Players randomly trade characters at each new game session

[Adam G]

Anyone have _experience_ with rotating characters between players at the beginning of each session? My group has been playing for just over 20 years, and we have never tried this. I am thinking about kicking off Rise of the Runelords with this approach for a change of pace.

We will put together 5 characters (e.g. a fighter, barb, rogue, wiz, and cleric) with their own distinct backgrounds and personalities, and then rotate them between players in a semi-random way each session. The objective will be to roleplay each character as described.

[Lincoln Hills]

I've never tried it. Although I've read of slightly less extreme experiments, where each player designs a character for another player at the table. I don't know if it will work for long, but if your group's all on board with it, I suppose it's worth a try. Due to lack of character commitment there may be a degeneration into silliness as each player tries to leave his own 'stamp' on the character, but that's going to depend on the group.

[kmal2t]

This is not a bad idea as long as, like said above, you don't screw with the character so the next guy gets something weird to deal with.

I'm not so sure about doing this every session for a whole AP though. Maybe each person gets one of the chars for one level then changes at level up

[Atarlost]

I can't see an upside.

Trading characters around will kill character consistency. This is bad for roleplaying.

Trading characters around will result in painfully schizophrenic builds unless everyone's on the same page. This is bad for both the combat miniatures game and the character building metagame.

I suppose if you're just using pregens with fixed leveling plans it could work, but otherwise you get an improv skit rather than a roleplaying game.

[Phasics]

Perhaps you should ask what your actually trying to achieve with this.

If it just for the hell of it you might find the novelty wears thin pretty quickly.

I've played in a game like this before using the Marvel Heroes RPG system. it works well when the characters are VERY defined, Hulk, Iron Man etc and then it becomes fun to see how different people play known Heroes. I played Colossus with Sean Connery accent and a Creepy Perverted Spider man.

Its fun for a laugh but it rarely leads to any serious or interesting roleplay.

As far as doing it with blank slate characters players like to have ownership over their characters once a campaign has started and forcing people to roleplay a certain type of character may be difficult for them and create less roleplay not more as they remain silent for most of the session.

Might I suggested this instead.

Create a pool of characters double or triple what you need (you can have players put some together for each other too). Then spend an entire session with players picking up various character sheets reading them and then introducing themselves in character. Have some set questions for them to answer in character and some hypothetical situations for them to react to in character.

Then each player votes for each of their favorite characters as played by player X, Y, Z. Tally the votes and you get the character that other players voted they best liked you playing, ties are decided by the player who will play them.

You keep your voted character for the entire campaign so you can make it your own but its chosen for you by what others enjoyed your roleplaying as.