Has anyone had players make second characters – either as a result of over indulging or just for the fun of it? I love the idea of troupe style play ala ars magica but I’ve found there is always so much going on that everyone is heavily invested in their first character and not interested in playing additional ones.
I’d love to hear from anyone with different experiences.
I could see doing it if you wanted to coordinate two or more crews or districts. That’s kind of brilliant.
My playing home group plays pretty infrequently, but I had a second character prepped from the start. My plan has always been to bee-line for trauma/ overindulgence/ jail on my Whisper to get the opportunity for experience, then play my Hound for a session while the Whisper deals, then alternate as it makes the most sense. It helped me, especially in the first session, think of my character as a risk-taker and scoundrel. I don’t need to protect him. Even if he dies (which is harder than it looks, although certainly possible) I have someone waiting in the wings.
Unfortunately, Quess still hasn’t traumaed out or overindulged so Tocker Dunvil sits and waits. I even took Tempest to make it easier to blow stress, but then v.8 rolled out. Damn your iterative improvements in design, John Harper!
My dream home game is also a troup-style thing. It might have four or five people with 8-12 characters between them. We’d roll up scores and move faction clocks together in downtime, and we’d rotate GMing regularly based on whose characters want to hit the streets for a score and who has a cool complication for making a score fun. I think it would work really well, but my friends and I need more compatible schedules…
When Harland was lost to his vice, Eric Fattig introduced Jadvyga, who we all loved. Later when Harland was being hunted by the Path of Echoes, Jadvyga was with the crew and from them on, Eric has just been going back and forth between them. Sometimes both it a sessions it’s been great.
Similarly, Hix got held hostage by the Grinders and while they were on the a score with the Lampblacks, Adrienne Mueller introduced Arquo, who was part of the Lampblacks but on the outs with Bazso because of some family trouble. Eventually Arquo left the crew and joined the Doskvol Spectral Society as a provisional member. Adrienne went back and forth between them as well until Hix went to Ironhook and now we only flash to Hix on occasion.
My experience is that players can manage multiple PCs just as easily as GMs can manage multiple NPCs. I’m all for it!
My current group has two players that have 2 characters each, and before they dropped out, a third player also had 2 characters (they are now NPC Expert Cohorts). We also have two new players with only 1 character each (so far).
It’s been working extremely well. My main rules is that when I split up the group, no player can have more than one character working on the same aspect of a job (So for example, when Constance is leading a gang of thugs to break in someone’s front door, Kamali is sneaking in the back to open the safe and steal the cash).
Related. When I was testing my Blades hack for Star Trek last year – I got to test out some troupe style play. In true Ars-style, each player had two PCs, one a bridge character and the other an away team character. The levels of detail felt off with two full blown characters, so I didnt stick with that – I just had them add bridge personnel from their department (aka cohort expert). I wish I had more detail about this because I think the subject is fascinating, but I placed testing on hold to finish Runners in the Shadows
Mark Cleveland Massengale
“The levels of detail felt off…” I’m curious if you could expand on this a little? The detail of characters created, or room for exploration of characters during play or something else?
The players felt drawn to making most of the decisions with the bridge character, and doing most of the things with the away team character. This meant that the bridge character had a lot of wasted detail that seemed to clutter the experience (ie: there was little reason for them to have stress and trauma tracks, load trackers, and the like, when they rarely took action except in downtime – and when both characters could be brought to bear, two stress tracks meant there was little to no danger/drama)
Interesting. That seems like it might be a fun split to explore in something. But I can see how blades is not really that something.
Well, I wouldnt go That far! If anything, it needs tweaking: we played about a dozen session campaign and it was loads of fun.
I just.. recommend using the secondary character rules as usual for that kind of play (experts are just that, the department is represented by a cohort gang), and changing how two PCs interact with one another slightly. That’s basically what I did.
A shared resistance roll paired with tougher resistance is one idea to get around the mechanical issues inherent in the style when used in Blades, and another thought I have in mind is to have cohorts be more closely tied to PC playbooks (and having those represent the groups of PCs we care about, rather than single characters).
I was thinking of a game where you explicitly have a decision making character and a doing stuff character. Like an agent and their handler. I like the idea of a player cursing a decision their other character made. I think you’d have to seriously hack blades do to that, maybe take apart the playbook into two parts, seperate stats out somehow, have the handler characters able to make the score harder for more rewards or some other thing to point handlers and agents against each other but maintain common benefit… I can see that cohorts would be a smoother approach.
yea, so I would use experts, or a second PC the player can switch to. but you could do that! your idea seems fine too and might work better for your needs. 🙂 or mine for something else
I like the idea of a reimagined PC sheet whose actions dots are added personnel/training of a particular type (ala early Blades, when its actions were things like Cutter, Whisper, etc but for a crew)
Yeah, there is a lot to work with! One of the things I’m most excited for is seeing how far hacks go away from core blades. Like when I look at say bluebeard’s bride, dream askew or murderous ghosts – what would a blades hack that’s drifted that far from core look like and what could it be made to do?
yes – these thoughts are clearly brewing throughout the community – and honestly I can’t wait to see what this year brings
The long running game I was in that ended early last year had multiple pcs for players. I had 3 actually. It was alright. I feel like we didn’t get into pc personal stuff enough in general in that game, so it wasn’t problematic. More personal pc stuff would have been nice, in which case less pcs would likely have been better. If I ran a game I’d likely allow a second character after there’s first one has progressed enough to be somewhat flashed out and perhaps afraid of extra stress.
John Dornberger​ protip for fast character switch via trauma: resist everything 🙂 eSpecially with your lowest attribute. With vice it’s even easier, just indulge repeatedly until overindulging