Gasp...wheeze... storytime... Tell a story of coordinating multiple characters.... I gotta stop trying to beat Raxon. -passes out-

Have you tried using RSS?

I'm just fooling. I lucked into it and thought I'd crack a joke.

That was standard practice in the campaign I played in from 1981 to 1989 (and then revived for my kids in 1998-2000). Every player ran two or three characters of different classes, usually a fighter or thief and a mage or cleric. That way, everyone could melee and cast spells. It made for very big parties that could plow their way through low-level dungeons. I was so used to it that I thought it was normal. When I found out that the usual way was to play only one character, I was surprised.

Well, I had two characters once. I had a pixie rogue with some kind of loophole abuse to let me treat her as one size larger and one size smaller at the same time. So she counted as a small character for the purposes of wielding weapons, and then... diminuative, was it? Tiny? I forget, but two size categories below small for the purposes of combat.

In addition to this, she had dual wielding and the oversized weapons feats, so her daggers were larger than she was. Basically, she could parry anything with her insane dex bonuses, plus circumstantial bonuses, as in the fact she could literally hide behind her daggers, meant she was nigh untouchable. She also too the leadership feat later on.

That was the introduction of my half-halfling jungle giant monk.

They were so much fun to play.

Loophole abuse? I love that stuff! I mostly use it to throw 21 splash weaPons that deal 10d6 cold damage each while I'm immune to cold with 75% fortification. While power attacking with no strength mod to speak of using weapon finesse on a 2 handed weapon.

I ran (still run, occasionally) campaigns for my little brothers. The issue was, there were only two of them, so they would inevitably end up not having some important skill. We eventually decided that everyone should just run multiple characters, which let them specialize more.

Half-Orc Favored Soul of Obad-Hai: carries many implements from the cache of adventuring gear pressed on him by his people as he was hastily sent away. Including 3 bags of caltrops.
Raptoran Scout (with a Barbarian dip): optimized for ludicrous move speed for giggles' sake, with the unexpected consequence that she can literally fly circles around enemy formations, trailing caltrops.

My groups tend to be pretty small, so playing two or more characters at a time is pretty much the norm. I do remember playing a seriously chaotic pyromaniac wizard and a paladin. In our introduction, I joked that the paladin was the wizard's parole officer.

Back in the day just after my brother and I got into D&D, we had the basic starter pack that came with four characters. He was older, so he was the game master and more complicated rogue and wizard. I was younger, so I was the less complicated fighter and cleric.

Happy New Year to you and the rest of your readers! Also, thank you for the link to the new campaign comic.

happy new year! I hope you will all enjoy the fireworks!

Seriously, where do you always find those, DT?

After several adventures we took our wellrounded party into a premade sea campaign of epic proportions (Phileasson Saga for those who know it). The crew of the ship came with a handful of noticable NPCs designed to provide any necessary skill the party might lack due to numbers or such shenanigans. In order to keep things managable and since there were as many NPCs as PCs it was decided that every player should take over one NPC. Because they were basically a wellrounded party on their own most of our characters suddenly became BFFs with their captain ersatz.

I caught up! This is by far my fave Campaign comic. Just have to be careful not to click to the next page when my mouth is full...