Troupe Play in GURPS

[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.

[aesir23]

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.)

[somecallmetim]

Originally Posted by aesir23

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.

That's one of my favorite Pyramid articles.

[Michael Cule]

Originally Posted by aesir23

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.)

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!

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

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.

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.

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).