Troupe Play in GURPS

[RogerBW]

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.