Warstories is the name I gave to a short series of articles meant to spark discussions and advice amongst DM’s and players. With the series, I hope to tackle common problems that crop up during the game, and see how other people deal with them at their table. This is the fifth of such articles.
Some of my players are getting the itch. They’ve been playing their characters for enough time now that they want to sample other classes. Unfortunately for me, when I first crafted my campaign story arc, I made it too dependent on certain players being around, which I find to be a big mistake.
We only play every other week for a few hours at a time and don’t have the luxury of a weekly marathon game. Having said that, it would be really selfish of me to say “no” if a player tells me he wants to bring in a X class of X race, even if it doesn’t fit my story. I think he deserves the right to have fun too, it’s his game as much as it is mine, and I should find a way to make it happen. The game isn’t just for me, and if playing drow assassins seems like it would be fun for you, and you want to try the class, it’s my job to figure out how it fits. Being part of a long running campaign shouldn’t be like wearing a straight-jacket, locking you into the same class for 30 levels, (unless you want to).
So I’m leaning towards the idea that my story needs be served by having a pool of characters being the heroes of the world, rather than just 7 guys. This way when there’s a natural break point in the story characters can swap out PC’s and bring other classes in and out of the game, the story progresses, and they get to sample all the goods that the game has to offer the players.
My job now is to find a way to make it happen, as I don’t have a “Hall of Justice” type place where there are heroes loitering around waiting for their turn to go kill monsters and take their stuff. That’s why maybe I’m leaning towards natural breaks in story, rather than all of them working for the same groups of people or whatever. Mini-campaigns for other groups of adventurers, or maybe the “main” heroes actually go out and recruit the other band of heroes and brief them on matters… Who knows where I can take this… I do think it’ll be more fun for the players to have the liberty to swap characters in and out, and it’ll keep me on my toes as a DM.
We DM’s get to play multiple NPC’s, sample tons of monsters, and have tons of variety with every session. It’s only fair that player’s get it too if they want it.
What do you think?
www. Newbie DM .com 
Paul
December 4, 2009
As I mentioned on twitter, I like this idea and have thought about it myself. It would cause character development would tend to fall by the wayside, but so does boredom with a character. I hope you’re able to give it a try and let us know how it goes.
Sean Brady
December 4, 2009
We are talking a little bit about new PC’s now as well. I don’t think any one PC is hardwired into our game though, so it is not a big deal to have someone take up another class. I do like the idea of having a collection of PC’s that can be swapped in at appropriate points. I will bring this up with my group and see what the general thoughts are.
Jim
December 4, 2009
I’m dealing with this in my game now, and here’s how I’m making it work.
I’ve got one guy who plays a Genasi Swordmage who’s really been jonesing to play the DDi exclusive Assassin class. I completely agree with what you said in this post, the point is for the players to have fun and if experiencing a variety is more important to them than attaching themselves to one character for 30 levels, then who am I to deny them that? So, I’m brainstorming some ideas (with his input) about how the swordmage can go off-camera for a while…we won’t kill him off, but maybe he gets kidnapped, or has some kind of personal quest he has to fulfill while the main PCs are continuing on the “main quest”. We’ll do a few more sessions with the swordmage and hopefully come to some kind of climax where it makes sense for the character to depart or disappear. So he goes off to do his thing and we introduce the assassin character. If he ever gets wistful for his old swordmage, we can just collaboratively write a story as to what happened while he was away. I liken it to character creation in the development of a backstory – we can introduce all kinds of new hooks and potential villains based on the swordmages interim story.
I suppose this could get complicated as more characters do it, but my group is small (only 4 people) and I try to be meticulous with recording story elements and progression as my players and I run the game as if it’s an evolving fantasy novel. It may not work for all types of games, but as long as the players are committed to and engaged in story development it should be easy to work around the addition and subtraction of party members from the main story arc.
P.S. This is my first post on your blog newbie and I just wanted to say that it’s one of my favorite DMing resources for 4e. Keep it up.
Brent P. Newhall
December 4, 2009
Neat idea! Be interested to see how this works.
Another option is to let the player bring in that second character *as another PC*. So the player has to run both PCs at once, and agree to do so effectively.
newbiedm
December 4, 2009
Paul, character development can still happen, because as Jim points out, things can happen off camera with the other PC, that you as a Dm craft in conjunction with the player.
And Jim, welcome and thanks for the nice words!
Tyson J. Hayes
December 4, 2009
One other thing to consider is why is the player wanting to dump the character? If they aren’t satisfied with it is there a way you can keep them interested in the character by offering more character development? Obviously you don’t want to stop them from changing to another character but you do want to enrich their experience when playing and make the game as enjoyable as possible.
