bring a GURPS character up to 'ready-to-play' status and the degree of personal investment that players have in their carefully designed core characters (or perhaps that's just my players? Who knows?) are the main problems. But I think that I can see ways to do this and certain advantages to doing it this way.

The advantages I see are being less trapped by the 'adventuring party' and therefore less afraid to 'split the party' if that's where the story takes you. Imagine how hard it would have been with long running series like ST: TNG to develop character and story if every bloody week you had to give Picard something to do, Riker something to do, Data and Jordi.... You get the idea. You could never switch to a story that was about one character or even two because you would be freezing out the other players.

In my current game I've got story threads about all the main characters but at least one of them has been pretty frustrated because she was dragged across the Atlantic ocean because that's where the party as a whole chose to go and her backstory was left behind in Europe. (I'm trying to make it up to her now she's back: next week she may have to make the decision: kill my hated enemy in the face of the whole royal court or not?)

You can also adapt more easily to the failure of one or more players to turn up, bring in characters capable of dealing with specific problems and give the players a chance to be creative.

But GURPS needs some work in game mechanical terms to make characters ready.

So how about this as an outline:

1) Core characters. Every player gets one personal core character that is theirs and theirs alone. This should be at the full level of character points allowed for 'player characters'. This could be slightly more than that of the 'pool characters': they are supposed to be the leads and they get special treatment even if they're not always in every episode. At least one core character should be in every session but even that can be changed if the story focusses on secondary characters in the style of that ST:TNG episode called (IIRC) BELOW DECKS. The core characters are owned and maintained by the player who created them.

2) Pool characters. These are the supporting characters who are there when story needs dictate. The gruff sergeant, the chirpy young squire, the forensic tech, the girlfriend who is a part time witch. Anyone can play them. They are owned and maintained and probably designed by the GM though he could well delegate that last part (under supervision and with his approval) to players. ("Fred, she's your girlfriend. If Sharon is going to play her next week you're going to have to flesh her out a bit.") They should be fully worked up but may be less powerful than core characters and may be in the process of being designed bit by bit.

3) Experience points. Every character gets one experience point every time it is played. Every player also gets a pool of experience points based on how well they did in a particular session which they can apply to any character they have played. (Although I suspect most of them will apply their points to their core characters no matter where or how they were earned.) A player may spend any accumulated points on a pool character's sheet before he hands it back to the GM.

4) Designing characters bit by bit. This is a tricky part. When a script-writer starts with a character concept he doesn't know everything about the character. He just knows the high points. And when I start a campaign I don't know what I'm going to want the minor characters to be able to do in detail.

And when the NPCs remain NPCs and aren't going to have to be written down in detail I can add as many points to them as I like. ("Oc course the grizzled sergeant has Scrounging! Yes and contacts in the local criminal underworld...." "Did I not mention that the kobold was a Buddhist missionary? If you were a kobold you'd want to believe in a better re-incarnation!")

But if I'm going to allow and encourage the players to build characters in that way I'd better create some guidelines. So:

A) NPCs have a budget of points just like any other character.
B) They also have a limit of Disadvantages and five quirks which are undefined until someone comes up with a nice bit of characterisation.
C) Nothing put on the character sheet may contradict what has been said in game.
D) Any skill or advantage that fits the character may be claimed at any time but you had best pay the points right there. If you need a disadvantage to pay for it and the limit hasn't been reached you can put in a place holder ("I need a -5 disad... Let's not hold up the game...") but you cannot hand the character back to the GM without having established what the disadvantage is. That should encourage players to come up with stuff that is entertaining and adds to the story. ("Giant spiders? I think Rodney the Randy had best roll to control his arachnophobia that he's never told anyone about...")

5) Each session should probably end with a few moments spent planning what the next meeting's stories should be about and which characters will be featured. The GM should be able and willing to go off on a tangent with other characters at the drop of a text telling him the focus character's player isn't going to make it.

Does that make sense? Sound appealing? Practical?

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

1) Core characters.

I see no problem here, but depending on your campaign there may not be specific characters you can point at as being "core".

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

2) Pool characters.

I would be wary about letting multiple people play the same character - I have seen conflict with this sort of thing in the past. I would permanently assign those characters as they are used, and make sure that you have back-ups - "Well, Tim isn't here this week and Dr. Carstairs is his... let's say he is at a conference and got Dr. Wiglet to cover for him - John can play him."

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

3) Experience points.

Might work, although I am personally wary of allowing players to used CP earned on character to improve another. I would treat each one separately.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

4) Designing characters bit by bit.

This really is a challenge in GURPS, and is ripe for abuse. I think it will fall on the GM to plan this out in advance so that the appropriate characters are ready for each session. Rather than giving them some block of points to be allocated as needed, I would simply be more lenient in allowing the characters to allocate earned CP to reflect that the characters were not yet well-defined.

Still, some level of this will probably be necessary.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

A) NPCs have a budget of points just like any other character.
B) They also have a limit of Disadvantages and five quirks which are undefined until someone comes up with a nice bit of characterisation.
C) Nothing put on the character sheet may contradict what has been said in game.
D) Any skill or advantage that fits the character may be claimed at any time but you had best pay the points right there.

