Rosters as Meta-characters
In Scribbles' REDUX campaign, we've been using character rosters, where each player has a list of (currently) 2-5 characters.1 An ingenious downtime system frequently imposes forms of indisposition on characters, ensuring that there is a regular rotation from week-to-week.2 Additionally, there's extra turnover due to a moderate but significant mortality rate.
I find this very fun, but there is a tendency for a players' characters to smudge together. Whether I'm playing Gertrude Waldgrave, Swordsman, or Paul Luap, Acolyte, I'm going to use knowledge acquired by both characters, & I'm also not going to shy away from having Gertrude's deep pockets cover Paul's debts. And both characters know secrets unearthed by Gertrude's deceased uncle, Brother Waldgrave.
According to some schools of thought, this makes me a shoddy role-player or a meta-gamer, and I won't dispute it!3 But it occurs to me that one could hang a fig leaf by positing that each character in a players' roster comes from a common origin.4
The common origin should:
- Account for why the characters in a player's roster freely share information & wealth.
- Not be so insular/exclusive that it's implausible for a character to join with other players' characters for an expedition.
- Be fluid enough to plausibly generate an endless supply of Veterans, Acolytes, & Mediums.
- Not be so uniform that it feels like one is playing the same character over and over again.
- (If an open-table game) not be so significant to the imagined world that player turnover has a huge impact.
Some ideas that might check all boxes include:
- Minor noble families or aristocratic clans with lots of cadet branches & cousins. (With, of course, a shared coat-of-arms & surname)
- Denizens of a village or town where wealth is shared communally.
- Members of a cult or faith community
- Former members of a college fraternity/sorority
- Veterans of a military unit or sailors
- Delegations from a distant country
- Employees of the same corporation
This idea could be gamified further.5 If rosters map onto noble families, the combined XP could enhance the house's prestige, possible having some effect on a secondary 'wargame' layer. Or characters that accumulated wealth in the dungeon could be sent home to play in an En Garde! -esque society game. For villagers, remittances sent home could allow new characters access to better starting equipment.
To be clear, I see roster metagaming as fundamentally a non-problem, but I do think this could be a fun conceit for a campaign. I'm also fairly sure it's been done before in one form or another -- if so, I'd love to hear about it!6
Actually, one regular player is so enthused about rolling up OD&D characters that he has a stack of at least 30 or 40 index cards ready to go, but he's an outlier.↩
This framing is notable, I think. It seems like most downtime procedures focus on extra things you can do with your (single, primary) character during downtime & often relate to productive or aspirational activities like crafting, training, or domain-building. The REDUX downtime is more focused on generating amusing reasons for why you have to take a different character on this week's expedition.↩
Other players have been more fastidious about compartmentalizing their characters. I had the idea for this post when another player decided not to transfer a magic orb from an inactive character to an active one. Even though my impulse would be to just do it anyways, I do find this admirable, or at least think it adds interesting wrinkles to the game. In this case, we ended up pursuing a different lead that session.↩
C.f. Men & Magic p. 13: "Relatives: The referee may allow players to designate one relative of his character to inherit his possessions if for any reason the participant unexpectedly disappears, with or without 'death' being positively established."↩
Though if it's too involved, it just recreates the problems that character rosters are meant to solve.↩
I have a hazy sense that Arneson's group did something like this for Blackmoor, with players controlling wargame factions and drawing their dungeon adventure characters from the associated roster.↩