It can happen from time to time. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, the steps you take to prevent it, sometimes a character just has to be changed mid-campaign. Characters die despite the best efforts of the healer, people get captured and sold into forced slavery, dragon slaying gets outsourced to a firm from India, or players just change their mind. The reasons vary but the end result is always the same and now it’s up to not just you to deal with it but the players as well. First though is how you are going to deal with it. Depending on how it is handled by you the DM can set the tone for how everyone else will cope with it.
The next easiest to deal with by far is character death though. The character is dead, you obviously did your job quite well (Kudo’s to you on a death), the survivors say a few words and loot the corpse. Time to move on and introduce the new character. At the opposite end of the spectrum though is when a player just plain changes his mind and insists on a new character. That can be a tricksy one to handle. Not only do you have to figure out how to bring the new character in and up to speed, you have to deal with how to get rid of the old one as well.
I recently ran into this myself with one of the players in my D&D group. They realized that not speaking Common and being a bigot as well made the game not only hard to roleplay but a bit boring to boot. So now they want a new character. Problems with group balance aside I am left to decide how to handle the switch as well as trying to be as fair as possible for what to allow with the new characters creation. Obviously the players aren’t first level anymore and they have one or two nice little magical baubles they are lugging around. So do I give let the player recreate at the same experience as his current character. And what about the gear on his character? Obviously the player is going to want it to move over to his new character but is that exactly fair?
Thankfully there are rules for creating a character at higher than first level so at least that part is taken care of. As far as gear goes on the current character it is quite obvious it would be lost to him. It’s not like the new character is going to walk into the dungeon mid run, the old one will hand everything over, fill him in on the situation and go home for the day like it was a shift changeover. So that problem taken care of. But still it leaves the question of how to do the transition of the actual characters themselves.
Remember, be creative! You are telling a story here above all else. There is no unwritten rule that states that all characters must take up where the old one left off. This development actually opened my mind up to a ton of possibilities.
- Death – Easiest and quickest would be for the character to die. It’s simple, it’s efficient, and every DM deep down wants to kill their players. With a little bit of work you can even get the players to assist you in killing their compatriot. Maybe there is a cleric of Kelemvor in the group. Easy as pie to give them a vision showing that it is time for the doomed person to move onto the next plane.
- Capture – Monsters take prisoners all the time. Hobgoblins need slaves, Dragons need food, Beholders need new statues, Drow need sacrifices. The possibilities are endless here quite honestly.
- Betrayal – Maybe that evil god was right after all and killing your companions is the way to go to get that power they offered you. Perhaps they were a plant all along just waiting for the right moment to spring into action.
- Parting of Ways – People move on. Plain and simple. The groups paths aren’t always going to lead them down the same road. Heroes get recalled back to their hometowns, military service calls upon them, any number of things.
Don’t be to quick to kill off a character though. It could be beneficial to find another way to get rid of the character and use it at a later date. Even if you do kill it off though nothing is to say that death has to be permanent or even real. Former characters can sometimes make the best NPC’s at a later time whether they still be for the forces of good or now serving the forces of darkness is up to you.
Now that you have managed to get rid of a character the question remains how do you bring in the new character. There are several options for this at your disposal for bringing it in.
- Hired Gun – Sometimes you just need someone with a specific skillset to take care of a problem. Mercenary doesn’t always need to just be a hired sword.
- Ambassador – Someone who is sent along with the group to help create a peaceful resolution to a system.
- Captive – Being captured doesn’t always have to end with being eaten by the dragon. PC’s can show up just in the nick of time and save the captured character from certain doom.
- Fellow Adventurer – Who is to say that the PC’s have to always be the only ones in the dungeon. It only makes sense that there is a chance someone else is poking around trying to destroy that goblin warchief.
No matter which way you go there are a ton of options for dealing with this kind of situation. Hopefully this will give someone some ideas. If anyone has any suggestions for how else to deal with this feel or found this helpful free to drop a comment.
