Changing Characters...

[Cedric]

How do DM's feel about having their players change characters?

Here are my thoughts, if we are between adventures, and you want to change characters because you have another idea or you just aren't happy with your character then you can make a new character equal to the lowest level person in the party.

You may do this once per player per campaign.

You may not change characters during an adventure or plot line, except under extreme circumstances...and I've never come across circumstances that extreme yet, so I couldn't say what they would be.

What are your thoughts?

Cedric

 

[thundershot]

My players switch characters all the time. Before the adventure, they choose who they're going to use, and then they don't change again until after the adventure when they return home. They all have an abandoned temple that they live out of.

I can also flip back and forth between groups doing things, so they can have two adventures running at the same time.

They each have a character pool of four...


Chris

 

[FungiMuncher]

I just got back from my weekly session, and four of my nine players choose to bring in new characters. They just went through a rather tough encounter, where three of the characters dropped, and the rest ran away. The encounter was designed to be purely role playing, but it went rather badly when one of them attacked the NPCs. I guess a few of them felt a need for a change.

So far, it has worked out this way: They've chosen to retire an old character, and bring in a new one at a level below their previous one. They need to help me out by including in their new character's background an explaination of why they are at where the rest of the party is, and a modestly good reason to hook up with the other player characters (though I'm prettly flexible). Bringing in the old character again has never come up.

For the most part, I don't have a problem with this. I want them to be happy with what their playing. As long as I can continue with the overall plot thread as previously established, I don't mind. They do this rarely because of the level loss.

FM

 

[Jeph]

I only let players change characters when their old one dies (unfortunately this has led to a couple suicides and picking out-o'-this-world fights), and they start at the average party level -1.

 

[Renaissance Man]

My fellow players must have incredibly short attention spans. We quickly tire of the scenarios we find ourselves in, and often relieve the monotony by creating a new batch of characters. One drawback: this usually means that the current storyline abruptly terminates, with no closure whatsoever. But half the time, the storyline is what's really prompting the change, so no harm done. This is no reflection on my DM's ability to weave a compelling story, by the way. It's just as likely to happen when I'm running the game. (Or perhaps we both suck. )

 

[Neo]

I dont; mind players changing characters, much better than forcing them to keep playing a character they no longer enjoy or hate, as that causes a whole bunch of problems.

However that siad if someone changes characters in my game it is as if the previous character died with regards to the replacement. e.g. the new character is 3 levels lover than the highest party members level, so anyone who chooses to change characters does suffer for it.

However one thing I can't stand is people giving up on a character as follows. giving up on a character because they lose a limb, get polymorphed or so forth.... I would much rather the player roleplayed the changes (even if they do sometimes come with penalties or hindrances), simply because a character suffer a penalty of some sort is not what I consider a good reason for giving a character up.

 

[Hypersmurf]

The group I originally learned to play with (AD&D 1E) didn't go in for deep campaign immersion.

We tended to play pre-packaged modules, or home-made scenarios of the same sort of length.

The role of DM was a rotating one - essentially, when one DM was getting close to wrapping up an adventure, someone else would throw their hat in the ring as having something prepared.

Each time the DM changed, players decided which character they would run through the next scenario. Obviously, if we'd just finished a 7th-9th level adventure, and the next DM was running a 3rd-5th, we wouldn't be playing the same character.

Suspension of disbelief was no problem. Of a party of seven who'd just completed the Ghost Tower of Inverness, three of them suddenly showed up the next week in the Desert of Desolation with five new buddies. In some cases, they might have met some of the others a few adventures back; in others, they might be first-time acquaintances. It didn't matter - they were all adventurers, and adventurers worked together.

The groups I play with now have campaign continuity, which is more logical, I suppose. But logic was never necessary for fun, and we never had a problem with being "trapped" with a certain character.

(Of course, we never created characters above first level - they had to earn their levels the hard way. So if someone decided to run a 10th-12th level game, and the highest level character you had on hand was 8th, you either hoped he'd manage to stay alive, or begged a high-level character on loan from another player )

But yeah - in the continuous campaign games, I've seen players "get bored" and have their characters storm off, retire, or get themselves killed just so they can change...

-Hyp.

 

[Ruavel]

Embrace change..

I have found it best not the restrict the times during which players can change the characters (within the boundaries of scenario events, etc) and taking into account the reasons for wanting to change...

a few times a player has taken a character that they thought would be great fun to play only to find that they were completely unsuited to that class... keeping them in that position until the end of an adventure has resulted in a very unenjoyable experience for all involved...

I generally bring in a new character (for the purposes of someone changing) at the same level as the current lowest member of the party, but at base level experience for that level (rather than halfway to next level)...

 

[Kilmore]

Nobody's mentioned the greatest cause of character attrition... character sheet loss. Such a thing is heinously stupid and totally unforgivable except for one small thing.

We've all done it.

I thought I was clever yesterday. I had my charascter in our Freeport campaign on my laptop. While the others spent a while digging for their characters, I proudly whipped out the laptop and ceremoniously placed it on the table.

I left the cord at home.

One moment that made me proud, though. One player who was famous for forgetting characters playing a character he liked in my campaign so much he wrote him into every notebook he had.

 

[Umbran]

We've all done it.

When I DM, I always make sure there are two copies of each character sheet. The player has one, and I have the other. If both teh DM and playersare missing vital information, it's time to pack up and play Risk.