I haven’t had that come up very much. In the first contact scenario, the diplomats and the scientists mostly were parallel tracks, and the diplomats mostly interacted with “their” scientists, or the diplomats as a group with the scientists as a group. In Mage, the allies rarely interacted with mages other their “their” mages. When I ran a campaign in the Buffyverse, my convention was that the second character (a Slayer-comparable hero for most of the players, a Scooby for the player of the Slayer) would only be on camera when the primary character was absent; that was more formal than my usual approach.
The one case I can remember was Manse, the campaign with four characters each; one player had chosen to play both the senior aristocrat/sorcerer who was in command of the guards, and the teenage daughter of his mistress, who didn’t know about the relationship and was secretly in love with him. After it came into the open, we had some scenes of that player “talking to herself,” a little awkwardly, but to the amusement of the other three players.
The nearest I’ve come across was a charity auction at a SF convention, where Dale ended up bidding against himself using the voices of Tom Baker’s Doctor and K9. It was very entertaining to watch!
My Transhuman Space Royal Navy campaign has a couple of NPCs who are going to be significant, because they are the non-PC crew of the ship that the campaign centers on. Both of them are based on people I know. One is based on someone at work who none of the players know, so I could use him fairly directly. The other is based on a much younger version of someone Roger knows; I’m wondering if he’ll recognise her someday. I did character sheets for both of them as a way of nailing down their backgrounds and the reasons why they think the way they do.
I was quite surprised when one of them, in the second session of the campaign, popped up in my head with an unconventional but useful idea. I wasn’t expecting her to start doing that for some time, if ever.
When I was running my Discworld mini-campaign, a police procedural set in Lancre, I woke up one morning with the realization that the murder victim could come back as a zombie and go to the police, demanding that they find out what had happened to her clothes and jewelry . . .
(She had been trying to become King Verence’s mistress, and not making any progress, when she was murdered, and naturally the suspicion fell first on Queen Magrat. And naturally, also, Verence would have gone ahead and tried her had the police decided she was the murderess.)
Arthur Koestler quoted Isaac Newton as saying, when asked how he came up with his theories, diu noctuque incubando [by brooding over them day and night]. I’ve found that this works for coming up with ideas for characters and settings; by thinking about them whenever I have a spare moment I get them into my brain to the point where it presents me with things I can use, seemingly spontaneously. This is what JGD was calling “third person immersion,” I think.
Of course Ars Magica is famous for multiple characters per player, and encouraging people to rotate between their wizards, their companions, and grogs. Of course, in order to make all these different character types possible and offer enough ways for characters to differentiate each other, character creation has to offer so many choices it can paralyze a player and take a while. I’ve been used to this concept for a while.
Transhuman settings like GURPS Transhuman Space or Eclipse Phase could get to a point where you may need multiple characters, because you are playing at the limits of what “human” or “sentient” really is, there can be multiple copies of the same personality around at the same time, people operating different robotic shells, people walking around with their AI assistant and intelligent swarm of microbots - do you say people have a bunch of NPC assistants, or do you encourage them to play out the different versions?
I have to clarify that that that scheme does not involve the players ever having to play two different characters at the same time. Rather, the idea was that the adventures should mostly be about the amusing, interesting, dramatic, and comical human-scale encounters a circle of friends in the survey team have in the course of their encounters with exotic human cultures on alien planets, but that on the occasions when the players felt that the issues ought to be or realistically would be taken over by officialdom, the course of the adventure should not pass out of the hands of the players¹.
So each player generated a social scientist (anthropologist, sociologist, economist, human geographer, agronomist, military intelligence officer, etc.) in the Survey Team, a diplomat, a marines commando, and a naval officer with a part of play in space-combat operations. Among this four (or otherwise) each player would have in their stable one of the Head of Survey, the Ambassador-at-Large, the leader of the marines contingent, the captain of the ship, and maybe the first lieutenant or a military intelligence officer. The idea was that if the material of the adventure ever became such as the field academics could not or would not be allowed to handle themselves, then the Head of Survey would take the issue to the big table, and everyone (except perhaps the player playing the Head of Survey) would switch characters. They would hash out the issues among their senior-officers characters and decide on a official action. If that was, for example, to have the Ambassador make representations to some figure in the or a planetary government then everyone except the Ambassador would switch to their diplomatic character. Then if, for example, the diplomatic party were made captive, all the players could switch to their commando characters for the rescue. And then if an orbital skirmish became necessary for the ship to make good a retrieval and safe escape, the players would get to play that out.
There we links and common characters between the four PC parties in the troupe, arranged so that the player who had to represent a team at the Big Table would be the leader responsible for carrying out the orders it received, and so that everyone would get a share of responsibility and command. But I designed the structure so that the spotlight should fall at any time on a group in which each player had one and only one character.
¹ I don’t actually like stories about powerful and rational visitors from an advanced society fixing the problems of a foolish and backward one, especially doing so quickly and easily. But I found that character-players were not convinced that they would never see a way to do so, or that their chain-of-command would never try. A large part of the point of this elaborate structure is to reassure character players (a) that the adventure would never get taken over by NPCs, and (b) that it would be okay to play a bit of a goof-off in the contact team, because they would get to switch to a solemn character for serious problems.
I would have expected the goof-off to be a member of the commando team, at least when they weren’t actually fighting anyone.
That kind of alternation happened fairly often in Manse. We had scenes of the council meeting to discuss policy and resolve disputes; we had scenes of the cadets going to classes or attending recreational events; we had scenes of the guards going on missions or playing the Manse’s variant of lacrosse . . . The only group that hardly ever got together was the servants; there just weren’t many occasions for the head cook for the guard, the distillation specialist for the House of Glass, one of the underground construction workers, and the personal servant of the House of Life’s horticulturalist to spend time together.
But there were crossovers; for example, the horticulturalist was also a player character, so that was a senior aristocrat and a servant on camera together. The legate of the guard was a player character, but so was the tribune, who was one of the cadets, so they had occasion to consult. And of course the mutual attraction of the legate and his mistress’s daughter made some sock puppeting unavoidable.
And the big dance had both the cadet characters and the guard characters in attendance (the dance was for cadets, younger and unmarried guards, and the children of the village gentry, with the aim of letting them look each other over). But I didn’t do a lot of huge crossovers like that.
But your structure seems to fit one of the better formulae for this sort of thing, in that each group has one member who can plausibly be a senior officer and take part in the inner council. Though it might be safer if the Captain were an NPC, to avoid the “one man, one vote” issue (He is the Man and he has the Vote).
Do you think? We haven’t had military conscription in decades. Of course we also haven’t had all that much military-themed popular culture since conscription went away; I think the last widely followed example might have been MAS*H, which was atypical of such shows.
The setting of that games was a heterotopia, and the marines in question were well-paid elite highly-trained long-service professionals whose duties involved military judgement and operations in vacuum. Marine recruits were above average in intelligence and mechanical aptitude, and way above average in impulse control. They underwent 96 weeks of initial training, and the typical marine was a forty-something long-service professional with 156 weeks of intense training and twenty-odd years of experience, a third of it in commando operations and a third of it in vacc suits. Think of an SAS operator who was also a clearance diver and an astronaut. The tropes of short-service semi-skilled grunt infantry don’t apply.