Does anyone have experience with players running multiple characters in Blades? I have a player who’s lurk has been hit with level 2 harm and is pretty full up on stress. He is wanting to sideline his Lurk for a few sessions and run a second character in the mean time, My initial response is to let him and use the Lost entry from overindulging of vice as a guide. My concern is that players may wind up circumventing the recovery downtime actions and just run a stable of characters i I set that precedent.
Any thoughts?
Characters don’t get downtime actions while they’re Lost, so I don’t think it’s really exploitable. He’d save a few downtime actions and coin on recovery, but he’d miss out on several sessions-worth of downtime, coin, and xp on that character. End result is a couple of less powerful characters, I’d imagine.
Plus maybe it’ll turn out to be fun, having a rotating cast.
(I’ve never had a player get Lost, so it’s just my educated guess.)
My Lurk was in a similar position, so he Overindulged on purpose (and got grounded by his momma). So while he’s resting up, I’m running a Slide. Now, the GM did do one thing to temper this option. My new character got only either 7 dots or 5 dots and a special ability to start with. So she’s not as powerful as a normal starting character.
Basically what Steven Dodds​ said. Yes, they may get the benefit of free stress recovery (and maybe healing if you’re inclined) but they’re out of action for a score or two so missing out on earning XP and therefore not levelling up. Life as a scoundrel is tough.You can either live hard and die young or you can take some time out and maybe make it to retirement (which in Blades is when you’re too traumatised by everything to function, rather than reaching a certain age, obviously).
You can (and maybe should) put restrictions on which characters can have downtime actions if players have multiple characters. Discuss with your group to find what works for you.
I had this come up in one of my games, and it was fine. I’ll try and dig up what john said about it….
Just asked John via twitter he says “yep”: https://twitter.com/john_harper/status/900895784698236929
Multiple characters are fine. He said at one point to just have your other character become lost, but I found it an easy out for dealing with stress and healing. Instead, give them a down time action when they get back (you might allow one for every session they skipped, but that can get tricky).
I usually just heal Lost PCs like cohorts. If theyre gone for a long enough time – they just heal the harm. You might be asking yourself “How long is that?” Depends on rows of harm taken (so it’s a number from 1 to 3, like Cohorts harm), and each downtime phase heals 1 harm it circumstances are amenable for it, or 2 if a PC spends a DT action to help.
Sometimes i offer other solutions to make sure I’m not shooting down their fetish for multiple personalities, but that has so far covered it
By page 156, when PCs overindulge and get Lost, they heal all stress (clearing more stress than the PC had is what triggers overindulging, after all) and also heal all harm they had.
If this is a player switching between two characters, then yeah, the character they aren’t playing shouldn’t auto-heal (or get downtime actions), but if their character gets Lost through overindulging, I think they should get what few benefits that confers.
Unless they want to bring a character back early, in which case, I rather like the idea of not returning fully healed of their harm.