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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Blake" data-source="post: 3928700" data-attributes="member: 57267">Because that's where the money is.J. K. Rowling didn't suddenly introduce a new main character, or group, halfway through the Harry Potter stories.Nobody tunes in to their favorite TV show to find their favorite characters have been written off and replaced by new ones.Once a writer has established a hero that his audience loves, he sticks with it, because that's where the money is.And cut their own financial throats?It takes just as long to write 300 pages about some new hero as it takes to write 300 pages about an established one. It takes just as much of that auther's life to create that either novel.In exchange for spending a portion of his life writing the book, he gets a percentage of the book's sales.Wo, which should he do? Spend all that time to make a a few thousand dollars, or spend the same amount of time to make hundreds of thousands of dollars?No, it's easy to jsutfiy in many ways. Why didn't Gandalf and Elrond take the ring to Mount Doom and destroy it? Why didn't Elrond join the Fellowship? Why did Gandalf leave it (twice)?Bingo!It's not hard at all to justify missig heroes. They have lives too. Often they're working on the bigger problem, or a different problem, or the current problem just hasn't reached their attention yet. Or they just plain old think that the party of 8th level heroes can handle the troll dungeon and it would be beneath their effort, and embarrassing for that party, when the level 20 archmage shows up to upstage them - they have better things to do.When the beloved character isn't profitable any more, then it's time to retire him. How many Conan books were there? Sherlock Holmes stories? Tarzan? Superman comics?Until then, Write the novel, please the fans, and make the big bucks.It's not hard for a DM to work around it.</blockquote>

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