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So I have lots of ideas floating around in my head.

Most of these ideas revolve around a 5-act Dark Heresy Campaign that stretches across 5 planets, the interior of a two small starships, and a space station. It's ambitious. It also involves 6 characters.

Small problem - only 4 players.

Now three of the people in our group, including me, have an ongoing Warhammer Quest campaign going. Now Quest is obviously far less complex than Dark Heresy, but each of us is controlling 2 characters each, with me acting as Game Master as well. In this case I'd be acting as GM and not playing any characters, and the other four would be playing the 6 characters.

For anyone with experience playing this game, would it be realistic to play 2 characters at once? I'm thinking the pairings would be:

One player plays a Psyker.
One player plauy an AdMech dude.
One player plays a Priest & Guardsmen
One player plays an Arbite & Scribey-Type Person

This achieves a couple of things:

1. We have more characters to play around with.
2. The person who gets the Scribe isn't stuck with a non-combat weakling for the whole campaign while everyone else is off killing Greater Daemons and Titans with their bare hands.

But is a feasible?

Interested to hear your thoughts.

Hmm.... I've had mixed results with regards to players with multiple characters at the same time over the years.

I'll assume seeing as you all play together already your group will be dicks about this and you'll avoid the " this character sells all his stuff and gives all his money to the other character and always jumps in the way of bullets" that can ruin this.

But... in my experience this can cause problems if the team ever have to split up -- as you can wind up with 1 player with two characters having to roleplay both at the same time. It's quite odd to hold a conversation between yourself. .

Also, inter character conflict is a fairly key part-- even if it's due to madness or possession-- of the DH game in my experience, and you might ruin the risk of the 2 character players "ganging up" against the 1 player characters.

Biggest problem I've found with this overall is normally 1 character out of the pair becomes favoured and the 2nd one becomes just a supporting character.

...so with that in mind I would suggest :

Either full on embracing this : get rid of the guardsman straigt away and just give the ad mech guy ( for example) a combat servitor or two. Gives them the muscle they'll need and avoids any problems with character development and gives the player something to do in the combat as well.

Or maybe rotate the control of the spare characters from sesssion to session, or keep one of them at least as a GM controlled NPC. IN my experience, especially in DH it's well worth having at least NPC with the party to help steer them.

Only other thing I can suggest :

Years back I ran a cmpaign and every player had 2 characters ( 3 in the group ) each player had one fighter/warrior character and 1 tech/support character who was in constant contact with the fighters by plotdevice communications. Each techie character was assigned to a different fighter so they wouldn't have to talk to themselves. This way the figters could go into the dungeon/whatever and still be advised and aided by the smarter but crap in a fight brainy guys. Worked quite well.

Think I stole the idea from Batgirl/Oracle comics.

Migt be able to bend that concept perhaps ?

Be interested in hearing your campaign ideas though.

Depends on the maturity of the RPers. If they are able to avoid the traps mentioned above (i.e. the Adept gives all his money to the Arbite, etc) then it could definitely work out.

Personally, when GMing a smaller group that needs a few more, I tend to use NPCs to fill the void. I generally make them so that they don't take the spotlight away from the PCs but simply help to fill any skill set holes that the PCs may have.

One thing I would suggest though - if people are potentially going to play 2 characters, either have everyone playing two or no one playing two, just to keep things fair and even.

Just my 2 thrones.

-Tyr

On the plus side, killing off a character can be just as dramatic but not quite as costly with two. I had this going in a DnD campaign and the secondary character's passings were heavily mourned by the primary ones. Nice and heavy sessions, those were

In my experience roleplaying, multiple-characters per player works well in some situations, and not others. It really depends on the flavour that you want your campaign to have.

Multiple characters work great if you're running essentially dungeon crawl games. More characters is more combat power. They don't need personalities.

They work ok if you are running solve-the-puzzle campaigns (more skills to gather data, but less player minds to solve the puzzle.).

They work poorly if you're looking for more role-playing and less roll-playing. Most people cannot actually separate into two personalities - as reds8n says, one becomes the character, and one is just a tagalong. It's not even so much about overt actions, like one character giving possessions to the other, it's just that one will be subsidiary.

At that point, it's almost better to have the GM handle the extra characters as NPCs that will do what they're told (within reason), and let each player focus on their one PC.

I would say have the extra two characters as GM-controlled NPC's. Then, if (when) someone dies, they can pick one of the NPC's instead of rolling up a new character and having them join in (possibly at an inoportune moment).