Or – you could not have a party.

The "ensemble party" concept of role-playing games is traditionally established, but definitely not even nearly the only choice when it comes to how to structure the experience of play. Over the last couple of decades, a number of games have come forward as exemplars of how to run games without that central, day-to-day, follow-these-people-for-the-story architecture.

They have largely been the better for it.

Sometimes this can be as simple as recognizing that the characters played by the people at the table don't necessarily have to be together for their stories to overlap. In Eternal Contenders, the protagonists are very often not in the same place save for when a couple of them find themselves in a duel (which is one of the central tenets of the stories being told in the game).

In Remember Tomorrow, the protagonists are generally actively framed out of being in the same location or even interacting directly in favor of everyone having at least two characters, the second of which provides the antagonist for someone else's story.

In Microscope, of course, the idea of single character ownership – or even character continuity in any mechanistic sense – would be ludicrous. There is no team at all.

As I have talked about at some length elsewhere, Capes and Universalis dispense with the idea of character/player ownership at all, accumulating characters from everybody's hand, with distribution and attention to their stories happening as the players find it convenient.

Any light character generation system can be a boon when it comes to blowing away the idea of the traditional party as the unit of storytelling. If it takes less than five minutes to create a character, it makes sense to introduce and share characters around the table for the good of the experience rather than because each player needs a pawn.

When we get down to places which version over to more wargaming than RPG, including the origins of D&D itself, what you find is that there is a much greater focus on the players being associated with a group of characters – the war band, the squad, what have you – with the expectations that come along with that. If anything, the idea of the "second party" was an artificial construct that grew out of the artificial construct of "the main party." What was once a game about characters-as-leaders and the people that they lead turned into a far more restrictive, constricting game about "just these people."

Don't stop at just the B-team. Go even further afield and discover that it's not hard; in fact, it makes telling stories more like the inspirational literature of your choice of genre much, much easier and a lot more fun besides.