Forums » RP Discussion » Thoughts on playing multiple characters?

This has been on my mind for a while, and I wanted to see if anyone else has put thought into this.
What are your opinions on players controlling multiple PCs?
The way I see it, as a GM I might control up to 20 NPCs in a campaign, so why should players be limited to just one character? I feel that giving them the opportunity to write up a new character sheet and introduce them into the setting allows players to experiment with a more diverse cast of characters, which has widespread consequences for the rest of the campaign. There are more player/NPC interactions, more tensions and relationships within the group, the world becomes larger and more storied as a whole.
Would you allow multiple characters per player in your game? How would you manage it?

In a fairly large chunk of my freeform RPs, I play multiple characters (and so will the person I'm RPing with). When it comes to the reasoning why - you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. When a RPer plays multiple characters, it's not unusual for them to be friends or family. And this gives them a grounding in the world and opens up possibilities for more interactions and relationships.

From a technical point of view I pick the character who gets the spotlight of the post from the dropdown menu to make the post. I also generally write fairly long multi-para posts, so it's hopefully fairly obvious who is talking at the time.

Obviously, this isn't an approach that would apply to every single RP genre or every single writing style. But for wide-reaching, adventure style RPs, I think it's a very good way to build up your 'cast' number without also having to bring in additional RPers.

When I GM tabletop it really depends on a few factors. The first of which is the players themselves. While I never say they can't switch between new characters if you want to change things up, I unfortunately need to keep in mind the ablity to responsibly handle playing multiple characters. I have had some players who wanted to use it as a way to be more powerful or to do more in a game, which tends to throw the balence when one player is doing everything and others who might be a touch less outgoing or newer to the idea of RP sit back and quickly grow to think of the activitie as rather dull.
The idea of party balence always needs to be kept in mind too. If you have three players who are meant for a small dungeon party and one who has taken 100 followers they want to use as a trained army and March on the north... Well you have an outlier who might upset things.

However, in online RP when there really isn't a designated GM but rather a Cooperative way of telling a story having people play multiple characters make sense. I'm of the mind of having always thought of NPC's as characters. Many of my characters started out that way. Because while many might just want to think of the old bartender as'tbe old bartender' they do in fact have a story. You can't live your life in a room with nothing and then come out and start tending a bar and have no background, even that life spent in one room is a story.

So, my overlying thoughts on playing multiple characters happens to be the circumstances surrounding really do play a big role in whether or not it should be happening. In writing it makes a lot of sense, and takes a burden off of one person having to play so many roles or everyone needing to figure out how to keep a story exclusive to only two or three single played characters. Which doesn't really make sense when you think about how many interactions one person might have in a day. So if there is to be any sense of realism then it's only logical to play multiples. but it should never be expected as not everyone can handle juggling the mines of more than a few characters, which is perfectly understandable especially if they are newer to roleplay.

Based on the new players' intros as they come into the RP servers I'm involved with, I was actually wondering if this was becoming a new norm.

I'm only speaking as a player who engages in player-to-player interactions, but in the past multiple characters weren't mentioned specifically, at least not as far as I remember; like, maybe it wasn't a big deal if you wanted to play them or anything, but now I'm seeing it crop up. "I'll be playing at least a couple of characters and I'd like that from my partner, too," usually with an "(although that's not absolutely necessary of course)" clause attached.

So is this just something people are becoming more comfortable with? Is it becoming, like, an expectation?

I absolutely don't mind if other people want to play more than a single character at once, but I'm admittedly a little concerned about my ability to keep up, haha. While I might be able to handle it given some time to adjust, I'm already really pokey with one character on my plate at a time. Also, speaking honestly, some of my concern might be coming from the possibility of having to write more. I always feel like I'm hogging "screen time" or something, so the longer anyone has to linger over my posts the weirder I feel about it.

Another factor for tabletop gaming, in my experience, is how likely the players are to metagame. One of my pet peeves with players when I'm DMing when they're heavy on metagaming. It takes the right player to be able to have several characters and keep them totally independent, unless their backstory lets them have a little more freedom with that.

