Quote from: S'mon;1073908This would be most practical using just the Basic Rules for 3 of the 4 PCs. At any rate I would recommend not allowing Feats or Multiclassing for them.

Yes, I intentionally chose very straight forward, conventional characters and mechanically will run them pretty vanilla. In contrast I gave them some interesting personalities which is where the real joy of the game will be found, I hope!

Quote from: rgrove0172;1073728I'm about to start a campaign as the only player. I'll be running 4 characters. Anybody have experience running multiple characters? How many? Comments or suggestions?

We had this in our old RQ games, but generally don't have it now.

It is useful if your game has a wide mix of PCs and some might not want to adventure with the others.

We had a strict Chinese Wall system, whereby one PC wouldn't just help that players other PCs for no reason other than they had the same player.

Apart from that, it went very well.

Normally, we had a main PC and a backup PC, if the main PC was busy or didn't fit the scenario. Sometimes, both played at once, but that got a bit complex.

Quote from: rgrove0172;1073923Yes, I intentionally chose very straight forward, conventional characters and mechanically will run them pretty vanilla. In contrast I gave them some interesting personalities which is where the real joy of the game will be found, I hope!

That sounds good.  I don't use Feats or Multiclassing.  Just simple takes on core classes.

Quote from: rgrove0172;1073728I'm about to start a campaign as the only player. I'll be running 4 characters. Anybody have experience running multiple characters? How many? Comments or suggestions?

You mentioned 5e. Have you given any thought to what races/classes the PCs are?

My experience is mostly in the "run two; one as main, one as sidekick/retainer" vein in 1 GM/2-3 player games and we generally found that having one of the characters be on the simple side made things run a lot better than two complex ones (the Essentials Knight, Slayer, Thief, Hunter and Scout worked REALLY well as secondaries; builds like the Champion Fighter who skips feats for ASIs to keep complexity to a minimum would be a good equivalent in 5e).

In your case one thing you really should take advantage of is the opportunity for is tailoring a party with inbuilt connections; think "a noble and his retinue (noble as desired with a fighter/bodyguard, bard/overqualified valet and a wizardly scribe) or "traveling circus (a bard as the ringmaster, the fighter is the strongman, the rogue is the acrobat, a warlock or wizard is the magic act)."

You've got the rare chance to completely control the party's composition and goals without negotiating with the other players so take advantage to go high concept if that's where your interest lies (ex. all the PCs are bards from a different college).

Quote from: rgrove0172;1073728I'm about to start a campaign as the only player. I'll be running 4 characters. Anybody have experience running multiple characters? How many? Comments or suggestions?

DCCRPG has its funnel of 4 0 level characters per person, and I have to say it is fun and it works. When I ran some funnels, I told the unsure players to pick a leader character and all of their other characters would sort of 'mill around' in the background, like so many secondary characters on Lost. But with other systems, I think using hirelings or other NPCs is probably better, because then you can focus your role-playing on being the leader.

Quote from: Lynn;1074087DCCRPG has its funnel of 4 0 level characters per person, and I have to say it is fun and it works. When I ran some funnels, I told the unsure players to pick a leader character and all of their other characters would sort of 'mill around' in the background, like so many secondary characters on Lost. But with other systems, I think using hirelings or other NPCs is probably better, because then you can focus your role-playing on being the leader.

I joined a new group recently and we each played two characters.  What I found was one character became the dominate while the other was no better than a hireling.