How many practice sessions did you have?

[Zustiur]

You should have said that your characters soul refuses to return from the afterlife - perfectly acceptable; the soul has to want to be raised.

I nearly did. At the time I still wanted to see out the character background I'd written. By the end of KOTS I was convinced I'd never be satisfied with
a) How long it was taking to resolve my character's background issues
b) What the DM had in mind for doing so
c) Continuing to play a character that always missed
My new character has the following key benefits which made the decision to finally switch very easy indeed:
a) I built him after learning the rules, and seeing exactly where I went wrong with the first character
b) I gave him no background history that needed to be resolved (by this point I'd realized that my DM doesn't deviate enough from modules to deal with issues like that)
c) I got to test him out in what was more of a one-shot game than our original 'practice' game.

Something similar happened in a more recent session - the paladin was killed, and I could see the player was getting excited about playing something new, until he realized just how easily and soon we could raise his character. He looked quite disappointed, but seems to have got over it. While it took an hour or so to finish that combat and resolve the role-play issues of getting him raised, he was essentially raised immediately after the battle. One character simply ponied up the coin she had on hand, and he was back.

Call me old fashioned by I preferred raise dead when you couldn't afford it at low levels.


Incidentally my original 'practice session' was the kobold hall, which we didn't complete, and the events did count as part of the campaign.

 

[Iron Sky]

We had many many practice sessions:

First, three or four one-shot test combats that we ran based off pre-release rules accumulated here (the reason I found EnWorld in the first place).

Then we did a two-level test game that one of my buddies ran.

After that, he finally decided he was going to run a campaign, ran that up to level 16.

Then he took a break, played an online FG2 game that I ran up to level 3. FG2 didn't work out for us, so I started a new campaign at level 3 that's now at level 8.

All the previous players carried over except for one, who, after 2 test combats said he'd made up his mind about 4e and would never play it. One of our other player's brothers took his place during the FG2 game and we added our new roommate in at level 10 in the first campaign.

 

[Nightson]

The easy raise dead is for the players who want to play their characters, if you don't want to play them then just change. It's a game, it's meant to be fun, there's nothing abusive about getting a new character when an old ones dies.


I started my campaign session one but gave people pretty much unlimited room to change any mechanical defect they felt got in the way of their character.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I ran Raiders of Oakhurst with pregens and rules downloaded from here before release and then straight into Keep on the Shadowfel as soon as it came out.
I am pretty liberal about rebuilds or replacing characters so far it has worked out quite well.

 

[delericho]

We ran a single test session, and decided the game wasn't for us. (A couple of reasons - we didn't care for the power structure, and combats took too long for our taste. As the first of these is fairly fundamental to the game, it isn't really a case of tweaking it to fit.) We did, however, agree that it might play better with more players, so agreed to at least one more test session if and when we can recruit two more players. If we had decided to adopt 4e, we would have started a full campaign after that point, with new characters brought in.

(In fact, with the test session we were deliberately testing the mechanics, so there was no role-playing as such, any characterisation was deliberately wafer-thin, and every monster was there to be killed. This works for a test, but would be a poor start for one of my campaigns.)

When we get to Pathfinder, we'll use the same strategy - a single test session, and then a full campaign at some later point if the game meets with our approval.

However, regarding rebuilds:

My stance depends on how extreme the changes a player wants to make to his character, and why he wants to make them.

For most of my players, if they find they've taken some skill/feat/spell/power that they've since found doesn't really help their character, or if they're suffering because of some poor choices, I'll generally allow them to make some (fairly minor) changes to their character - swapping the occasional feat out for another, of whatever.

I do have one resident power-gamer, with whom I have to be a bit more wary. If he comes to me with a bunch of proposed changes, I do have to consider whether he has simply found some new way to squeeze yet one more "+1" out of the system. If this is the case, I'll generally resist the change.

If a player is simply not happy with his character on some fundamental level (he wants to play an Elf instead of a Dwarf, or a Rogue instead of a Cleric), then he always has the right to simply retire the existing character and bring in a new one (at the same XP total as the rest of the group, and equipped per the DMG wealth-per-level guidelines (3.5e; would be the equivalent rules for equipping characters in 4e)). I've never had a problem with a player constantly switching characters with my current group; if there was such an issue it would probably be a sign of a problem player, and so cause to eject the offender.

(One slight oddity with a recent Star Wars Saga campaign - the game came to a neat "season break" recently. For the restart, I have offered my players the chance to rebuild their characters from scratch. The only caveat is that the core of the character must remain the same, so the Ithorian Jedi has to remain an Ithorian Jedi, and so on. However, this is a slightly unusual situation.)

I'm not keen on formal "retraining" rules (as in the 3.5e PHB2). These strike me as an attempt to formalise a process that is generally better handled by informal agreement by player and DM. YMMV, of course.

