awesomeocalypse
First Post
No, this is not a "very special" thread about coping with player depression.
Rather, I'm interested to deal with a problem that, while far from ubiquitous, has shown up occasionally in essentially every edition of D&D I've played. Namely, what do you when a player is no longer invested in a character and/or wants to play something else, to the extent that they want their current character to die so they can roll up a new one, and begin to behave accordingly?
This happened all the time for me back when I started playing with second edition. The party would roll characters up and, barring egregiously low stats, we had a rule that you played the stats you rolled. In theory, this was supposed to encourage us to play characters with a range of stats, and not just get caught up in playing super elite characters. In practice, however, the knowledge that if we died we'd get a chance to create a new character meant that any character who was statistically unsatisfactory was likely to be played as a more or less suicidial maniac, in the hopes that he would die and the player could roll up a character with (hopefully) better stats. I guess if we'd played those badly statted characters to higher levels, we might have become invested enough to want to avoid having to start over with better statted but lower level characters, but since we never really bothered to keep characters with bad stats alive that long it never became an issue. There would just be an early period of attrition with characters dying off until we all had the characters of the classes and races we wanted, with the awesome stats we wanted, at which point we'd actually give a crap about those characters dying.
4th edition, by letting players choose essentially every facet of their character from stats to powers to items, would seem to have solved this problem. Everyone just plays the character they would ideally want to play, so there's no upside to having their character die. But I've noticed that, as soon as there is any discrepancy between the character someone wants to be playing, and the character they are actually playing, this issue rears its head again. For example, after PHB3 came out, one of our players wanted to switch to playing a monk (he'd been playing an avenger). However, his old character we pretty important, at that point, to the lore of our campaign. His relationship to his god, his magic sword, etc. were all important plot elements, such that the DM was resistant to simply letting him reroll a monk. But, of course, if any of our characters die permanently, we can reroll. So lo and behold, that Avenger begins acting recklessly to the point of mania, and the second he died that player had the character builder opened and was building a monk.
Or to use another example, that same DM used to give out treasure that was mostly useful, but never simply corresponded to a wish list, and he would never give enough gold to enchant many at-level items of your choice. However, when rolling new characters of mid or high level, we could choose a few level appropriate items. So, essentially, characters who acquired their items organically didn't get their wish list, but new characters did. This created more than a few situations where a character would die, only to be replaced by an essentially identical character with better items.
It really seems in my experience that the only consistent way to keep players invested in their characters is to let them play exactly what they want 100% of the time (or, if not exactly what they want, then closer to what they want then they'd be able to achieve by simply making a new character). Is this true? Or have others found ways to keep players invested, even if the character they're playing isn't exactly their ideal.
Rather, I'm interested to deal with a problem that, while far from ubiquitous, has shown up occasionally in essentially every edition of D&D I've played. Namely, what do you when a player is no longer invested in a character and/or wants to play something else, to the extent that they want their current character to die so they can roll up a new one, and begin to behave accordingly?
This happened all the time for me back when I started playing with second edition. The party would roll characters up and, barring egregiously low stats, we had a rule that you played the stats you rolled. In theory, this was supposed to encourage us to play characters with a range of stats, and not just get caught up in playing super elite characters. In practice, however, the knowledge that if we died we'd get a chance to create a new character meant that any character who was statistically unsatisfactory was likely to be played as a more or less suicidial maniac, in the hopes that he would die and the player could roll up a character with (hopefully) better stats. I guess if we'd played those badly statted characters to higher levels, we might have become invested enough to want to avoid having to start over with better statted but lower level characters, but since we never really bothered to keep characters with bad stats alive that long it never became an issue. There would just be an early period of attrition with characters dying off until we all had the characters of the classes and races we wanted, with the awesome stats we wanted, at which point we'd actually give a crap about those characters dying.
4th edition, by letting players choose essentially every facet of their character from stats to powers to items, would seem to have solved this problem. Everyone just plays the character they would ideally want to play, so there's no upside to having their character die. But I've noticed that, as soon as there is any discrepancy between the character someone wants to be playing, and the character they are actually playing, this issue rears its head again. For example, after PHB3 came out, one of our players wanted to switch to playing a monk (he'd been playing an avenger). However, his old character we pretty important, at that point, to the lore of our campaign. His relationship to his god, his magic sword, etc. were all important plot elements, such that the DM was resistant to simply letting him reroll a monk. But, of course, if any of our characters die permanently, we can reroll. So lo and behold, that Avenger begins acting recklessly to the point of mania, and the second he died that player had the character builder opened and was building a monk.
Or to use another example, that same DM used to give out treasure that was mostly useful, but never simply corresponded to a wish list, and he would never give enough gold to enchant many at-level items of your choice. However, when rolling new characters of mid or high level, we could choose a few level appropriate items. So, essentially, characters who acquired their items organically didn't get their wish list, but new characters did. This created more than a few situations where a character would die, only to be replaced by an essentially identical character with better items.
It really seems in my experience that the only consistent way to keep players invested in their characters is to let them play exactly what they want 100% of the time (or, if not exactly what they want, then closer to what they want then they'd be able to achieve by simply making a new character). Is this true? Or have others found ways to keep players invested, even if the character they're playing isn't exactly their ideal.
