The best way to think about it is as regular stars and the guest stars...
The main crew (your players main characters) are the major stars and feature regularly...
However with Trupe play, you can give the players 1 or 2 back-up characters that can be used when their main character is unsuitable...
Fr Example;
Say one of your players is playing Quark... He fun, hes a fine character, but if you were running a high security adventure at Starfleet Command on earth it might prove difficult to justify his presence (not impossible, just difficult), however if the player of Quark happens to have a bright young Academy graduate working at Starfleet command as a reserve character...
Suddenly the universe becomes a little more 3D as some of the incidental characters that they meet and whose paths cross occasionally sometimes for good and bad, become far more capable than your average NPC...
I've GM'd and played in these types of games (well sort of).
In our games, the reason the players were playing two PCs in one game was because two campaigns crossed-over each other in storyline content.
Sometimes, two campaigns merged into one. When that happened the player would be playing two PCs at once, but would then make one inactive and play the other or switch between the two PCs depending on the mission.
It can easily be done on a starship where there are hundreds of officers on board. It's harder when the group is small and tight-knit.
Likewise, my players have dwindled down to two. I've GM'd many games with just one player. Right now, I am in a solo campaign with my brother as the GM. Occasionally another player will join the campaign for a game or two.
The ST:TNG GM screen has a section where it talks about "troupe" style play. Using this method, each player has multiple characters of differing abilities and picks a character each session that will fit in the story best.
Has anyone tried this successfully? Any problems to avoid?
Actually this is a lot fun because it lets everyone get into the game without feeling they are "just standing around waiting for my turn."
The only suggestions I would make would be:
1. Enforce a rule where each player can only play one of his or her character per game session. Something that happend too much early on when we started playing LUG Trek was that players would have all their secondary characters tag along on away missions just to have people with the right skills onhand. Tell them that they are playing one of the "stars" of your Star Trek show and they can from time to time play a recurring character.
2. Talk to them about what kind of game it will be this week. If it will be a shipboard accident that needs to be resolved, the player who normally plays the Security Chief may want create a junior engineer to help out since no ship-to-ship battles or phaser fights are likely to happen.
3. Mention the players' other characters during play so they appear to be real. The secondary or tertiary characters aren't supposed to just wait on a shelf for their turn, they are Starfleet officer just like other NPCs. Don't play them as NPCs yourself because they do belong to the players but if one players says his young doctor would have been involved in this or that analysis say it happened "behind the scenes." Plus this gives a good reason as to why a recurring character wasn't present that week.
4. Encourage them to make their characters very different from their primary so that the other players act different with each character. And this doesn't mean just chosing a different race. A vulcan science officer isn't very different from a betazoid science officer. Likewise a vulcan security officer and a vulcan doctor don't provide much range of roleplaying opportunities.
[This message has been edited by CaptainGonzalez (edited 02-24-2001).]
It started as a scenario where the players regular characters (the senior officers) had been brainwashed. The junior officers (their second characters) discovered this.
The second scenario involved the junior officers investigating a murder on board. They never suspected that it was the Captain (one of their regular characters).
But the junior officers took on a life of their own after that and have become regular guest appearances, with mixing between main and secondary characters.
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Greg
"Calm may work for Locutus of Borg here, but I'm freaked and intend to stay that way."
I'm thinking of running a Klingon campaign that focuses more on h-t-h combat. That's why I would like the players to have bridge crew and boarding party characters. Either that or set the game in the SWU, having the players play on an Imperial ship.
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