All Star Cast

Basic Information

When you recognise every member of a team by name, title and/or appearance, you're looking at an All Star Cast. It doesn't matter if they're historical figures, heroes of the realm or something else, just as long as they have some level of significant notoriety.

Sources

Bibliography

1. TV Tropes Wiki entry

Game and Story Use

• This could be used to start a campaign at a high level. Have each character be the hero of their own story and frame the current one as all of them teaming up to defeat an even bigger bad than the ones they had faced before.
  • At least one edition of Spirit of the Century RPG did this. In character creation, you told a brief summary of one of your previous adventures, and worked in the character of the player on your left. It gave the players a say in the game world's recent history, and provided a way to link the PCs together so they didn't just meet in a bar at the start of the first session.
  • You could also use this to gather characters from different campaigns together using the same idea.
• You could mentally cast your NPCs as if they were played by various real-world actors, and then base your roleplaying of them on impressions of those actors. This makes it easier for the GM (and new players) to keep them sorted out in your head.
  • I've done this a few times with Amber Diceless Roleplay campaigns. It's a game with a huge default NPC cast, so having some way to get acting hooks into them can really help differentiate the otherwise bewildering number of NPCs. King Random was played as if by Tim Roth, that bastard uncle Caine was Antonio Banderas, Dworkin was Jack Nance, etc.
• If the Party of Player Characters are all famous people, you've got yourself a League of Extraordinary Whatevers.