Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Pretty much none of which is strongly supported in the game. The GM is encouraged to enforce templates (Adventurers, p. 14). Replacement PCs are for dead people (Exploits, p. 87). If players start killing off characters to bring in replacements, that's fine – but this will cost everybody points for the adventure (Exploits, p. 92). The GM who's willing to ignore all that is probably experienced enough to handle the situation with a well-placed guffaw or eye-roll.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Requiring that you only make one character at a time, play every character you ever make and forbidding changes of concept or backup characters (or just making tons of characters for fun) seems to be antithetical to my group's idea of fun. Forbidding pre-campaign trading is the assumed default. YMMV, of course.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

It means after the adventure begins, of course – but during all the events outlined in Getting Ready to Go (Exploits, pp. 13-15), the heroes are safe in town, with whatever stuff they wanted to start with, but free to buy more stuff with remaining cash, scrounge in gutters, beg, seek quests, make deals with sponsors, pursue rumors, etc. See Adventures (Exploits, p. 87) for the general phase structure. This precludes rich PCs being randomly mugged, unless the GM wants town to be something other than the safe haven it's intended to be.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

I often start adventures with an encounter, so I guess I am off script there.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Every group is different! My players have always been big on the "create a unit" approach, so they select abilities and gear collectively, which means a lot of "Character A will cover for Character B" goes on.

On the other hand, swapping indefinite numbers of PCs into and out of the game without ever playing them? Never seen it, never met a group that did it. It might be fun, but if you allow it, it breaks the cash economy no matter how you handle it, because even just parading in infinite Poor guys who drop cheap gear will eventually lead to infinite money. All my rules interpretation changes is how quickly it breaks . . .

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Oh, mine too, but what I have never seen is "and then we will swap gear before the campaign starts in order to optimize based on some rules exploit". The idea that characters can do anything at all active prior to the campaign starting is frankly pretty alien to my experience.
Nobody has ever gone with concept A instead of B, or started a character and then abandoned it for a different one, or made a bunch of backup characters in advance, or anything like that? These are pretty typical for my experience. How do they create a unit without choosing between alternate character concepts in the first place?
I don't really see how, if you assume, as I do, that characters that have never see play effectively don't exist yet.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Oh, people change ideas and concepts all the time. I was referring specifically to your six-step process, which included "Retire the character" as a permitted step before "Then start the first adventure." People can and do create dozens of characters before settling on one! But bringing them into the campaign, disbursing funds, and retiring them isn't permitted. Trading beforehand happens after all characters are final (that is, after the unit is formed) but before I'd allow anybody to retire.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Deciding not to ever play a character seems to be something that people ought to be able to do.

I am not really sure what the difference between trading beforehand under these circumstances and trading as soon as possible in-play is, except that the former avoids the risks of a) having to fight with the gear on your sheet (or lack thereof in the case of Dead Broke) and b) the starting town not having the thing that you want, both of which, frankly, seem to be a pretty good deterrent to making Mr. Moneybags and the Dead Broke Delvers.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

It seems like the moneybag & Dead Broke party idea could be fun, but it's a matter of play style. It's in keeping with munchkinism to do something like that, of course. I remember in the way back days having DMs who allowed swapping gear, but also rolled randomly to see if some of the gear swapping was done to NPCs who subsequently decided not to join the party - or even swindlers who take them for as much as they can get. That made it fun, but risky.

Re: A sack of DFRPG questions!
 

Sure, but then you don't get to say that the other PCs get that character's extra gear and cash. If you never actually play the character, then they were never a part of the group.

(And really, if you disagree and think that it's fair to allow infinite "theoretical" characters to appear, drop their cash, and then disappear, then Wealth really doesn't matter . . . as you're basically okay with PCs starting with infinite cash, all donated by their fairy Schroedinger's companions.)