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

[Jeff Wilder]

IMO, the responsibility for believable, relatively quick, and death-free integration of a new or replacement PC is split almost evenly among the DM, the current players, and the new players.

The DM must provide the new player with enough guidance that he can create a character that can integrate with the group, and has the motivation to join them. Additionally, the DM needs to manipulate the situation such that the new PC has a nearly immediate chance to prove his worth.

The new player must be willing to be flexible in the type of PC played, and even in that PC's personality. Loners don't work. (Why the hell do some players absolutely insist on playing lone wolves, anyway?) Psychos don't work. In a group of elves, maybe a drow (or even a half-drow) doesn't work.

The current players must be willing to find IC reasons to accept the new PC, although, as someone said, the process need not be painless.

Perhaps the best example from literature of this (were it an RPG) is D'Artagnan's introduction to Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The DM has helped him create a character and a history that fits with the group. The new player has created a PC who, though a hothead, desperately wishes to belong to the group the other PCs belong to. The current players, rather than immediately run the young rake through, posture and sputter and delay ("until we can safely duel outside the city gates") and basically give good RP long enough for the DM to introduce the Cardinal's Guard, giving the new PC a chance to prove himself.

It's a fine line to walk. The situation in The Gamers, like most of the others, is funny because it bears such a close relationship to one way things might work out if the DM and players are lazy.

 

[Arnwyn]

Generally, we go a long long ways to integrate a new party member... usually (though certainly not always) it's just not worth the hassle of getting the new guy in. In fact, our group has a catch-phrase for whenever a new character is introduced to the group:

"Yadda yadda yadda, we all love each other".

 

[kirinke]

heh. my current character (a fighter/cleric) was dominated by a naga. the rest of the group bargined for her release and due to an elvish sense of nobility, insisted she stick around until she repaid the debt. ^)^.

it was a blast to roleplay fighting the domination-spell. basically she sang gnomish road-trip songs based along the lines of 99 bottles of ale on the wall, a hole in the bottom of the sea, this old man etc.

 

[Rel]

For the most part we go out of our way to embrace a new PC even if we have to stretch credibility a bit to do so. It usually isn't hard because everybody pretty much tries to build characters who are going to fit well into an ongoing plot anyway. But there was this one time...

It was probably a dozen years ago and a roomate and I saw an ad up at a gaming store for somebody who wanted to run a Champions campaign. We called him, met him and it seemed like a reasonably good fit. Then character creation time came.

My friend and I both put a lot of work into making characters that had powers that fit together under a unified theme and had a lot of backstory replete with hooks for future adventures and plotlines. But another guy who was going to be playing made this PC up, pretty much on the spot, who was probably the most min-maxed PC I've ever seen, complete with a hodge-podge of super powers that he got from "cosmic rays or something" (I swear that is exactly what he said).

The GM in question had already sort of introduced my friend and I to the campaign background while the third guy was still making his character. So he decided that the two of us would have a history of being a team and were scoping out Cosmic Boy as a prospect for adding to our Super Group. We went to meet him at a warehouse with the idea being that we'd give him a little work out to see if his powers were up to snuff. Honestly I was a bit afraid that he'd waste us with his pimped out, min-maxed character.

My fears were unfounded however as we got the drop on him and completely kicked his butt in just a couple of rounds. Then we proceeded to give him some crap about how easily we'd stomped him and that he needed to toughen up if he was going to fight crime and stuff. The guy was so upset at how his point-pile of a character had been humiliated that he more or less left and never came back.

We sort of felt bad about that but the GM was rather glad we'd run him off because the guy was already trying to rules lawyer him before we'd even started playing the first session.

Probably not my most shining moment as a player but I do chuckle a bit at the memory. Oh well, color me a light shade of Chaotic Neutral.

 

[Aeric]

I'm currently playing through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, which has a fairly high rate of PC turnover, so we have to deal with introducing new PCs a lot. One of the first new characters was a half-orc fighter who had been petrified by a basilisk in one of the rooms. My wizard cast stone to flesh on him, and he pledged his loyalty to me, not unlike a Wookie life-debt from Star Wars. That was fun while it lasted.

The next character to come into the group was an elven fighter. We found him chained up in a cell waiting to be tortured or sacrificed. He claimed that he was in the temple looking for his sister, who had been spirited off by the cult some years ago. He checked out with the paladin, so we let him join our party--at which point he immediately started having personality conflicts with most of the rest of the group. He even pointed a (notched and drawn) arrow at the paladin during an arguement over whether or not we should kill some juvenile orcs we had come across. But we kept him, because he was a PC.

Another PC who was particularly annoying was the halfling rogue. She insisted on trying to pull some kind of B&E job every time we went to town for supplies, and couldn't understand that a town of 500 people didn't have a Thieves' Guild. She was also a follower of Olidammara (sic?), which in her mind meant she had to play pranks on the rest of us, sometimes at inopportune times. We warned her innumerous times about doing this, but she never really stopped. We all hated her to some degree, including the DM, and we were just waiting for an excuse to dump her.

Once the player stopped showing up due to scheduling reasons, a new character (a half-orc barbarian) killed her in her sleep for taking his backpack and putting it up in a tree. We sort of let it slide (the paladin was long gone by this point) because we all hated her anyways, but my character (now a NG cleric) insisted we return to town so I could raise her. We paid for the material components of the raise from the gold she had been skimming off the top since the game began, and after she was alive again we booted her from the party. But we kept the half-orc despite his murderous tendencies, more because he was a PC than anything else.