A few years back, I ran an Arcana Evolved campaign, and it was a sort of a Mission: Impossible kind of thing with a rotating cast of characters. There was a common pool of characters, representing every race and class in the game, and for each adventure players would choose appropriate characters (or sometimes just one they wanted to play for a while). It worked really well because they were all new to AE and this gave them opportunity to try out all the classes and races.

I think this idea has a lot of potential in a 4E game, what with new content always coming out. I know that I keep wanting to replace my current warlock with something else as the fancy takes me.

At the begginning of the story and every level or two or appropriate break in the plot, the whole gang gets together (with five players you’re looking at a group of 20). The players talk about what they want to do and the different things that need to be done to accomplish that (ie: We want to stop the invading army, to do that we need to send heroes to rally troops and defend at the bridge, the moutain pass, the main highway and the port).

The players decide which portion of the adventure they want to do and they split the parties four ways, taking the character they would like to play for the next few sessions off to whatever adventure the group wants to play. They then play that character until they all meet up again after that major plot point. The activities of the “NPC” characters (ie: the player characters that are not being actively controlled by the players) gets resolved off screen by the GM (or, I supposse, you could jump between multiple parties to let the group experience different parts of the story) and the GM lets the party know what their other characters had been up to and their outcome.

They then decide what to do next, break up into parties, rinse, repeat. The trick would be keeping the different characters comparible. Off screen characters would need to accumulate XP and magical gear at the same rate as the main characters so there wouldn’t be a power difference that might prevent a player from using them. There’s also the issue of players not knowing how to play their other classes if they spent the first five levels playing a fighter and then tried to switch to a sorcerer.

It worked out really well, and our DM even let us make a kind of “home base” for our adventuring group in the city. When we got two other people to join the group, the one guy retired his other character, but the DM let me keep mine and just say what I wanted her to be working on within the city while the rest of the party was off adventuring. At about 6th or 7th level, I switched characters, and gave the DM a plan about what I want my other character to do while the secondary party is off adventuring.

Having a pool of characters like this is important, and because I’m only sticking to two, I’ve had decent chances for character development as well, and I intend on keeping them for the entire course of the campaign (if they live that long).

I think it is perfectly fine to introduce new chars to the campaign without stopping it and starting a new thing and it is also perfectly fine to create chars with higher level (DMG teaches how for a reason, right?) if that is consonant to the players fun. The “Say yes” philosophy is really an evolution to role playing because it gives an active part to the players in creating the major story and can even make they want to DM eventually.

Though I hadn’t really planned it that way, having this in the campaign world would make switching out heroes relatively easy… Just head back to the guild and trade out PCs at the end of the adventure.

Another option is let one of the Hench-folk step up to bat, perhaps revealing abilities previously hidden. The “Main” PC is still there, just faded into the background while Henchy gets his groove on. Once the “7-adventure Itch” runs it’s course, the Follower goes back to being just that, a follower, and the main PC steps back to the fore.