D&D General Have you ever retired a character?

[MarkB]

I retired a sorcerer in a very high-level 3.5e campaign because, as effective as he was, I wound up feeling like I wasn't playing a person, I was playing a walking artillery piece.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I've always wanted to run a campaign in which the first round of characters retire at 5th Level. The second round of characters start at 5th Level and are the children / mentees / students etc of the previous characters.

The second round of characters retires at 10th Level, and then a third round of characters starts at 10th Level as the next generation.

Each time the characters retire, the campaign world moves 20 years or so into the future.

I think it would be a really epic campaign!

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I've always wanted to run a campaign in which the first round of characters retire at 5th Level. The second round of characters start at 5th Level and are the children / mentees / students etc of the previous characters.

The second round of characters retires at 10th Level, and then a third round of characters starts at 10th Level as the next generation.

Each time the characters retire, the campaign world moves 20 years or so into the future.

I think it would be a really epic campaign!

Do it in reverse. 15-20 first, the next generation, is 10-15 etc...

Each new generation never quite living up to the expectations of the previous.

"Oh! Fireball, eh? Well in my day, we had to cast Time Stop three times a day just to go to school. In five feet of snow, up hill both ways, while being hunted by Pit fiends."

 

[Sacrosanct]

Several times. Usually when they reach name level or so (level 9). For various reasons, mostly campaign ending or I want to play something different.

 

[jdrakeh]

I'm mean, I've had a few Call of Cthulhu characters go completely insane in the middle of campaigns. They retired to a sanitarium.

 

[JamesLFlowers]

Yes,
We played a long running game in a homebrewed Spelljammer Sphere called DarSphere. The character started off as a Paladin of Darson, son of the High Lord Dar and the God of Justice and War. When Darson was slain by one of his evil brothers, the Paladin became an Avatar absorbing the remains of Darson. In the end, he achieved Godhood and replaced Darson as the new God of Justice and War. Can't really play a character who has become a god, so he was retired.

 

[Scott Christian]

As the title says.
I'm not talking about writing an ending for your character when the campaign is over.
Have you ever retired a character and made a new one instead to continue playing?

If so, why?

I've only ever retired a character once, (that I can recall) he fell in love with an NPC and retired from the adventuring life.

I've put this in a DnD thread, but feel free to mention other systems as well.

Yes. In a yearlong campaign, where the DM told us prior to character creation we had to have someone important to us go missing, I created the typical Human Champion Fighter with a background of Outlander. (Two things: We found out it was a cult, and at the time, I do believe there was only the PHB available. No supplemental books had been released yet.) I was a logger, who came home and found my two twin girls gone missing, and my wife dead. Nothing crazy inventive, but the trope worked great for the campaign.

Fast forward to seven months in, and we found one of my girls dead, and the other one alive. Well, I grabbed her, and the other kid who had survived with her, and ended that character. He was a ninth level fighter by that point. He adopted the kid, moved to the countryside, and started logging again - teaching his kids the craft of the trade.

Of course, we still had five months to go and several other character backstories to get through. But there was zero percent chance that character would have risked making his daughter an orphan and possibly exposing her to the cult again. So he retired. To me, it was perfect because it followed the character arc, and not just the campaign arc.

Side Note: I created another fighter who was his logging friend from long ago. A dwarf this time. I chose the fighter again because we had eight players and didn't want to steal anyone else's class-shine.

 

[CleverNickName]

Yeah, a could of times. Most recently, I dropped my dwarf Battle Master in favor of a human Hexblade.

I normally play spellcasters, and I thought the BM would be a good choice for dipping my toe into the "martials" pool. But I found that class to be too limiting for my play style, even after taking the Magic Initiate feat at 4th level, even after multiclassing with cleric. So I talked offline with my DM about it, and we hatched a plan for my character to exit the campaign and be replaced with another one.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Yes, particularly as we transferred from 1e to 2e. With 1e, we all had a bunch of characters we played. As 2e took root, it encouraged more focusing on a single character. So slowly, one by one we retired our excess characters. The one that's my namesake here, whom I'd been playing since he was a BECMI character, a dwarven fighter, retired to become a smith in Waterdeep. For years after that, I continued to insert him as an NPC whenever someone was looking for a good weapon- or armor- smith in Waterdeep.

 

[TwoSix]

Multiple times. I'll usually let the DM know I'm interested in making a transition, and we'll have a scene in the next session or two when it would make sense for the character to bow out and move on to other interests.

I generally feel like I've done enough with a D&D character after 20 sessions or so and want to move on.