Troupe Play in GURPS

[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.