Chronic Character Boredom Syndrome (Need Help!)

My party has recently started a new campaign (our 7th in 1 1/2 years) and I'm trying to figure out why our campaigns keep stopping, as well as why we keep getting bored of our characters. This is my second time DMing, and I feel I've gotten the hang of it. The only problem is we can't seem to hold on to our characters. We get bored of them, so we try to kill our current characters to bring in new ones. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except, once our first/favorite (favorite whether we know it or not) characters die, we become bored of the game, and the campaign usually ends shortly after that.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this problem. I really would like to find a campaign that we can stick to, and have everyone play characters that they're happy with, but I don't know how.

By the way, we're playing an FR campaign with a lot of planes stuff, and its working out great so far.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

By the way, we're playing an FR campaign with a lot of planes stuff, and its working out great so far.

This may be part of the problem. Are you using core races, or going for the myriad options presented to you by the Planes?
It's possible that your setting is more interesting than the characters.

If this isn't the case then I would suggest having *harsh* guidelines for bringing in new characters. New characters start at 1st level no matter what the average party level is. This will make players pay for raise dead and the like.

Close calls and humours situations are a great way to build character attachment. Vengence works too, but can often lead to sad cliches.

Are you having a lot of role-playing? How often are the DM and players speaking in voice. Speaking in voice can lead to a good personality and attachment to the character.

Give out intangible awards. Magic items can always be handed off to the next character that walks in the door. Titles and lands are lost with the character's death. If your group is comfortable with it hand out lovers, and allies that only trust a certain member of the party.

$0.02

Thanks for the quick response!
Unfortunately, this problem has occured in all of our games but one, and we've played oriental adventures, a homebrew world, greyhawk, and the FR.
Having new characters starting at 1st level wouldn't really solve the problem, I think. This is because the players would still get bored with their current characters, they'd just get angry with me for making their new ones really bad.
I've been trying to incorporate a lot of roleplaying, and so far a few of them have been roleplaying. I've been trying to include the other players, but they just won't roleplay.
In our last camaign, the party had a name, the characters had a lot of land, many allies, but this didn't stop people from switching characters when they got bored (me included).

The problem doesn't seem to be that you're not attatched enough to the current characters....

Perhaps the problem is that there's so many things you want to try that it's hard to play any one thing?

If this is the case, than time is the most helpful antidote. Once you've maybe dabbled in a few things, the problem will sort itself out, having tried a bit of everything that's interesting.

You may want to try just doing a series of one-off adventures, new characters each time, until it's "gotten out of the system," so to speak. Or create secondary characters that you use in a seperate world once in a while as a change of pace.

Maybe the campaign looses steam because the plot does? This is actually fairly common, especially at first. Not everyone can think of epic-long journeys that take months or years to complete.

Maybe the characters grow stale because they don't change enough. As a DM, you could up the XP awards (so that they gain levels quicker), mess with the character history (everyone has a family that could be endangered), or toy around with the personalities of the characters. It helps a lot if you tailor the campaign to the players, roping them in by using compelling storylines that affect them personally.

And maybe your group can't keep an attention span for more than a month or two. Nothing wrong with that.

Remember, characters don't have to die to bring in new ones. You could keep them alive, go off onto a different plot, and then come back to the party later.

Hope that Helps!

Instead of changing the way you play to fit the game, you may want to try changing the game to fit the way you play. I highly recommend checking out d20 Call of Cthulu when it comes out in a few weeks. You'll go through characters pretty quickly, and you may find the roleplaying more fun in a different genre.

Why play the same campaign every session? The group I play with alternates DMs and campaigns from week to week, on Fridays and Saturdays. I have five different characters active right now and only had to fry one once (her personality refused to gel).

Also, our DMs like to (sometimes) give extra XP to those who do the best role-playing in the session.

I suppose the the opposite could work as motivation; penalizing players who don't role-play at all, but that seems kinda harsh. We all have bad days, right?

Remember, it's supposed to be fun! If it isn't, why bother? If changing characters every few weeks is fun for some people, then go for it!

I can think of two possible solutions:

1. The one-off adventure, as was said before. You might even want to play in the same campaign world - maybe even as a group of assasins out to kill your group!

2. Add secrets to the characters. If there are mysteries surrounding your characters ("Why doesn't Bob ever seem to eat or sleep?" "Why do these tatooed monks keep chasing Sam?"), hopefully the players will want to spend the time to figure them out.

You could combine the two - as players of the assasins, they know a little about a secret or two. This would be a good way to introduce mystery into the lives of the PCs. ("Just why are we hunting these guys? Who is our boss? Why does he want them dead?")

I feel your pain. i get really excited about a character concept, write a huge history on him, and draw a picture of her. An, wouldn't you know it, 2 sessions latter I am mindlessly rolling dice.

try new things my group had a similar problem. we looked at our last 10 characters and searched only for similarities. looking for differences is counter productive to this exercise. we looked at the last few campaigns we had done and did the same. we found that because of character similarity, the campaigns had become redundant, we just kept doing the same crap over and over again. we brought this up with the dm and began a new campaign. we played against type i played a stupid one armed barbarian with no wit as opposed to the party leading swashbuckler type. the other players did the same. it was really fun.

my advice is try new things, new styles of campaigns like comedic, munchkin, horror, ect, familiarity breeds contempt.

Do the players feel that their characters make a difference in the campaign world? As they increase in level, a really great DM gets them more and more involved in the structure of the campaign, so that what they do (and don't do) makes a difference. If there are long range threats which they can't cope with now but are trying to solve, that can help.

Basically, though - I see players getting bored with characters for a few reasons again and again -

* character always overshadowed by another character who is better in the same field.

* Character doesn't have any "stake" in the campaign world

* What a character does, doesn't seem to make any lasting impact on the campaign world.

Maybe if some of these reflect your experience, it could give a direction to look at?

Cheers