Chris
December 4, 2009
I think it’s hard not to have this problem, especially if your players have DDI subscriptions. I know, as a player, every time I see something new and shiny I want to roll one up and play it.
newbiedm
December 4, 2009
I completely agree Chris, that’s whats happening in my game. DDI is too cool.
Youseph Tanha
December 4, 2009
When my group started we played about 5 games. each game they created a new character. They did this to understand the different classes and characters better. Then on the 6th game they all selected a class and character they liked and the game has been going strong ever since.
Manny
December 4, 2009
There is an article in wizards on-line that deals w/ character career changes. it majkes a little sense. check it out.
Michael
December 4, 2009
As a player I certainly understand the desire to change characters, especially with DDI. I had a Revenant that I ditched as soon the Psion playtest came out. But I made the switch because that character wasn’t compatible play-wise with the rest of the party. I suppose I could have retooled the same character to work better, but I just wasn’t that in to him.
What I’m saying is props to you for letting your players change characters. We all want to come to the table each time and be excited to play.
You can use all the old ways of getting the party together to introduce a new character…you meet a stranger at the inn, someone comes up to you and looking to help fight the giants to avenge his father, etc. New characters can allow the DM to move the plot forward or in a new direction.
I’ve found it pretty rare that an old character comes back into the party when its been a continuous set of players. I’ve only had it really work once. Usually people stop playing a character because they’re bored or its not working out. It is nice to hear about the exploits of an old friend through an NPC later on, though.
DiceGolem
December 5, 2009
I feel it’s more a question of plot preparation and on-the-fly DM-ing than anything else. If you’ve tooled your campaign so that play hinges on a specific set of characters, I think you’ve wrote yourself into a corner.
Sure, each player needs to have incentive to get into the current quest, but sometimes the dice don’t roll their way. Perhaps they sacrifice themselves and they don’t want to be resurrected. In any case, you should always be careful to have natural breaking points where a player could introduce new characters without upsetting the game.
Rauthik
December 7, 2009
I find this ia a common problem for groups (this or having people leave and new people join through out a campaign). What I’ve done as a DM is worked on toning down the epic scale of the advenutes I create and working in a more episodic fashion. This way there are more natural break points, which also allows someone else to take up the screen for a few sessions if they like. In making shorter adventures, I allow the players to try their new PCs with out a real issue of continuity. Also, I keep my ‘grand story arc’ alive by linking the different adventures through clues or information they uncover through out. Granted not all the PCs would understand the signifigance of some things they find, but the Players do (yes, it’s metagaming but in a good way) and it is assummed that the other PCs fill them in. This makes the bigger story arc seem more grandiose and intensely thought out because it start affecting more and more PCs. By the time they get to the end of the story I originally thought up, it’s a huge deal and they are really into it.
The downside of making all the new characters and fitting them in is that it takes longer for PCs to reach higher levels because they are not played as much. Also, you wind up with people who don’t want to make new PCs but kind of have to since everyone else is making level 1 guys and their level 8 would just be too overpowered.
Level1Gamer
December 7, 2009
This is an interesting subject. I think a campaign with a “Hall of Justice” type of place could be kind of fun. There could be a great leader who is gathering heroes to face some pending cataclysm. Could be pretty fun and allow players to swap out characters. It would be hard to implement mid-campaign, though.
Also, the fact that this problem is brought about by the limited amount of time your group has to game brings up a larger issue. The wants/needs of a group that games for 5 to 6 hours every week are very different from a group that games several hours every other week or less. It affects how often want to switch characters, pacing, session design, etc. I’d like to see more discussion on how to cater to a group that meets less often.
Jason
December 7, 2009
Hi there. Great discussion. I’m also a “newbie” DM running my first campaign. We are currently in the middle of the Heroic tier. Here’s what I plan to do to address this issue:
In each tier of play, I will have 1 or 2 sessions where the characters need to learn some important back-story to move the plot forward. The way they will experience the story is to literally play out the characters from the past. In this way, the players can roll up all new characters of a certain level and play them. It will require some extra effort on my end to give them the appropriate amount of treasure for their level.
So, for example, my players are currently level 5. When they get to level 8, I plan to have an adventure where they “see” (experience) the events from 1,000 years ago. They’ll roll up their party (the heroes from legend) as level 8 heroes and play out a session that way.
The XP earned in that session will count towards their normal character PC’s.
When we do the same thing for the Paragon and Epic tiers, we may roll up ENTIRELY new characters, or possibly return to the same ones they did the first time. I’ll play it by ear and see how much they enjoy the first “Flashback” session.
Has anybody else done this?
LordVreeg
December 7, 2009
Much of my decision of what ruleset to use and what rules to change in a campaign is centered around this question of character development. And honestly one of the biggest reasons I got away from Class-based rulesets.