 

[Jhaelen]

We took a week off to give 4E a try and played it for about five (relatively short) sessions. This was enough to complete the first part of the 'Ashen Crown' adventure and convince all of us that we liked the system. Over the course of this week we noticed a significant improvement regarding how long it took us to complete a combat encounter.

It really does take a while to get to know your options and powers.

After that, two players mentioned they wanted to rebuild their characters because they weren't happy with their power selection (wizard) or build (fighter) and one player wanted to try a different class/role (cleric).

The barbarian and the bard player were quite happy with their choice; I'm not sure about the warlord player who seemed to want to continue playing her character at least for a while and the ranger player who wasn't a regular player from my 3E group (and in fact new to rpg) didn't seem to be interested in continuing to play.

Since it's recommended to keep all pcs at the same level at all time, I don't think I would mind players switching characters between adventures or even sessions as often as they like. If they can find an in-character reason for the switch, that's fine for me. There's no point in continuing to play a character you don't enjoy playing.

 

[filthgrinder]

I nearly did. At the time I still wanted to see out the character background I'd written. By the end of KOTS I was convinced I'd never be satisfied with
a) How long it was taking to resolve my character's background issues
b) What the DM had in mind for doing so
c) Continuing to play a character that always missed
My new character has the following key benefits which made the decision to finally switch very easy indeed:
a) I built him after learning the rules, and seeing exactly where I went wrong with the first character
b) I gave him no background history that needed to be resolved (by this point I'd realized that my DM doesn't deviate enough from modules to deal with issues like that)
c) I got to test him out in what was more of a one-shot game than our original 'practice' game.

Something similar happened in a more recent session - the paladin was killed, and I could see the player was getting excited about playing something new, until he realized just how easily and soon we could raise his character. He looked quite disappointed, but seems to have got over it. While it took an hour or so to finish that combat and resolve the role-play issues of getting him raised, he was essentially raised immediately after the battle. One character simply ponied up the coin she had on hand, and he was back.

Call me old fashioned by I preferred raise dead when you couldn't afford it at low levels.

It seems like a lot of your problems with 4E could be solved with a different DM. You mentioned that you created a character with an interesting backstory that your DM ignored. That led you to want to play a different character as well. That is pretty edition independent.

The "easy" raise dead ritual is to make it available to players who do lose their character but want to still play the same character. If one of my players has a character that dies, I'm more than willing to let them just stay dead. The fact that there are players in your group who want to play new characters but aren't allowed seems very cruel and "unfun", and against the very premise of the game in general.

Maybe if you just have a chat with your DM things would work out better. One of my players was playing a dragonborn paladin and felt his character wasn't working out. So he made a warforged warden and came up with a cool backstory, and we worked that into the location the party currently was located. Since two sessions before the switch they defeated a vampire cleric of Bane and taken his sword, I had changed the sword to a sentient blade and had it consume the soul of the paladin and turned him into a future villian for the party to face.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
34+ sessions into the campaign, and I'll be a little more stern about it, but everyone seems very happy with their PC's and the normal retraining rules are good enough for them to fix any niggly little irritations that might develop.

At the request of one of my players, I have built a kind of "guest-shot" clause into the campaign, which will give my guys the chance to trial a completely different PC for a session or two, giving them a chance to experiment with the many options now open to them in 4E. The only stipulation I make is that this is a planned event, and must fit seamlessly into the campaign -- i.e. they can't turn up one week with a new character sheet and just expect to run it. So far no-one has taken me up on this, which I take as a good sign.

Ooo, I like this idea. Consider it yoinked!

 

[Anand]

First, three or four one-shot test combats that we ran based off pre-release rules accumulated here (the reason I found EnWorld in the first place).

I also run two "play-test" sessions, so we could learn the basics, and evaluate the ruleset. Some people liked, other didn't.

Couple of weeks later, our gift's set arrived, and we started a simple "beta"-campaign, that lasted about 5 sessions, and finally began our current (at the 16th session) FR campaign.

Everyone's enjoying the game nowadays. I like the guest-char idea, I'll try to propose that to my players.

 

[Obryn]

I ran the Gameday adventure for my players the week after I both played in and ran it at my LGS. We used pregens, so everyone got a feel at least for how the game worked.

I allowed free, zero-loss character swaps and total rebuilds after the first two adventures. With a new game - especially one where new stuff is coming out all the time - I didn't want my players stuck in the same position as the OP - that is, being stuck with a character they hated because they didn't have a firm rules foundation before making their first PC.

Now that everyone's 12th level, we're mostly sticking with the same PCs, and there's a minor XP penalty for switching to a new character. Still, at this point, everyone's pretty happy with their PCs and it shouldn't be an issue.

-O