This Feature is part of my ongoing True Campaign Managery course. If you haven’t been following it from the beginning — or have no idea what the hell I’m talking about — use The True Campaign Managery Course Index to catch up.

This Feature is part of a course module called True Mechanical Managery. It’s all about deciding in advance how to use your chosen system’s rules to give your campaign the best chance of not crashing and burning before you’re ready to crash it and burn it.

True Mechanical Managery: Character Replacement Policies I

Last time — whenever the hell that was — I hinted that an issue most Campaign Managers — True or otherwise — eventually have to deal with is bringing new characters into the middle of the campaign. Naturally that first came up during my lesson about Character Death. Unless you’re running a hardcore permadeath campaign where dead characters’ players have to quit the group — which is awesome, by the way — you’re gonna need a replacement character every time you put a character sheet through the paper shredder.

But character death ain’t the only thing that might create a need for a new character. As I explained some time ago, smart Game Masters and True Campaign Managers don’t stop their players from retiring characters and starting fresh — that discussion sure rustled some panties, huh — as smart Game Masters let players freely retire their characters, you might find yourself introducing a replacement character even if there’s no imaginary blood on your hands.

Then, too, there’s always the possibility that you might finally break your coworker’s spirit after weeks or months of work and they’ll agree to give your pretend elf game a try. New players need characters too.

The point is that True Campaign Managers know they might someday have to bring a new character into a campaign-in-progress and — as has been established as pretty much the entire frigging point of this whole course in True Campaign Managery — True Campaign Managers always have a plan for handling any tricky issue that’s reasonably and practically predictable. Which this issue absolutely is. Seriously! How the hell are Game Masters always blindsided by the fact that, in a game that explicitly has rules for character death, they might have to replace a character? Why aren’t you dumbasses ever ready for that?

Sorry…

As with previous True Mechanical Managery lessons, this one comes in two parts. Unlike previous lessons, however, I’m actually going to tell you outright that there are objectively correct answers to some of these questions. There are certain elements of your Character Replacement Policy that shouldn’t depend on the game you’re running or your personal preferences and explaining them provides a good lesson about compromising with your game system. That said, I know you dumbasses don’t like being told what to do and that this course is about helping you figure out how to run the campaign you think you want and give it the best chance to succeed, so I’ll keep all that, “Here’s the actual right answer” crap to the second part.

In the first part of this lesson — the part you’re reading right now — I’m going to tell you how to come up with the Character Replacement Policy you think you want based on the system you’ve chosen and the campaign you’ve envisioned.

Cool?

I don’t know why I asked; I don’t care what you think is cool. I’m doing what I said I’d do.

Let’s get to it.

Thinking Through Your Character Replacement Policy

So…

You’ve got a campaign running and suddenly, one day, you’ve got a player without a character. How did that happen? It literally doesn’t matter. What matters is you’ve got to fix that crap because players can’t play without characters. That’s one of the most basic, fundamental rules of tabletop roleplaying gaming: you need a character to play the game.

Hypothetically, this shouldn’t be a problem at all. If you’ve already got a campaign running, you must have gotten through character creation at least once already, right? You know what it takes. In theory, creating a replacement character shouldn’t be any different from creating a starting character. In the second part, I’ll explain why that’s actually true, by the way, and how in a perfect world, you wouldn’t need a Character Replacement Policy, but we don’t live in that perfect world.

My point is that creating replacement characters should work just like creating any characters, but you and I both know that ain’t how it be. You’re not new to this whole Game Mastering thing. You know, for one thing, that there’s going to be questions about the levels and treasure and other advancements the replacement character might be entitled to. You also know that you might have to impose some limits on the players’ character generation choices when they make replacement characters. Finally, you know that getting a new character into an ongoing game is a huge-ass issue in itself.

Here’s the thing though…

I’m awesome.

Why do I bring up that totally obvious fact you’re all definitely aware of by now? It’s because I’ve actually walked you through most of these issues already in previous lessons. At least, I’ve armed you already to think through them. This means all it’ll take is a brief 750-word discussion of each issue to arm you to come up with your own Character Replacement Policy.

Shut up; that’s brief.

You’re welcome.

Advanced Characters for Advanced Players

The first issue your Character Replacement Policy has to hit arises from the fact that characters grow as they progress through the game. I think I mentioned something like that in my entire 7,500-word discussion of Experience and Advancement Systems in roleplaying games. Not only that, but I also told you to do a pretty deep analysis of your chosen game of choice’s Experience and Advancement System and everything that bumps against it. Thus, you should already know everything that makes an advanced character different from a starting character in your game system du jour. If you don’t, get to it. Start listing everything that changes on the character sheet as the players play the game.

