As a spin-off from last week’s thoughts – one element that works well with antagonistic PCs is the concept of ‘temporary’ characters. If you kill off my 12th level D&D elf wizard who I’ve levelled up from 1st, that’s a big thing. If you kill off the elf wizard I came up with ten minutes ago, using something like Over the Edge where his stats are ‘Elf Wizard 5d6′, it’s not as big a blow to me. I don’t have as much time and effort invested in that character.
Future project: A semi-adversarial game where all the players have a high-level main PC, and scads of temporary ones. Your main PC is sacrosanct, but the temporary ones are fair game. (I’ve a Traveller variant based on this idea, where you’re all playing interstellar empires, and game turns are decades apart, but anyway…)
Temporary characters also solve the spotlight time problem. If PC#1 is going to be away from the rest of the group for a long time, then any time the GM spends with him is time spent ignoring the rest of the group. If, however, the GM can give the other players temporary PCs to go along with PC#1, then everyone’s still involved. It skirts the edges of collaborative play without actually growing its hair out and going full hippy. One potential problem: In my experience, temporary characters tend to be played for laughs more than long-running PCs. If I’m only going to be playing Bob the Redshirt for a scene or two, then I’m instinctively going to give Bob some absurd personality quirk or accent to give me something to hang on to.
To drag this tangent in the direction of Grognardia, have I just partially recreated the whole concept of Hirelings? How often did players roleplay their hirelings back in the day?
30/04/2010 at 4:32 am Permalink
Firsthand, our OD&D/AD&D1e group didn’t roleplay the hirelings during the day we were in (1979-80). Very early D&D was famously various from place to place, but my recollection is that early texts advised the GM to keep tight controls on the hirelings, providing a long list of circumstances in which they should desert or rebel, among other things.
I think in addition to playing temp characters for laughs, people might be more “out there” with them in a lot of ways. You don’t feel as bad trashing a rental, right? Then if people start to think they’re having more fun playing the temps, well, that gets interesting. It might feed back into how they play their “real character.”