Jason Cordova and Richard Rogers who play a lot of Gauntlet Hangouts games almost certainly have thoughts on this subject.
I think Phil Lewis makes a good suggestion here. Ars Magica does the whole one person plays the wizard and the rest play their helpers and you have a troupe of wizards and thus a troupe of helpers thing. I certainly could see doing something similar:
Everyone makes two or three characters and you create bonds or whatnot with those there at the first session. You play until someone has to drop out or you want to bring someone in and then you put that story on hold and swap to the new set of characters and create bonds there. Then continue mixing and matching.
I think you could also do things where you tell stories earlier or later in time with some subset of characters. So you have five players in your party and two can’t make it this week. So you play a vignette about the three characters the players still around play that gives some background about who they came to become a party.
To be honest I think SWvM could be one of the best things you could play to facilitate this kind of episodic structure. If you have two players who can commit and can be trusted to be there consistently you can have them play SW and M. Then you can just do something similar to what I mentioned above having a stable of other characters and you can tell different stories, from different times/struggles between SW and M.
You could even take it a step further if you are willing to see SW and M as eternal aspects. There always has to be a SW and a M. Then when your SW or M players are absent you play a scenario that happened with previous or later incarnations of SW and M.
I know The Gauntlet does what Jason Tocci suggests and replaces Bonds with Flags – so the characters are individuated and their flavor is easily understood to new players but you don’t have to have deep connections with other PCs which are just worthless when those other players are absent.
This is kind of why I have been tossing around in my head replacing Bonds with Beliefs from Burning Wheel, possibly stipulating that one or two of them need to be about another PC. The thing is, at the start of each session you can dump or revise your beliefs.
The thing to think about here is what is the utility of Hx/Bonds/etc? It is twofold:
* it creates drama and connection and backstory instantly at character creation (community even)
* it mechanically rewards the exercise of those links, in either a positive or negative way, but it rewards playing with “community” and inter-character relationships in mind
If you want to continue in that vein you need to figure out what kinds of mechanisms you can come up with to create connections quickly between characters that haven’t been seen in a story yet (ie the drop in) and incentivize exercising those connections.
The other thing to think about is, if you are going to have a varying cast – does the “meaning” of the story have to come from long intense story arcs between the same characters? Can it come from small vignettes of subsets of a larger cast? Should it come from the larger factions at work in the world itself where the players are just small cogs in the grander scheme of things. (I think SWvM kind of lends itself to this thinking.)
Finally, I will note that I just watched an episode of Adam Koebel’s (fantastic) Office Hours show (
youtube.com – Office Hours Episode 40