Playing with multiple PCs in 3.5

[Trey Bright]

So I played a game a while ago where the DM had me and the other players all make multiple characters. We made three. I made a sorcerer/pyromancer, a rogue, and an artificer. It was a lot of fun!! Ever since then though, I haven't met another DM who'd be willing to do the same sort of thing. What are other people's opinions on this sort of thing? As a DM, would you be willing to run a game where all the players could play 2 or 3 PCs? As a player, does this sound fun to you?

[Falontani]

I do it generally with one to two players. But sure, why not?

[Telonius]

I think it would be best in small groups, and with campaigns that are more hack and slash than roleplay. High-level combat tends to bog down no matter what you're doing; it would take forever to resolve a round if a standard 4-player party had 12 characters to manage. That also makes more work for you as the DM, since you'll need to manage more monsters to keep things interesting. (A single bad guy against a party of 12 is going to end up as chunky salsa inside a round).

[BowStreetRunner]

I've played in a game where players had only one PC at a time, but multiple backup PCs and could switch out between adventures as desired. All PCs belonging to a player received the same XP and the ones left behind received WBL equivalent to the PC that was played (part in random treasure and the rest in gold).

I've also played in a game where each PC had one character that was their own and they made all of the decisions. The party then had additional characters that belonged to the entire party, not just one player. The group had to decide for those PCs as a group, although the 'decision' was generally to let one player or the other run them for the session. Those secondary PCs also had some general rules they had to follow, based on the idea of Supporting Cast from a movie or TV show. So they followed rules like 'don't speak unless spoken to' unless the issue under discussion specifically related to their specialty and in combat 'always attack the nearest enemy who poses a threat' (ignoring incapacitated or non-combatant enemies) unless their specialty was something like sniping or healing.

But in most of our games once you got past about 4 or 5 characters in play at the same time things started to bog down. So you either arranged it so that they weren't all in play at the same time or so that some of them followed simple rules that made it less likely they would do anything to drag things out.

I've seen threads out here about groups of 8-12 players getting too complicated; groups where all of the cohorts, animal companions, familiars, mounts, summoned creatures, and so forth made things too complicated; even groups where the sheer number of NPCs bogged things down too much. In general, the most common complaint in those is that players have to wait too long between one turn and the next though. If you have multiple PCs and they don't follow each other back-to-back in initiative order however, this may not be as annoying. Between Sir Hackenslash's turns you get to run Castalot the Great's turns somewhere in there, so maybe it's not going to feel as sluggish that way.