You are (in my humble opinion) totally right to want to make the game enjoyable for the players. But where in some systems, a fighter can go get initiated into a group of assassins and start learning those skills, in other systems, this necessitates a whole new character and a major break in the action/continuity.
Is there any way in your system that you are using that you can accomodate a natural learning experience to allow for this?
Shimmer
December 8, 2009
A potential problem I see with breaks in story continuity for one or more players, is that other players may have compensated their own skill sets for those players. Sure, we all “play what we want to,” but let’s face it, if no one else in the party took a certain skill, and you have an opportunity to fill that gap, you’ll probably take it. But then another PC goes around and creates a whole class based on that, and there can be conflict. That may be an extreme, but I know that players enjoy being good at something that no one else is, and frequent switching of characters may step on some toes.
I have a player who I feel also has “the itch.” He hasn’t said anything yet, but he’s known for being a little restless. Nothing wrong with that, but I HAVE set lots of stuff up for him, not only in the upcoming adventures, but way down the line. Sure that’s dangerous, but the way I see it is if he does decide to change characters, I may make a few tweaks here and there, but once he notices there are all these things that his previous character might have enjoyed, he may be drawn to picking them back up again. Of course I’ll cater to whatever the player is playing currently, but I’ve got a great story too, and I’m going to want to see it play out, with or without that original character. Heck, I might even play him out as a potential hero-turned-villain if he leaves him be for long.
There are lots of options, because d&d IS fluid.
Theodore
December 8, 2009
The first thing I labeled on the map of my main campaign city was the “Adventurer’s Guild”, Essentially just a bar/hostel/continuous job fair for those who make a living by risking their lives.
Though I hadn’t really planned it that way, having this in the campaign world would make switching out heroes relatively easy… Just head back to the guild and trade out PCs at the end of the adventure.
Another option is let one of the Hench-folk step up to bat, perhaps revealing abilities previously hidden. The “Main” PC is still there, just faded into the background while Henchy gets his groove on. Once the “7-adventure Itch” runs it’s course, the Follower goes back to being just that, a follower, and the main PC steps back to the fore.
RoudVolf
December 9, 2009
In my campaign I am planning to use a major “sponsor of adventures” (which I am planning to be a low profile member of the Wynarn University on Fairhaven on the Eberron Campaign Setting) who sign contracts with a lot of adventurers to find some riches and treasures which will all be tied to a major plot connected to a big event in the world’s past (in this case the Day of Mourning, to the ones who know Eberron it is the single most important event of the last year… so there is a VERY good reason for someone want to sponsor a lot of adventurers). All adventures will happen in parallel which makes the char advancement equal for all groups. Of course shit could happen – some adventurers of the other groups leaving the cause for other sponsors or to sponsor themselves or even dying – and some new adventurers could come into play – the players possible new characters. It would be neat as they would have already probably met the other characters at least once at the sponsor’s enclave (Wynarn University). Of course players could just do what they want and create a new char not sponsored by the patron and even play out a villain who repented which wouldn’t be too difficult to adapt.
I think it is perfectly fine to introduce new chars to the campaign without stopping it and starting a new thing and it is also perfectly fine to create chars with higher level (DMG teaches how for a reason, right?) if that is consonant to the players fun. The “Say yes” philosophy is really an evolution to role playing because it gives an active part to the players in creating the major story and can even make they want to DM eventually.
Philo Pharynx
December 9, 2009
Newbie, it sounds like you have some epic plot threads. Often in those kinds of games it can seem as if there’s more evil to fight than one group can handle. I suggest having a second group of characters. Perhaps some of them are friends or relatives of the PC’s. Or former henchmen. This lets everybody try something different. In some cases you can switch characters between the groups, or have people come and go. It also lets you try unusual parties without risking your game. In one world, we had our normal group and the stealth group. The stealth group (four halflings, a gnome and a token human) was used for different types of missions. It does mean twice the prep, but you’ll also have twice the time to do it.
by_the_sword
December 11, 2009
Run a 4e version of “Tomb of Horrors”. That ought to give each player a chance to play several different characters.
TitoElito
January 16, 2010
Hi, I’ve never DMed before, although I want to eventually. Right now I’m in a game with a DM who just started playing DND in 4e, and it has been really great. We started off with a party of 3 doing the Scales of War campaign, but then my brother left for a year to Korea, so there were just two players, so at that time both of us made a secondary character and played them both at the same time, so that there was a party of 4.
