The Campaign: Why Players Play Multiple Characters (& Form Multiple Warbands)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition presupposes that there shall be multiple parties--warbands--operating during a campaign.

The need for the Referee to establish and maintain strict timekeeping accounting and records thereof is a consequence of this practice; two parties can't be in the same place at the same time without the opportunity for encountering one another. (Yes, those rules regarding encounters are as applicable in Player vs. Player as when it is not.)

The game also presupposes that players can, and will, play multiple characters in a campaign. This is easy to explain:

• The rules for recovering from illness or disease, training when a character advances in level, or engages in spell research or item creation imposes costs in terms of mandatory downtime coupled with strict timekeeping, seeking out and signing on Hirelings or Henchmen, etc. all impose costs of time as well as gold or other material demands. That time must be served out, as if imprisoned, and cannot be avoided; this is why it is called "Time Jail".
• A character put into Time Jail is locked into Downtime and becomes unavailable for play until the time cost is paid out. A player that wishes to continue playing at the table during this interval, should it overlap with when the Referee (or a designated substitute) runs play at the table, must play a different character.

But there is another reason for why a player with a playable character may opt to play another: not being in the same place.

A campaign may range further afield than in a specific safe location and the nearby region. If the Referee (or a substitute) runs a session in a location where established characters cannot act, then those players must make play other characters to participate therein- including rolling up a new one.

Regardless of the why, the result is the same: over time, every player accrues a roster of characters. Players want to be where the action is. If their current character can't get them there, they'll make one that can.

This makes the One True Party nonsense we see in later editions irrelevant.

The way to make this phenomenon work for the benefit of the campaign is to do two things.

1. Enforce a policy where each character is a separate and distinct entity until itself. There is none of this MMORPG-derived idea of "mains" and "alts"- and with it the senseless sharing of gear, gold, and other resources (including information) across a player's characters. Globe of Gankcraft is over there; this ain't it.
2. Enforce a standard of player pro-activity for their characters. There should be an agreement on a course of action for a session of play before players show up, and if this can be done without the Referee forcing it to happen so much the better. Successful people do not wait for things to happen; successful characters don't either.

Now that we have a sound policy, it's time to build on this foundation. Tomorrow, we start putting these into motion.