Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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?

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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

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."

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.

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.

Agreed so far.

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.

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.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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.

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.

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.

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....)

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.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

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.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

One of my all time favorite articles from the Pyramid (vol.2? Online but not PDF) concerned doing this with a league of superheroes.

Each player has a superhero in their own town, but has characters who are sidekicks or allies to the other player's superheros. The only time everyone plays their most powerful character is when the league gets together with the fate of the world in the balance.

So you could play Batman, but when the adventure's happening in Metropolis, you play Jimmy Olsen -- you know that you're time to shine will come when the scene shifts over to Gotham.

I never have gotten a group on board with it though (I'm the only one in my group who likes making characters enough that I'd want to make 5 of them.)

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

The main consideration is how often the "party" -- by which I now mean "main characters" -- will be split up. Another important consideration is how long you expect the campaign to last. Some examples from this thread:

The post-DS9 campaign offers something most of us are familiar with, where multiple threads of an adventure and campaign take place in parallel. This suits long term development of multiple characters rather well, with the "main characters" being department heads and the "secondary" characters being their subordinates. Pool points work well here and are more of a reward to the player than anything else. But since other characters DO have tasks off screen but in (time) sequence, and often in the context of the same adventure, this doesn't seem even slightly objectionable.

Bill tends to run shorter term campaigns. Because of this, splitting parties and having secondary characters seems like it would work well. In general in a short-term campaign, bonus points used for development don't unbalance things the way they can over a longer period of play.

Finally an example from a campaign I'm playing in. Our party got split up. We ended up playing our characters or NPCs handed to us as GM control sheets. In other words, we were supporting cast (or even extras). We received bonus XP for good roleplaying as usual (if we did something good), or just straight XP for our characters. Since this was roughly equal, it didn't alter the course of character development. And since it allowed the other players to do something interesting and be involved in the "subplot" (of COURSE it's a subplot -- MY character isn't involved!), I think it worked well.

All of this depends on the model of the game. I've done it successfully by requiring the players to have 2 characters -- one 150 point, one 100 point -- in a more sedentary game. One player ended up playing his "secondary" character FAR more, but dumped bonus points into his main character. That worked out just fine.

This is a long way of saying that, while you're going a step further than I have, I think that this model works well so long as the players are up for it. Be prepared with NPCs. You might even pregenerate the secondary characters! But most of all: have fun!

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

That's one of my favorite Pyramid articles.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I did that. However the first character making session took so long that there wasn't anymore time, so I decided to run a session with the primary characters on the way the pick up the secondary characters, with the intention of making the secondary characters later as I felt back to back character making sessions would likely lose their interest.

So when I wanted to run the session to make the secondary characters, they basically unanimously balked. At which point I did say, "But you agreed to play multiple characters when you asked to play in this game." They basically said, "Uh, no we didn't." So I showed them the prospectus (which honestly by the time I'm actually starting the chosen game, I find they've basically forgotten about anyway). At which point I discovered that none of them were familiar with what "troupe style" means. So I asked them if they really would rather those secondary characters be NPCs, to which they said "Yes". Which I reluctantly agreed to. Which basically helped doom that game (which is probably one of my most spectacular failures as it was basically a cascade of self-reinforcing failure loops).

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I think the frequency with which sessions happen is going to have an effect on this. If you're playing weekly, it would be fine. If sessions are a month or more apart, you're going to be a lot keener to have your core character involved.

Another approach is just to have multiple PCs per player. The players form teams for adventures from the characters who seem to be relevant, or who would be interested. This feels fairly natural in practice, IME.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

A note on this one. I do award 'pool' CP to the players themselves, to spend however they want, based on their portrayal of NPCs they take on. I give one point per session for taking the Captain off of my hands...more if they do something really great with him. Rewards for playing other NPCs are on an ad hoc basic, based on how much they added to the game. Other CP are awarded to the individual PCs based on their contributions.

One of my players is very interested in role-playing and character development while the other enjoys building up and using skills. I try to spread the points around as best I can but the RP player tends to get more. The 'skills player' tends to get bonus points for coming up with good ideas for workarounds to problems...rather than just rolling under his pretty high skill values. As you might imagine, he plays the Chief Engineer and a skilled flight officer (pilot). His lowest-point character is a Bajoran junior security officer and she's the most interesting, best-developed character he runs. The rest mostly push buttons.
M

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

I'm with Sir Pudding. I've tried troupe style many times over the years, and the problem isn't with GURPS, it's with groups. Some players like it, some get it, and some don't.

Here's what I like to do instead, and even with this I've had iffy results. Players can contribute to the game for extra points. A fully-designed character sheet with a page of backstory for a significant, recurring NPC, is worth a point. Roleplaying the character in those recurring scenes will also be worth a point when it happens. (Write-ups of organizations and governments, artwork like maps and minis are also worth points.) The problem with this approach is that equal effort from different players does not produce equally useable results, and also that some players go hogwild with this idea and get way more points than their peers, which can lead to resentment. The solution to the second problem is to cap the bonus, but I don't know a solution to the first, especially with contributors who think an NPC needs thousands of points in order to be interesting, or conversely one who thinks he needs to experience every crisis ever depicted in General Hospital and All My Children in order to be interesting.

GEF

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

Sounds fun to me! This also works best with smaller groups, I would think. Yeah, I would think that the button pushers would be less fun for me to play unless they could get right into the action and DO something impactful, even if the mechanism wasn't written on my character sheet. But that's my play style -- I don't like secondary characters (except for jack-of-all trades types who may be secondary, but they are ALWAYS involved).

There are reasons for somewhat troupe-like play even in itinerant murdering games/genres. In my recent DF game, I had 3 players: Barbarian, Bard, Swashbuckler. I didn't want to restrict anyone, so I told them that we (i.e., me as a GM and them as PCs) would find whatever roles need filling in game. In practice, though, they ended up with some other delvers of lower caliber. At one point, they recruited a thief (who lived in spite of being built on 75 points -- lucky rolls!), and they were about to recruit a wizard before I suspended the campaign due to RL issues. With extra NPCs running around, I tended to hand them out in combat so that everyone had something to do more than once a turn, and so that I didn't end up running half of the physical bodies in the party by fiat or bogging everyone down while I adjudicated NPC vs. NPC moves. It ended up working out well.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

As I recall you were one of the players in my sad little tale...

Although in fairness you came in after the prospectus.

Re: Troupe Play in GURPS
 

Quite right. I had a PC go into the underworld for a session. In order to keep things interesting, I had the other players run characters who had died. They weren't really into it because I don't think I had properly prepared them. Fortunately, it was a one-time thing. That same group (minus one player, who wasn't even the problem) did just fine in a similar troupe situation, but the campaign was set up that way.

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.