It worked out really well, and our DM even let us make a kind of “home base” for our adventuring group in the city. When we got two other people to join the group, the one guy retired his other character, but the DM let me keep mine and just say what I wanted her to be working on within the city while the rest of the party was off adventuring. At about 6th or 7th level, I switched characters, and gave the DM a plan about what I want my other character to do while the secondary party is off adventuring.
Having a pool of characters like this is important, and because I’m only sticking to two, I’ve had decent chances for character development as well, and I intend on keeping them for the entire course of the campaign (if they live that long).
jafaro6
August 18, 2010
I haven’t tried this in play yet (its something I’m considering for my upcoming D&D campaign) but I always thought a pool of characters as a large group that were seperated by frequent plot devices could be an easy way to let the players play multiple characters. The basic idea being that each player creates a couple characters (lets say four, one of each archetype ie: defender, striker, etc…) that they think might be interesting to play.
At the begginning of the story and every level or two or appropriate break in the plot, the whole gang gets together (with five players you’re looking at a group of 20). The players talk about what they want to do and the different things that need to be done to accomplish that (ie: We want to stop the invading army, to do that we need to send heroes to rally troops and defend at the bridge, the moutain pass, the main highway and the port).
The players decide which portion of the adventure they want to do and they split the parties four ways, taking the character they would like to play for the next few sessions off to whatever adventure the group wants to play. They then play that character until they all meet up again after that major plot point. The activities of the “NPC” characters (ie: the player characters that are not being actively controlled by the players) gets resolved off screen by the GM (or, I supposse, you could jump between multiple parties to let the group experience different parts of the story) and the GM lets the party know what their other characters had been up to and their outcome.
They then decide what to do next, break up into parties, rinse, repeat. The trick would be keeping the different characters comparible. Off screen characters would need to accumulate XP and magical gear at the same rate as the main characters so there wouldn’t be a power difference that might prevent a player from using them. There’s also the issue of players not knowing how to play their other classes if they spent the first five levels playing a fighter and then tried to switch to a sorcerer.
Cord the Seeker
October 2, 2010
I’m coming to this party late, but I thought it was a good concept and have used it once before.
A few years back, I ran an Arcana Evolved campaign, and it was a sort of a Mission: Impossible kind of thing with a rotating cast of characters. There was a common pool of characters, representing every race and class in the game, and for each adventure players would choose appropriate characters (or sometimes just one they wanted to play for a while). It worked really well because they were all new to AE and this gave them opportunity to try out all the classes and races.
I think this idea has a lot of potential in a 4E game, what with new content always coming out. I know that I keep wanting to replace my current warlock with something else as the fancy takes me.
dldzioba
March 9, 2011
Strangely, my group has never run into this issue. We play our characters until the campaign ends or until they die, whichever comes first. I think it is highly dependent on the group, but you could try what we did when we didn’t have enough players for a Shadowrun game. Each player got two characters, the only rule was you can only have one character in a scene.
Jason
August 18, 2011
Ive been gaming for some time and iI personally love to play all different types of characters. During a long singular campaign it can be difficult to work in though. The natural progression of a story line is that the difficulty level increases proportionaly with the player characters increasing abilities and experience. This makes it difficult when a character starts over again with a new character in the middle of a game…. Here was my fix. Introducing the “generation” character. To play another character the player would adopt a new character (but doesnt get to play it yet). Really it can be gained by any manor, having a baby, adopting a needy non player character, etc, etc, etc. The player then donates to the needy cause, sending money, buying special weapons, paying for training and any other thing the player wants to prepair the next “generation” character for. When the player is ready to start the new character, the old one retires. (He can always come out of retirement) Vacation, writing memoirs, whatever… Leave it up to the player. Now you have a starting character but a well prepaired starting character that can still have natural progression and build up of experience through the game without so much offset in the story line.
Zach
September 20, 2011
This sounds like a really good idea.
Another idea I’ve considered is running with the coterie theme from Ars Magica. The setup in that game is that the PC’s all effectively play three characters (if I recall, I’ve only heard about the idea, never actually ran it), the first and foremost being a wizard. In this world wizards really *are* more powerful than everyone else. Period. There is no balance. These wizards would travel with their coterie which would consist of a follower that could be a body guard, or wet works guy, more or less your standard non-wizard adventurer. They’d also have their servants or “Grogs” I think they were called (again, could be wrong). They would travel the land pursuing their agenda with others of their ilk. Adventures were designed to take all three characters into account, the Wizard might be exploring an ancient library with his fellows while the henchman went about town investigating the murder of one of his friends, meanwhile the grogs might find they have to defend the camp from bandits while the heavy hitters are out playing.
Unfortunately every time I’ve been in a gaming store they’ve been completely out of the most recent edition of Ars Magica so I haven’t been able to read up on this fascinating style of play. Still, might be worth looking into!
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January 1, 2013
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