How far do your players go to accomodate a new character?

[Kareyev]

Around 8 years ago I left my regular gaming group due to work taking me away from home. Several months later I returned to the group and hatched an evil plan with the DM. The party had just rescued a young girl who several power groups were after for some reason or another. Enter my new character, a paladin who would help the party move the girl to a more secure location. As we traveled across the frozen wastes of the north several teams of bandits and monsters fell upon us. Each time my paladin put the girl upon his sled and moved her to safety while the party dealt with the threat. It became a pattern and everyone was comfortable with it as you can always trust a PC, especially a paladin. Towards the end of the session one last group of bandits came at us and like clockwork the paladin moved the girl to safety. After the battle the party found that the paladin did not stop, but kept on going. You see, he was not a paladin, but an anti-paladin of a god of deception. The girl was lost.

I ended up back on the road and left that gaming group again after that very entertaining session. Seven years later I ended up back at that DMs table. No one from the original group was left, except for the DM, but my new character not was trusted one bit. Seems there was this tail of a turn-coat paladin in the campaigns history.... My new PC had to go through all sorts of vows, zones of truths and other magical types of interrogation. Much to my suprise when I admited to playing the evil paladin I found out the DM had not shared this fact with anyone. It had just entered the lore of his campaign and was passed player to player as a horror story. As frustrating as it was for my new PC I have to say it was very fun to roleplay!

 

[Mark Chance]

DMing isn't about you having fun....

If I'm not having fun DMing, I won't do it. So, in my case, it is all about me. Things that I'll do even if I'm not having fun are things I must do, such as work for a living.

As to the question, "How far do your players go to accomodate a new character?"

My players just do it. I tell them, "Look, the group's getting a new character because X. Accomodate this new character."

 

[Psion]

babomb beat me to it.

First thing I thought of too...

 

[Xath]

Have you ever seen The Gamers? We're like that.

Man oh man I love this movie. I can't wait until the second one comes out.


Anyway, I have never DMed a serious long term campaign, so I've never done this, but I'm currently playing in a campaign where my character (and several others) came in in the middle of the campaign. The DM made it work really well, in that through creative use of the plot and certain events, he made it very difficult for us not to work with each other. For example, recently we sent out to the nearby towns to ask for aid in an upcoming battle. One of the new PC/NPC's came in response to that call. (I don't want to give too much away, check out the fairly new story hour in my sig)

 

[Umbran]

Which isn't a major problem, really, but it leaves me wondering how hard a DM should work to make the integration of a new character as painless as possible, whether it's fair to expect other players to break character at certain times, and how much onus in there on the new guy to make a character that'll get along with the party. (while balancing that against letting people play what they're happy with) Opinions?

Integrating new characters should not be painless. Pain is good for role-play.

That being said - there is a largish onus upon the new guy to bring in a character that'll get along wiht everyone else at least enough to keep things rolling. The new guy is supposed to have fun, but not at the expense of everyone else. I am not going to bust up the whole story to accomodate someoen who'd really rather be playing a solo game.

You want to play a shifty, habitual liar? That's nice. Why on Earth (or whatever your gaming world is) would anyone ever trust such a person with their lives?

 

[argo]

As a player (and a DM) I'm willing to go prety far to integrate a new PC. If an explaination for why one of the old PC's broke character is needed I find I can always go with the old "its fate" routine. Everybody just happened to be in one of those moods that day. I mean, people really do do wacky stuff all the time that they might not normally think they would do.

However, I also expect (and as a DM I demand) that the player of the new character create somebody who can get along with the existing party. As a DM I can invent any number of reasons why this new guy has to hang out with you for a session or two but after that it should be the case that the characters have gotten to know each other that they want to stay together, for whatever reason. The majority of the burden shoudl fall on the new character here for finding a way to fit in.

Really, I have a much worse time with the situation where, after a few sessions, you realize that nobody in the party particularly likes one character and that character has no real reason to want to stay with these people but nothing happens because he happens to be a PC. That situation can bring a whole campagin down.

 

[Chimera]

Enter the new PC - a shifty street-urchin type and a pathological liar.

The problem was, these are characters who'd probably gag the poor guy at the first sign of non-cooperation, cut off one finger, let him think about it for a minute, then cut another one off without giving him a chance to talk just to make sure he knew they were serious - and then ask their questions again. Which you really don't want to do to another PC, and so the whole thing, while fun, obviously involved breaking character in a serious way.

Hence "Three Finger Louie".

 

[Saeviomagy]

I played a shadowrun game.
Now part of the premise of shadowrun is that you've got a 'fixer'. If you need a new group member, usually your fixer will vet the guy, and then he's in.

Of course this is kind of the whole 'divine mark' schtick. They're a PC, so they're in.

Naturally, we're shadowrunners though, and after a rash of terrible PC's, starting with players who were just too stupid to stay alive, and culminating in a PC who was a villain in disguise and attempted to kill the party when we told him he was out (ie - after being told we didn't want to run with him, he changed his identity, rejoined the group and tried to set us up), we stopped believing in the all-powerful info network of our fixer.

We told new PC's: "ok, we're going to try you out. You are the bottom rung of the latter. If you don't follow orders - you're dead. If you do anything we find suspicious and don't have a convincing arguement - you're dead. If we find out one single thing about you that you don't tell us right now - you're dead."

New PC's believed us. We didn't actually have to kill any (Oh, wait. We accidentally killed one. He disobeyed orders and we locked him in the trunk of a car in a junkyard as a temporary measure, because we didn't want to kill him. Unfortunately the run then went awry and we had to flee town. He stayed in the car trunk for 2 weeks... And failed his con checks to stay alive). PC's gradually gained our trust and became full-fledged members of the group.

I think that it's ok to be hard on new group members, as long as everyone knows that's what's going to happen.

 

[jollyninja]

well in the campaign in which i play my new character was a cleric rogue. the main the party has had problems with is the local guard (basically an extortionist theives guild) and my character is a member. he admitted it upon meeting them as he was clearly marked as such. there were some grumblings but that was about it. the painfully obvious spy was let in.

 

[Ricochet]

In our group, one of the players always make obscure characters that don't fit into the party mix at all ("trained by the enemy", "no past" and such).

While most of the time, we accept this, sometimes we go for the inter-party conflict and boot the character (at least the concept, which can easily be reworked).