Characters coming and going (your opinion)

[Shadeydm]

Hello Players and DMs,

I am soliciting opinions on a difficult decision being forced upon my players and myself as the DM.

About a month ago one of the five players in my campaign informed us that he would be moving overseas for a year or so for work and would therefore be unavailable to play his character. I communicated with him via email and gave him the following options on how to handle this in game. The options were 1: have the PC leave the party, 2: have him stay with the party and be run by his fellow players and policed by me for fairness and accuracy, 3: have him die a heroic death, 4: have turn on the party and become a villan.

He chose to have him remain with the party and be run by all the players with me overseeing this group effort. So we kept on playing and everything was going great. Finally time passed and his final play session before his departure has come and gone.

So the day before his departure I recieve an email from him that he has changed his mind and wants his character to up and leave the party in the middle of a difficult adventure in a situation that would be totally out of character and in an adventure where the way the group entered the complex they are exploring has apparently shut them in. His explaination is that if his chatacter dies he wants it to be on his watch and nobody elses.

So I wrote back to him explaining how the party was in the middle of this adventure and that at the moment they are unaware of any way to depart the dungeon. Furthermore I wrote that such an act would be completely out of character and unfair to the rest of the party. I go on to remind him that given the modified action point rules we use which allow for the expenditure of action points to stabilize a dying character his character was unlikely to die unless a TPK happened. I told him that as soon as the adventure was over I would have his character leave the party and let them recruit a replacement.

He seemed upset and generally unstaisfied with my reply. This has gotten me to thinking which is why I have posted this here.

Am I out of line with my thinking and reasoning? Should the player have such absolute authority over his PC that he simply fades into nonexistance in the middle of a dungeon because he changed his mind at the last minute on a whim with no warning?

What do you folks think?

 

[Shadeydm]

Wow, 3 hours, 37 reads, and not a single reply...

Where is the community feedback and support we all have come to expect around here?

 

[billd91]

It's his character, man. If he wants it out of the game, he should be able to take it out of the game. If you feel it must be done semi-realistically, have him fall victim to a trap or trick that takes him out of the area completely so that it's clear he can't get back in or they can't get to him.

I wouldn't have suggested having the PC continue on, run by the rest of the party in the first place. Doing so for a session or two is one thing, doing it for a year is quite another matter. The character should have gone out in a blaze of glory, gone NPC, or gone dormant and out of adventuring until the player returns (which really means NPC but one that the player may return to play again).

 

[Piratecat]

In this case, I think the kindest thing to do for all concerned is to make the PC stumble into a teleport trap that ports him a hundred or so miles away, or which makes him exchange places with some poor unsuspecting adventurer in another city. That lets you have a replacement, and leaves everyone happy.

 

[SteveC]

Ah, the travails of a GM are never done!

The question is, at this point, what is the effect of the character leaving the game RIGHT NOW going to have on the group. If the character leaves and that dooms the rest of the group, I'd suggest keeping him on, as that was what he talked about doing and what the group planned for.

If he's not essential to the group's survival, why not just let him out of things and make him happy? There's such a thing as verisimilitude, but there's also keeping one of your player's happy. I guess I suggest erring on the side of happiness.

--Steve

 

[Shadeydm]

He is the stealthy skill guy a very important person to have around imo.

Would you guys really put in a one time only teleport trap that replaces the stealthy skill guy with another stealthy skill guy? I don't think I could do that to my game. I thought having him leave after the adventure was a reasonable compromise. I feel like my only other option is to put my game on hold for a year which is not an option I relish...

 

[Corathon]

I don't think that you're being at all unreasonable,ShadeyDM. You gave the player a choice ahead of time, and he wants to change his mind at the last minute. The DM is responsible for his campaign, and that is more important than any one character.

That said, I wouldn't have offered the option for his character to be run by the other players for a year. When similar things have happened in my game in the past, the missing player's character left the group, to rejoin them when the player returned. An in-game justification for the PCs absence was usually easy to create.

 

[ShawnLStroud]

Pfft. If your player really wants to have his PC not get killed, then don't worry about it. Email him back and say that his character was not in the party -- that he was replaced by his evil twin/a doppleganger/a Slider from another plane of existance... and let him come up with an explanation of how that happened. Of course, you have to let him know that, while he's not in the party doing cool things, he's also not gaining any XP. (Personally, I'm fond of having this kind of PC wake up in a flop house with a huge tatoo, reeking of alcohol and other substances, and sore in private places -- but that's just me)

Then, do what you want with a photocopy of his original character sheet. Since the sheet is only a piece of paper, and it represents a clone/doppleganger/eviltwin of the original PC, it can continue on with the party, then either betray them and run away, or set them up for a better adventure, or expire in a glorious battle that the party will remember for years... It's up to you.

Hope that helps; let us know how things turned out.

 

[kenobi65]

Real life intrudes on things. Sometimes, you just have to wing it a little bit, and suspend disbelief within the game, to accomodate what happens in real life (e.g., a player can't make a session, a player drops out of the game, a new player joins the game, etc.)

Do you, as the DM, have the right to keep players from totally hosing the game? To a certain extent, yes. But, he has the right to determine what happens to his PC, too. Yes, he should have spoken up earlier if he had second thoughts about the plan, but it is what it is.

You need to decide if this is really worth sticking to your guns on, and alienating the player (whom, I assume, is some level of friend, as well).

 

[ejja_1]

He is the stealthy skill guy a very important person to have around imo.

Would you guys really put in a one time only teleport trap that replaces the stealthy skill guy with another stealthy skill guy? I don't think I could do that to my game. I thought having him leave after the adventure was a reasonable compromise. I feel like my only other option is to put my game on hold for a year which is not an option I relish...

If this seems like a bad fit change the circumstance to fit your campaign.
IE: The character discovers a magic item and attempts to use it, when he activates it he is transported to another plane/city/whatever. Then have the party meet an npc within the dungeon itself, or whatver works for you paticular situation. The solution is viable it's up to you as to how you make it fit into your game.