First, to the original OP: I think I once had 8 or 9 players & characters in T2k, but that was only for one session. I never thought of adding a bunch more characters for people to run. I was recently thinking, that given the slow healing time for wounds, second and third characters might not be a bad idea.
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Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b
I've always found, both as a GM and a player, that games work best when each player has one character. Sometimes, when you don't have many players, one or more of the players has to play more than one PC; inevitably, the player concentrates on one character and the rest become "throwaways," the ones who do the really dangerous and deadly things and enable the player to protect his favorite PC. So size of a character group really depends on how many player you have on hand, perhaps rounded out by some GM-controlled NPCs, to give the group additional firepower or with the skills the group needs but no player had the foresight to choose.
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I read a while ago about the game Ars Magica, in which a player is supposed to have 1 wizard-like character, 1 or 2 non-wizard adventurers, and any number of "grogs." Generally, in a given adventure session, 1 player would be the wizard and leader, some might be playing their secondary characters, and some might be playing their grogs as spear-carriers or medics or whatever. I thought that would be very applicable to, for instance, Star Trek. The captain and senior officers all are played by players, but each player also has a junior officer and some specialist crewmen. The captain orders one of the senior officers to form a landing party, with 1-2 juniors and the rest crewmen. The Captain's PC will have someone on the ground, so he's not sitting around bored, and the other players might have something to do when the action's not planetside.
So, if one wanted to do the same with a reduced company team from Kalisz, each player has someone among the vehicle crews, someone on the recon squad, and maybe even someone in the main body of the unit. Heck, if you wanted to run bigger events, set up most of the unit as NPCs (name and sketchy stats), and the PCs are just the leaders.