One of the rps i'm currently in there's literally only 3 of us left playing. 3 players, each playing a good dozen characters each. Heck, even when we had other players (2 left) they only played 3 or 4 to our dozen or more. It works great because it allows us to switch things up within the game, so nobody gets bored of just playing one guy talking to one or two other guys. (I have 11 characters in this rp, plus a few npcs and 'special guest appearance' sort of characters who wander in for an episode or two, then leave again once their role is no longer needed lol. You know kinda like Q in Star Trek? Just pops in for an episode or two, but otherwise isn't really present or part of the main story in any way)


Prior to this, in another long running rp almost everyone had multiple characters for much the same reason. We'd rest characters for a bit when we felt their story had been told and had no more current inspiration for them, introduce new ones as we felt inspired and so the story evolved, kinda like a soap opera does where old characters leave or die and new characters come in. Characters DID die, it made everything a little more high stakes knowing characters could die and wouldn't just come back with some contrived mechanic. The owner of the site had a great rant about it "dead is dead is quite very dead!" she'd yell. I still yell that sometimes hahah.


I've never done it with a gmed dice style game though. I think it works amazing in a free form rp but it could be pretty tricky to keep track of in something with actual game mechanics. So many stats to keep up with. Still more power to someone who wants to try, I mean why not?
I have been in a game once where we had a few characters generated (Dark Sun) but the actual game reason is because the mortality rate is so high you need a backup. But if I remember rightly, we flitted between two stories anyway. Presumably eventually they'd all meet up but it was kinda like playing two separate games set in one world, it was a bit odd.

As for npcs, maaaan, i've had a few npcs become actual characters too! Why do they do that to us man?! you create them to just serve a basic role, get players from one place to another or give some background or info and bam... they become interesting and you fall in love with them. Bah.
Curse them!

But yeah, I usually end up playing more than just one character because I can't help it. I mean, I loooooove two people just talking in a room but eventually the scene needs to move on and an actual story has to be told. And in most stories, that means other people. Contacts, friends, random others who might join the group for a while, might offer help, might be antagonistic but whatever the case help to drive the damn plot along and create a slight change in dynamic to shake things up a bit. Variety is the spice of life right? These days i'm not so good at just playing ONE character hahaha. I've got too used to thinking as 11 separate people. Oops?

I actually hadn't considered the implications for freeform rp, but the style really lends itself to playing a cast of characters. I can see myself trying this in future roleplays in this community.

Well. That's given me a lot to think about. I can see powergaming with multiple characters becoming a serious issue, particularly since it allows a small number of the players at the table to dominate the majority of the gameplay. There are a couple of ways I can think of to work around it:
The most obvious one to me is to encourage the new character to pursue a different agenda. Keeping the players characters apart could serve to mitigate some of the overwhelming advantages they have, as well as avoiding the awkward situation of having to talk to yourself in character. Maybe the new PC is an antagonist to the existing characters? Or another adventurer with loosely parallel goals?
The second strategy to put in place is something I already consider to be my duty as GM. That means tailoring the story to my players. They wanna raise an army? Cool. Who am I to stop them? Anything I had planned for the small five man party just went out the window cause that's not the kind of game my players wanna play anymore.
On a closing note, I think your bartender analogy is going to stick with me for a while.

I was DMing a group where the players decided they really wanted to stay in a village they'd saved from Generic Lvl 1-3 Goblin Threat. So they became guards in a town. A small, sleepy hamlet. For FOUR sessions. 16 hours of on-the-fly DMing a group that decided to do... pretty much nothing but track down missing goats and fight a grifter in the tavern.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Meanwhile, the minor baddy who had been working with the goblins had spent those weeks gathering more and more forces, since the party opted not to pursue that particular thread.

Oops.

I'm starting to think we might have done the same thing to the gm in another campaign I'm playing in. At least we uncovered a slavery ring and he's a good sport about it. Oops.