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Okay I've seen some players play a mutilple personality disorder but never really pull it off. More often then not they seem to be a very very emoish homicidal manic rather than someone who seems to think of themself "Differently". Yet, Lo and behold a brief moment of awesome struck my brain last night and I worked out some details. Keep in mind this is all speculation and could do serious harm to your party in so many ways. Not to mention you'd need your DM to allow it.

First step

Make your Core Personality. This is the guy who you want your actual background and whatnot to extend off of. Somehow at somepoint in time he did something that made his soul or mind or whatever fracture or multiply. Make him in his entirety minus his items. For ease of exposition I'm going to say it was a Sorcerer who took a left turn and ended up in the far realm for some time.

Second step

Make a number of alternate characters using differents stats but again leave items out of it. These function as the alternate selves. These characters show up and do their thing. Now to make the transition all the characters should probably use the same kind of weapon through feats or whatnot. The best part is since these guys are 'completely autonomous' therefore they each have their own variant of the background. They are aware of what is happening but not each other. At least in my version. 

Let me make an example.

The Barbarian personality is wandering into town and sees a mother and child walk down the street. The little  girl has a big lolipop while the mom just watches with a smile. Giving into his urges he steals her candy. 

What happens in the memories of the alternate personalities?

The Sorc
Spoiler: Show  
 
The Bard
Spoiler: Show

The Paladin
Spoiler: Show

Barbarian
Spoiler: Show

Step 3  Implementing the shifting personalities.

Now this is probably the tricky part. To be a true mutilple personality issue for the party.. it has to be completely random. this was the simple steps I decided upon

Battle: Flip a coin at the start of each of your turn. Heads means you stay the same. Tails means you Roll a dice to determine which personality pops up (I'd recommend doing something like a d4 or d3 tops to keep it from being too hard to keep straight in rp) 

 For health use an agreed upon amount by your dm. This is could be your average health between your personalities or something different. Same with defenses? (one of the reasons I said all the same items)

For powers. equivalency. if you use a lv 1 daily. All your level 1 dailies from across the personality spectrum get used. Keeps you from having thirty or so so dailies at a time.


Social: The meat and potatoes of this. Honestly its too tempting to say "I change personality again... and again.. and again... oh goodie my bard is here to talk us out of this... just what we needed" thats not the point of this. Go into it expecting and looking forward to causing your party trouble. The Dm should have authority to tell you that you cannot change personality  or that you should right now. Use the same system above but instead of every round simply flip a coin casually at the table. Dont make a show of it dont do anything along those lines. Just try to keep it on the downlo so when your Bard suddenly rages and rips the merchant in half for saying "punted pony" your party members are surprised.


Things to think about:  
 Honestly, Conspire with your DM to make this as fun and disruptive as possible. Keep the party on their toes and make sure they arent faling into the 'we start our battle like this.. every time". This is an Rp centric build Make up a reason why in barbairan form you suddenly gain 20 strength instead of being a weak mage still (I say magic fueled stength personally) and most importantly... steal little girl's candy. 

Honestly, the challenge was to make it 'random' you could also build in certain triggers that only you and the DM know about.

Make a list.

Sorc is brought to the forefront when he sees apples or whatnot

Barb is triggered anytime he hears the phrase 'punted pony' and reacts with extreme violence against that person

ETc etc

this is just on top of other concepts and whanot.

I did have some critisims about too much of a power play for  alternate stats. My thought was that the Sorc's magic was augmenting the Barb's strength with magic on a subconcious level.

It remembers me of Ravenloft's "madness checks" - I like that!
The final state of a "dissociative disorder" was "multiple personalities" indeed. I tried to update a couple of Halloweens ago the ravenloft setting for 4e.


