Every game group occasionally has those nights when one player can’t make it, but everyone else still wants to play. Usually, the character of the missing player goes temporarily AWOL or gets run NPC-like by the gamemaster. This week one of the players in our Pathfinder group (my girlfriend Katie, to be precise) will be gone, so I pitched a radical idea to the gamemaster: why don’t we all switch characters for one night? If one person doesn’t get to play her character, no one gets to play their own character.
About 90% of you are probably looking at me like I’m an even bigger freak than usual, and I admit that this would only work for certain groups with a lot of trust. Most of the folks in the group have been friends for years, and we’ve been playing this game since March so we all know each others’ characters pretty well, so I think we could pull this off. I see a lot of benefits. First, so long as everyone can take a joke, it would be fun to riff on each others’ characters, and each others’ play styles. Running jokes, in jokes, habits, and so forth will likely abound. Second, you’ll get to see how another player views your character; they way they run your character is how they see your character, and that could be very useful feedback. Finally, they might have some ideas about the character that you’ve missed, some thoughts on using abilities or even character bits that you could incorporate later.
Of course, there will be basic ground rules. This does require trust. No one can do anything to try to intentionally harm the character they’re playing. And any choices that the original player doesn’t like can be retconned out later.Overall, though, it could make for an interesting change of pace and/or team building exercise for the group. You don’t even have to wait for a missing player to try it.
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