I actually went to a session zero for a planned astrology-themed campaign where there were two antagonists who alternated between being controlling a PC and being the DM.
The players wanted neither of them to achieve their goal, so whichever demiurge was in flesh mode would be helping the other PCs to counteract the places of the other pc/dm.
We tried to figure out how to actually make it work and said “yeah nah”.
I actually did this once, only the good personality was a pacifist healer who was a liability in combat due to her aforementioned pacifism and her oath to help anyone who asks for it occasionally helping our enemies, and the evil personality was a sociopathic battle hungry sorcerer who just wants to cause as much mayhem as possible.
Mechanically speaking, the evil one surfaces in high stress situations (And even then, I have to fail a con save for it to take effect) and I automatically revert to the good one upon falling asleep or otherwise losing consciousness in some way. I ran all of this by my dm to make sure it wouldn’t screw over the party too much or be too powerful. It was my favorite character thus far.
Did your party feel the need to knock out your character from time to time?
At lower levels, this problem was quickly resolved by a simple sleep spell. By the time sleep fell off in terms of usefulness, character development had left my evil side with a sort of begrudging respect for my allies. (though I still didn’t care if they just so happened to be within splash damage range) By that point it was more of a mixed bag type of deal. The evil form was undeniably effective at nuking whatever threatened us, but couldn’t be trusted to handle delicate negotiations. The good side would outright refuse to help in battle, but was a superb utility party member. Because of how the mechanics worked, being evil was only a temporary problem that would resolve itself as soon as I take a rest, which obviously I would need to do to get my health and spell slots back. So to answer your question: yes at first, but eventually no.
I encourage you to try Everyone is John then.
That sounds like a blast
That’s … actually a pretty good pitch. I think I would also split the character in combat to avoid having one player be idle for several hours or even sessions in case a very long boss fight happens.
Agreed, give a chance to flip at the beginning of every turn, since that’s when reactions and a lot of 1-turn effects end.
Also, to further reduce the chance of one player holding the character too long and to add a little fun tension: instead of a coin flip, in order to take over, the player not presenting makes an unmodified DC10 check that decreases by 1 with every failure and resets on a success.
Also, to further reduce the chance of one player holding the character too long
If two players want to copilot a character that shit is on them to figure out. If they’re disagreeing often enough about who should pilot when then it’s gonna be a drag and shouldn’t be done.
Also makes sense that in higher stress situations like combat, they’d be fighting for control more frequently than when they’re chilling in camp.
Might be fun to add a check to it. Maybe something akin to a concentration check that they have to roll when they take damage to hold on to their connection to their patron. Failure means they flip.
This sounds like a fun character. They even balance it out by not allowing the two classes to operate at the same time so it’s not OP.
It sounds like the character has the same total level as the rest of the party, but can only use features from half of those levels, so it’s going to be underpowered to the point of unplayability.
Yeah, either give both the level or—IMO the better option—the GM can just give them level-ups twice as often. More work for the GM of course.
Just have two character sheets. Share equipment and at least the same constitution score so you can share hit points. It’s a few extra hit points than the Warlock should have but also it’s a pretty unique scenario. As long as they aren’t trying to cheese the system it would work fine.
Is there a name for this trope of cramming really wacky, difficult, high spotlight, stuff into a game like DND that doesn’t especially support it?
I usually feel bad because I want to encourage creativity, but I also don’t want this guy to have 80% of the table attention while Bob the Fighter and Joy the Rogue are playing by the numbers.
Main Character Syndrome
I ran a game for my kiddo and their friends and my kiddos character was similar, they had found a bunch of bottles that had different colored liquids in them.
Character was an artificer/warlock who was a refrigerator repair man named Sam Sung. Self built mechanical armor that was a mini fridge and they stored the bottles inside. Each bottle was the essence of a divine or demonic being that became the “patrons” that were constantly fighting over the character. Basically the character ways had 12 different voices telling them what to do. Best part was kiddo was constantly drinking from the bottles.
Limiting skills and abilities to only one class of a multiclass character at a time is going make them fall behind very quickly.
As a DM that is my only concern, love everything else!
That and the changing every in-game hour. I’m rarely tracking time down to the hour, so it would either slow things down if they try to make any kind of scene out of it, or we’re just going to gloss over multiple changes, potentially making the whole thing moot. Then you get into a dungeon and someone might be locked out of “their” character for a large chunk of playtime.
Tracking who controlled for longer to determine the next level up sounds pretty tedious too, but I guess that would be the players’ problem to sort out, not the DM’s. I would worry that it may be an unforeseen detriment to their enjoyment though.
So would the character have to carry two sets of gear and change with each personality switch? Would the warlock even have the strength to haul around a paladin’s armor and sword?
On edit: And how about changes during combat? Even with a bag of holding, the paladin would have to either fight without armor and a proper weapon or fall back and equip. The warlock would be immobile until he could drop the paladin gear. In either case, they’re dropping loot on personality changes during battle. Disclaimer: I’m going off old-school Baldur’s Gate and I’ve never played table-top, so I could be completely wrong about all of this.
In 5e, if they took their first level as Paladin, they would gain Heavy Armor Proficiency. Having proficiency in heavy armor would allow a normal Lockadin to cast their Warlock spells in armor just fine. They also both heavily favor Charisma, and if the Warlock took Pact of the Blade or Hexblade, they wouldn’t even need strength for melee.
That’s a normal Paladin/Warlock though, with this weird hotseat play they want to do, their self-imposed rules might not let them even use the other class’ passive features, which could get awkward.
Wouldn’t that character get super nerfed fast? Even at an even split of class levels you’ll be half the class level of the rest of the party, with only hp/proficiency keeping up.
Sometimes it’s just about having fun.
French rpg bloodlust is famous for God Weapon having their own urges but not being able to indulge them without a human bearing the weapon.
Leading to the poor human getting some power based on what the weaponk let them do, while having a weapon begging them to indulge in violence, lust or any other awful sin.
Having a player having the weapon and another one the bearer open the road to pretty interesting roleplay
So… Everyone is John? Dnd players keep reinventing the wheel and patting themselves in the back for it.
Sounds like a fun idea, but I can’t imagine sitting there for an hour watching another player play for you would be all that engaging. Especially if you get a few bad coin flips in a row, oops, now you don’t get to make any decisions for 3 hours.
What if one player kept whispering in the other’s ear?
Even worse it’s an hour of ingame time, which can be over in five seconds in the real world or almost an entire session depending on what you’re doing. I would think flipping every session would be a better chance at making this work
I think you could add a constitution saving throw against suggestions from the other voice in your head to keep things engaging.
Surely that would be a charisma save, possession is like the only use for charisma saves!
I think if I was going to do this I’d come up with some basic mechanics for the one not in control to act as a ghost on the other one’s shoulder. Let them use a limited selection of their abilities, see and hear what’s going on, speak exclusively to the other player, and influence the in-control one’s dice rolls a little
Eladrin, basically