Agreed so far.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

If you need a disadvantage to pay for it and the limit hasn't been reached you can put in a place holder ("I need a -5 disad... Let's not hold up the game...") but you cannot hand the character back to the GM without having established what the disadvantage is. That should encourage players to come up with stuff that is entertaining and adds to the story. ("Giant spiders? I think Rodney the Randy had best roll to control his arachnophobia that he's never told anyone about...")

Sounds good provided it really doesn't contradict anything that has already happened - realistically this means on-the-spot disadvantages will need to be pretty small.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

5) Each session should probably end with a few moments spent planning what the next meeting's stories should be about and which characters will be featured.

It does not have to be on the spot, and might not realistically happen at all - part of the advantage of this style of play is the flexibility it provide during the session to explore plans or ideas that the GM had not thought of. Likewise, the results of a session may lead the GM in new directions that will need some thought, and the GM may want to keep the players in the dark about what is going to happen.

[Walrus]

Some GURPS supplements consider this as well. I can remember Black Ops, though it's 3ed and MA: Gladiators.

So, all is in your hands. For creation speed use appropriate templates, they help a lot even for unusual characters.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

The advantages I see are being less trapped by the 'adventuring party' and therefore less afraid to 'split the party' if that's where the story takes you. Imagine how hard it would have been with long running series like ST: TNG to develop character and story if every bloody week you had to give Picard something to do, Riker something to do, Data and Jordi.... You get the idea. You could never switch to a story that was about one character or even two because you would be freezing out the other players.

I've never hesitated to split the party. In fact, I've run entire campaigns that saw the entire "party" together in one place only in the final few sessions. I expect the other players to take an interest—because the other characters' actions will have an indirect impact on their characters, because all the characters' actions relate to the theme of the campaign, and/or because the other players are good, entertaining roleplayers.

Bill Stoddard

[mearrin69]

I'm running a Star Trek (post DS9-era) GURPS game with two players. Each player has three characters at varying point levels. They both chose to have a 'department head' and two other officers...but they could have chosen to play lowly crewmen if they had wanted. I provided a character creation document with racial templates, new/renamed skills, and details on training and branch required skills. I use this to create Starfleet NPCs as well.

Sometimes an adventure will involve all of them and sometimes only a couple. One player might get two characters into a session while the other only gets one. I have a pool of NPCs (security officers, bridge crew, etc.) that the player can jump into when one of their PCs isn't involved.

Additionally, the players trade off playing the ship's captain every session (I retain veto rights, of course) and we've discussed his personality and goals and such in depth - and the players have brought some valuable input into his development. I always play the first officer (a Vulcan) who serves as my main means of providing in-game input, hints, etc.

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to successfully run a Star Trek game...which is *so* not geared toward traditional RPG party play. It has gone fairly well so far and I'm starting to get the hang of running it. Characters and player involvement is now the least of my problems using the system outlined above...I have a much harder time consistently providing plot and challenges without railroading, shorting out their tech toys in a new and unusual way each week, etc.

Have no idea if that gives you any insight into your problem or not...but I hope it's at least interesting. :)
M

Edit: Oh, and: we 'split the party' nearly every session, sometimes into more than two groups. As in the show, you'll often have a camera on the bridge, one with the away team...and maybe one in Main Engineering or Astrometrics or somewhere else.

[Michael Cule]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I see no problem here, but depending on your campaign there may not be specific characters you can point at as being "core".

I think you can normally say which are 'featured roles' from the set-up. More importantly this rule allows me to give each player a character that is his/hers and that was designed according to their taste and interests. If a character proves less interesting than originally thought (Tasha Yar anyone?) then a pool character could be reassigned.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I would be wary about letting multiple people play the same character - I have seen conflict with this sort of thing in the past. I would permanently assign those characters as they are used, and make sure that you have back-ups - "Well, Tim isn't here this week and Dr. Carstairs is his... let's say he is at a conference and got Dr. Wiglet to cover for him - John can play him."

And I would be wary of creating unnecessary new characters. Not all setups allow us to bring in unlimited fresh characters and I think (hope!) that my players would be mature enough to accept that characters of this level get played by whoever is there. In ARS MAGICA (which is the game with most support for troupe style play) the players have the second level characters (companions) as individual property and the third level and least powerful (grogs) as troupe property. I'm just pushing the idea a bit further.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Might work, although I am personally wary of allowing players to used CP earned on character to improve another. I would treat each one separately.

If I'm going to have pool characters at all then I'm going to have to do some slightly unusual things. There's absolutely no reason to say that character points earned by a player belong to a particular character of theirs. It's a convention.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

This really is a challenge in GURPS, and is ripe for abuse. I think it will fall on the GM to plan this out in advance so that the appropriate characters are ready for each session. Rather than giving them some block of points to be allocated as needed, I would simply be more lenient in allowing the characters to allocate earned CP to reflect that the characters were not yet well-defined.