>>>>>> I'll post how i translated the multiple personality disorder in 4e game mechanics: (not so different from op post, comments in green)

At the moment when the "Dissociative Disorder" reaches the final stage, the character psyche shatters into separated identities:
> A core personality: the original character identity
> 1d100 fragments: fragments are partial personas, easily described in a single phrase (such as "coin collector", "sleepy child" or "talented dancer"...). In game terms, a fragment can be built around a single non-weapon proficiency. These usually have non place in game except in roleplaying, still player can assign a single skill or ability to each fragment.
> 2d10 alter egos: these personalities are real and distinct individuals. Usually they are aware of sharing the body with many others (including the fragments perhaps), but each of them cannot be persuaded by any of the other personas of being less then "real". Randomly generates age, sex, race, class, alignment, a major and a minor personality traits and a short background. This is interesting imho to you: According to these results, an alter ego often BELIEVES he has special abilities or powers (like spell-casting or psionics) which the core personality might not: in most cases, the alter ego cannot ACTUALLY manifest such abilities, although he certainly appears very knowledgeable of them.

Whenever a character is in this stage, (once in a while or triggered by certain kind of events) roll for a saving-throw:
if he succeds, the character's core personality takes/holds control; if he fails, the character randomly swicthes to another of his personality (fragment or alter-ego, DM-call or randomize...as you like most!). Such a saving throw SHOULD BE ROLLED AT LEAST after any rest (long or short) and whenever the character is in a STRESSFULL SITUATION (while hiding or during a fight, for exemples...)

I think you can create character like hybrids to support a couple of alter-egos (i like the idea of using only the powers belonging to the personality in control at the moment), BUT (a big "but") i think the interesting part could be playing a barbarian who THINK of being a sorcerer, and nothing can persuade him of that...?! After all, a dissociative disorder should not give you magical powers: just because you think you are a magician, it doesn't mean you can cast a magic missile... right...?!
As well a wizard could have a fighter alter-ego, and when such persona takes control, (making him to forget about having magical powers) he could jump in the middle of the battlefield grabbing his longsword and keep fighting with his melee basic attack, and all his other stats. Why should he be better?

Oct 25, 2012 -- 5:47PM, Noctaem wrote:

you know one thing that I rarely see mentioned is how goddam annoying these kinds of characters can be to the rest of the table.  

That is true, but it also depends on the sort of group you are playing with. If for example you go to say one of those DND encouters or a local game with people you know but are not 'friends' with. Then yes I'd say be very careful or not at all.

But if its with friends you've known for years (such as mine), then its really up to you to judge your group. Is your group the type that would be frustrated over someone roleplaying something to the T? or are they the type who'd go "lol wut just happened? why did you steal that little girls cheezburger?" then I say go for it and only originally manifest your disorder when you've lulled them into complacency.

In the end its about meeting that balance between fun and disruptive. 

[in advance, sorry for the long post, I couldn't help myself]

I really like the idea of this. However I must say that a case like this should be handled with care. The four character descriptions in the first post are a bunch of douchebags that I would really dislike if they were my player's character (or one in my party).
These kinds of characters often turn out to be douchebags that use their condition as a way to avoid consequences. I would as a DM never allow that.
On the other hand this could be a great way to do some character development on your character(s), as long as you put a lot of time and effort into developing all of them.

However I like this idea enough to start working on a character like this right away. Don't know if i'll ever use it, but creating cool characters is it's own reward isn't it?

Most important thing about a character like this is to pull eveything together. How did this condition start? Were they once different people melded into a single body or are they splinters of a single being?
All of them might have started as an adventuring party and a freak artifact turned them into a single being.
The characters might all be aspects of one former character's personality, taken to the exreme by the others being absent. What caused this? A god, demon or a traumatic life event? Can the character redeem himself in some way?

Secondly you have to decide on the classes (and even races) of the personalities. Are all of them going to be the same roles or all of them different? (it might be nice for the group to have a single role so that you know the team is always complete).
Otherwise it might be nice to have a theme. My current idea is to have a team of divine characters with different roles, although the weapons, stats and equipment stay the same across the board.
I feel like the powers should all be different, as the classes just do different things. Just make sure you're not going to try any unfair things, just focus on all the cool stuff you're doing.

Decide how and when changes occur. It might happen each time the character sleeps, or each time the character becomes excited (on rolling initative). Ther might be other cues, but try to keep it part of the story, and not something that you could ever take advantage of.

So... now I gotta write four (or so) character backgrounds... So much work :p