I'm wrapping up my Incan-inspired D&D campaign, and I have two settings in development - Middle Earth and Murderbot (from the novels by Martha Wells).

In both the sources, there's a distinction of "big heroes" and "little heroes". In Lord of the Rings, you have the hobbits Frodo and gang right alongside epic heroes like Aragorn and Legolas. In Murderbot, a SecUnit is a superhuman construct that is superior to humans physically as well as in many mental tasks (though not socially) - but a party will probably have both SecUnit characters and human characters.

For my Lord of the Rings one-shot, I used standard Savage Worlds rules to create both little heroes and big heroes. Luckily, Savage Worlds has a lot of options for a viable support character that is lucky and spirited without being overtly powerful.

But I'm considering if I should have some variant rules to make little heroes easier to create and play.

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Have people had successful games that mix characters like Pippin in the same party as powerhouses like Aragorn? What helped to make it workable / fun?

In the 2000s, I played a lot of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (aka Cinematic Unisystem) that supports a split of characters like this. I also touched on this in some earlier campaigns, but the Buffy RPG was the first time it was explicitly supported.

I literally deal with this in every Supers game I run.

The first thing is considering what system you're going to use to express these things and how well these discrepancies matter. There must be things the "weaker" character can do that the "stronger" character can't - either by direct need or pre-occupation.

i.e. Superman and Batman can team up, but when Batman is dealing with the hordes of minions that Superman could easily mass-KTFO, Superman needs something that clearly he is better suited for. Whether that means he's tanking the Real Threat (or so he thinks) or he's making sure that outside issues aren't going to get Batman and the rest of the minions killed (dealing with a massive environmental issue or something.)

The flipside of your analogy is that Aragorn should be dealing with Aragorn level issues - Gondorian political intrigue, Orc invasion rumors, threats to Rivendell, blah blah. Whereas Pippin characters should have their much smaller concerns interwoven into the larger themes of the game. Whether that is, Gondorian spies meeting with Isengard agents in the Shire causing problems for Pippin's "normal mischief" where he and his pals stumble upon the spies and their conspiracies. Or perhaps they find a dead orc with missives about their tribes gathering for an attack on Gondor/Rohan/Rivendell - or the Shire. etc.

You need to also take into consideration your players themselves, I find it when less... "creative" players, in the Aragorn/Superman role, play thing very much on the nose, it's easier to keep things on the Pippin/Batman level with the powerhouses just doing necessary backup duty.

If your players think or demand that everything remain "balanced" - the onus is on you to split the threat and content between the different stratas and maintain them. This is why you'll need to weave the lesser content-threads into the greater. Make allowances for the player's individual styles.<--- I can't stress this enough.

I know of a few ways to deal with this issue.  One is just adventure design.  I ran a decade long campaign with the "stable of characters" approach and we commonly had second and third level characters working along side 11th and 12th level characters.  The main point is that the strong characters can take on anything, but they can' do everything at once.  Say your encounter is a stone giant with a bunch of goblin archers.  The strong characters can take on the giant, but if the weak characters don't take care of the archers successfully, the strong characters will go down under arrow fire.  And there are endless variations on this.

Ars Magica has a different approach, where players take turns playing stronger and weaker characters.  And one player can run a group of weaker characters all at once.

Another approach I've read but never used is that if you choose to play a weaker character you get a luck metacurrency as compensation.  Supposedly this can work well if balanced properly.

<shrugs>  Literally only a problem if you're using a physics-sim/wargame engine.  Try and pound a square peg into a round hole, you're going to have challenges.

Quote from: Mishihari on February 06, 2024, 10:06:28 PM
I know of a few ways to deal with this issue.  One is just adventure design.  I ran a decade long campaign with the "stable of characters" approach and we commonly had second and third level characters working along side 11th and 12th level characters.  The main point is that the strong characters can take on anything, but they can' do everything at once.  Say your encounter is a stone giant with a bunch of goblin archers.  The strong characters can take on the giant, but if the weak characters don't take care of the archers successfully, the strong characters will go down under arrow fire.  And there are endless variations on this.

Ars Magica has a different approach, where players take turns playing stronger and weaker characters.  And one player can run a group of weaker characters all at once.

Another approach I've read but never used is that if you choose to play a weaker character you get a luck metacurrency as compensation.  Supposedly this can work well if balanced properly.

Thanks. I've done #3 explicitly using Eden Studio's "Cinematic Unisystem", and it's also possible in Savage Worlds by having some characters with higher Luck (i.e. more "bennies") and other subtle boosts.

I hadn't thought about the Ars Magica approach, though I've played Ars Magica in the past. I'd been planning to run a few one-shots right now to test the setup and concepts, however, so the rotation doesn't work for that.