And that is something that makes more work for the GM and gives less power to the players. Honestly, that's the opposite of the direction I hoped this would take me. I might well just give a player a character sheet with a partly completed template based character and say: "Here, use this as a basis."

(Parenthetically, life would be easier if I could afford a better laptop and a portable printer. Or if all my players had devices they brought to the table instead of just some or if there was a version of GCA for the IPad. Or some combination of the above....)

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

It does not have to be on the spot, and might not realistically happen at all - part of the advantage of this style of play is the flexibility it provide during the session to explore plans or ideas that the GM had not thought of. Likewise, the results of a session may lead the GM in new directions that will need some thought, and the GM may want to keep the players in the dark about what is going to happen.

If I had some idea of where the players wanted to go, my life would be easier. It could probably be done via e-mail though.

Thing is this sort of thing is easier in systems other than GURPS. But the problem is that I like the way GURPS works better than them. So I'm struggling a bit. I think it can be done but it requires some new ways of thought.

Yes, I've split parties in the past (and will do so in the future) but there have been times when I've tried the patience of my players. I reallly couldn't have run my current campaign with scenes cutting back and forth across the Atlantic for six months game time and yet people were getting bored with so much of the focus not being on their core characters.

[sir_pudding]

I've had terrible luck with troupe style play in the past, including one game where the players basically refused to make their second characters and later claimed that I never said they had to (even though the prospectus said it was troupe-style). A lot of people seem very resistant to it. I remember even playing Living Steel twenty years or so ago, which like Ars Magica is expressly supposed to be played troupe style, nobody but me wanted to make the non-supersoldier characters that you were supposed to also be playing and the GM didn't really seem to care either.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I think you can normally say which are 'featured roles' from the set-up. More importantly this rule allows me to give each player a character that is his/hers and that was designed according to their taste and interests. If a character proves less interesting than originally thought (Tasha Yar anyone?) then a pool character could be reassigned.

That is fine, I was just thinking of how campaigns can diverge and the value of characters can vary as a result. It is all dependent on the campaign design.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

And I would be wary of creating unnecessary new characters. Not all setups allow us to bring in unlimited fresh characters and I think (hope!) that my players would be mature enough to accept that characters of this level get played by whoever is there.

Understood, but my point (however poorly made) was that in a campaign where each of 4-6 players has 3-4 characters each there should be plenty of room for redundency, and it should be a pretty rare event that a particular character is so vital that they cannot be temporarily replaced. If the doctor's player is absent, there should be someone else who is a medic. If the sniper is absent, then there should be someone else who is pretty good with a rifle.

I mention this because to me, sharing characters is like sharing underwear - makes my skin crawl, and I would rather just go commando.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

There's absolutely no reason to say that character points earned by a player belong to a particular character of theirs.

I have a hard time separating the player's actions from the character he/she used - it is of course your game, I just do not think I would let someone use points used for their masterful portrayal of characters B and C to build up character A. Again, that is just me.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

And that is something that makes more work for the GM and gives less power to the players. Honestly, that's the opposite of the direction I hoped this would take me. I might well just give a player a character sheet with a partly completed template based character and say: "Here, use this as a basis."

I was thinking more along the line of having the players build a small crop of characters before hand, leaving maybe 5-10cp free to flesh out the character later on if there is a reason to be uncertain. I don't think the GM needs to be any more involved than normal - just give them an idea of what the setting will be and turn them loose! I just think that minimizing the in-game filling-in can move some GM-player conflict from mid-game to pre-game.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

If I had some idea of where the players wanted to go, my life would be easier. It could probably be done via e-mail though.

Absolutely. The only games I have EVER run where it ended where I thought it would are the old D&D adventures where there was essentially only one route to take!

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

A lot of people seem very resistant to it. I remember even playing Living Steel twenty years or so ago, which like Ars Magica is expressly supposed to be played troupe style, nobody but me wanted to make the non-super soldier characters that you were supposed to also be playing and the GM didn't really seem to care either.

I loved the Living Steel setting, but the Alphas never really worked for us, either.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I've had terrible luck with troupe style play in the past, including one game where the players basically refused to make their second characters and later claimed that I never said they had to (even though the prospectus said it was troupe-style). A lot of people seem very resistant to it. I remember even playing Living Steel twenty years or so ago, which like Ars Magica is expressly supposed to be played troupe style, nobody but me wanted to make the non-supersoldier characters that you were supposed to also be playing and the GM didn't really seem to care either.

I have one player who hates having two characters and has now learned to give low ratings to campaigns that call for it. On the other hand, I ran one campaign where everyone had four characters and did just fine.

I manage to diminish problems with "you never said I had to" by holding a separate pre-session where everyone creates characters. If someone only created one character, I would spot that between the pre-session and the game, and tell them that they had to create a second character if they wanted to play. If a bunch of people resisted, I would be delaying the first session till they complied.

Of course, I do tell them in advance how many characters per player, so I feel justified in saying, "You agreed to this when you asked to play in this campaign." But then, I would say you would have been equally justified.