Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

And left shortly after. If I'd realized it was a troupe setup I'd've been glad to contribute more to troupe resources, but that wouldn't have solved the problem of life getting in the way. Too bad we don't get paid to play GURPS.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

That's very, very neat. I've also seen the suggestion that each player in a supers campaign should also create and play a supervillain. Which leads to an instant Rogues Gallery!

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I was thinking of this for one of my weekly groups.

With multiple PCs you're dividing up the oppotunities for play and advancement among them. It helps if you're pooling the player's earned character points but not so much, methinks.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

This is a good answer to an entirely different question.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I think that the first thing needed is a consistency of expectations: if some of the players aren't buying into the idea, it's unlikely to work. So the time to do this is probably at the start of a new campaign.

There are two ideas here that are perhaps usefully separable. One is the troupe-style play that has a large pool of characters who can become played at a moment's notice. The other is the develop-in-play idea of having a fuzzy block of points that can be reified when needed.

Taking the latter first, I think there are some axes I'd want to define - blocks of advantages and disadvantages that are mutually exclusive (for example, a character's degree of social eptness, ranging from Smooth Operator 4 to Clueless Loner). When a relevant situation comes up, the character's position on that axis has to be set, and it's then locked in - which is more or less what Michael suggested, but it also locks out the other positions. So someone who's shot a bad guy when it was needed, but felt bad about it afterwards, probably has Pacifism (Reluctant Killer); she isn't then going to develop Bloodlust in a later adventure without a major change in personality.

Looking at the more general troupe style, I think I'd want to know I was in a campaign with legs; unlike John Bell in the post you linked, I don't tend to "get bored of" a character (and in GURPS there are always new interests a PC can develop; I had a Laundry pathologist who was a hobbyist martial artist, but found that training and pain was a good way to cope with the things he saw, and over the course of the campaign became quite serious about it). If I'm going to get less time for my character than usual, I want to know that it'll be going on for long enough for me to do the development that's a big part of what I enjoy about gaming.

Awarding points effectively to players rather than to characters seems as though it ought to work; it has shades of the Amazing Engine, but let's not worry about that. I think it's worth, as you point out, making sure that pool characters improve too.

What this does, of course, is put a premium on unspent points. I think it might be worth being moderately rigorous about this: player points are handed out at the end of the session, and must be assigned immediately to a specific character (either one that's been played by that player that session or that player's core character). They don't have to be spent straight away; if a non-core character has spare points during a (subsequent) session, they can be used for reification as discussed above.

If one's going to take the televisual model, it might be worth taking it further. As was pointed out, a lot of shows will split the principals into an A plot team and a B plot team, who meet only occasionally during the episode; one could do this explicitly to get all the core characters some stage time during a single session, even if they aren't actually in touch with each other most of the time. (I find that a four-ish hour session usually contains about as much plot as 1-2 42-minute TV episodes...)

You would of course need players who enjoy creating GURPS characters and are reasonably competent at it, because you'll need an awful lot of them.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

Borrowing from the rather obvious reference for this topic (Ars Magica) - you could always have most character advancement coming from study and training (for which, GURPS has quite functional rules), with the bonus points for actions in play being cut right back to the odd point here or there for really cool accomplishments, and GM awards of Contacts, Favours, Reputation and the like as looks appropriate. So characters who get mixed up in adventures wind up famous and well-connected, but those who don't may actually get more skilled - creating a nice tension in deciding whether you really want your personal favourite character to go out or stay home.

The snag is, of course, the book-keeping - already a small bind with the training and study rules, made substantially worse if you've effectively got several characters per player.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I've written a little bit about troupe play in an upcoming book.

And technically, my current DF game allows for troupe play but no one does it - everyone either has one PC or has one PC and some standby PCs they haven't bothered to use.

I'm a little more experienced with multi-PC campaigns. My adaptation of Yaquinto's Pirates & Plunder for GURPS shamelessly stole their multiple PC rules and adapted them. I let people make something like one 100 point PC, two 75 point PCs, and as many 50 point NPCs as they wanted. The NPCs were technically group NPCs, but the creator got priority on playing them. Since the plot was escaping prison and meeting up with fellow pirate crewmen, it made sense that the players often met people they knew really well - because they'd generated them.

I also forced blind selection on them - I shuffled all three of their PCs (75, 75, and 100) and handed them one each. That was the guy they started with. They could find the others later, and since the game was post-disasterous battle they knew I'd roll on the Mass Combat Survival and Glory tables for them. So sometimes they got a PC or NPC with extra damage, or the social scar of witnessed cowardice, or even just found out the guy had died before play began (shades of Traveller!)

It was a lot of fun, although that specific setup doesn't work for all types of multi-PC and troupe play situations.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

Actually, there's at least a third idea: That you can run a campaign where each player has multiple characters, and different characters come into play in difference scenes or sessions. I've run a campaign on that principle, where characters were not substantially developed in play, and where player characters were uniquely assigned to specific players from the outset.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I haven't done this in GURPS, but I have done some impromptu trouping.

In one case, running Cartoon Action Hour, I had planned a climactic battle for the group, but only 1 of the PCs wanted to participate (and climbed a T. Rex to do it), so I whipped up quick characters for the other PCs to play in this battle while their regular PCs went safely on their way. Inspired by this idea, a number of the players decided to create their own minor PCs that let them try out something else for a session or two.

Playing in a friend's (rather dramatic) D&D game, the party got divided and some of the characters were called upon to take part in a divine trial to determine the fate of a particular soul. Those of us who did not have PCs on the scene were invited to play witnesses in the trial, giving testimony from varying sides.

In my current OSRIC megadungeon campaign, I am using the rules for training times and costs. This means that every character has to take some downtime at some point, but not always at the same time. So I've been encouraging the use of "alts" (to borrow an MMO term) so that each player can continue to play even if their "main" is unavailable. It's also handy in case of character death, as they have character already rolled up (and maybe even with a level or two). This does require keeping a campaign calendar to keep things straight.