For example, in Dungeons & Dragons, most of the major changes over time that happen to the character sheet are covered in that system’s Experience and Level-Up System. Really, to make an advanced character in modern D&D a player just has to make a 1st level character and then level it up however many times are necessary just as if they were gaining levels through play.

Even in a game like Savage Worlds where the players use the points they earn to buy improvements directly and the character’s Rank increases based on how many points have been spent, players can still make advanced characters just by making a starting character and then spending one Advance at a time.

In games like Pathfinder and some older editions of D&D, characters also have advanced equipment that improves their base stats and abilities. I ain’t saying that crap doesn’t exist in the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not correlated to character advancement the way it is in Pathfinder or D&D v.3.5. That’s another change to note.

If your game system of preference has other elements that change through play — for good or ill — you’ll want to note them as well. In some systems, characters gain Glory, Reputation, or Prestige and they can lose Sanity and suffer permanent Injuries and other crap like that. It might sound crazy, but there could be — and should be — a chance that advanced characters start play with depleted Sanity or permanent Injuries.

The point is to really think through everything that changes as a character in your game system goes through the adventuring mill — good and bad — so you know the difference between an advanced character and a starting character. Fortunately, many game systems are pretty good about spelling out this shit and telling you what matters and what doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t review your system carefully.

Once you know how to adjust a starting character to an advanced character, you can decide how advanced replacement characters should be. Should they be on par with the characters they’re replacing or the party they’re joining? Should they be a little weaker? Should they not be advanced at all? That’s an answer too.

This is all about Character Parity. That is, it’s about how the replacement character’s advancement compares to that of the party they are joining. Really, Character Parity should be all it’s about. If the advanced character is replacing a dead or retired character, the previous character’s advancement shouldn’t matter at all. The issue is Character Parity with the party, not with the corpse.

Of course, your system might have something to say about Character Parity, but you’ve analyzed that too, haven’t you? Remember back in the Experience and Advancement analysis when I called out what the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014 Edition) had to say about Character Parity? It noted, explicitly, that the game will start to break once the party members get outside a two-experience-level spread and it also notes that magical items don’t matter and aren’t part of the game balance.

If your system doesn’t explicitly discuss Character Parity, then it’s on you to notice how advancement imbalances affect the game and when they become a problem because this crap sets the boundaries within which you must work. No matter how much you might think it’s just right that every new character should start at 1st level if you’re running modern D&D, you can’t do that. It breaks the game.

The point is, though, that you’ve already done the legwork to figure out what advancement means and what your system lets you get away with in terms of Character Parity — if such things even matter — so you know how advanced or non-advanced replacement characters are allowed to be in your system. All you have to do now is decide the specific place you want replacement characters to land in your campaign. That’s as easy as saying, “Replacement characters in my modern D&D campaign always start one level below the lowest-level member of the party or two levels below the highest-level member of the party, whichever is higher.” Or, “Replacement characters always start at the same level as the party since the whole party is always at the same level.” Or whatever works for your campaign.

Your Menu Options Have Changed So Listen Carefully

Players pick from lots of options when making characters these days. Hell, in most modern systems, it’s fair to say they pick from too damned many options. That’s just what character generation is, right? But, for one reason or another, when players have to make characters for games already in progress, you — the Campaign Manager — might have to limit their choices. And this crap can get really situational.

Imagine, for example, your campaign started in some cosmopolitan trade city in the center of the world or some shit like that and your players were free to choose any race, class, background, career, template, or whatever from the core rules or any of three sourcebooks or whatever. But now, their adventures have taken them to an isolated frontier settlement in the heart of Celtigonia or Persiana or Romulan or Orientation or whatever analog for a real-life ancient culture you want. If someone dies, you might rightly need to limit their replacement character to options available in Pagan Fantasy Europe or from the Adventures in Arabia sourcebook or whatever to preserve the continuity.

You might remember I discussed the issue of preserving the continuity of the game even if it made things hard on players who got their characters killed back in the two-part lesson about Character Death. That’s a choice you have to make — it’s a choice you get to make — as a True Campaign Manager. You decide how important world continuity is and whether it overrides your players’ freedom of choice. You do what’s best for your campaign, not what the players want most.

But this campaign continuity crap ain’t the only reason why replacement characters tend to have a more limited option pool than starting characters. Some of it’s just down to how players tend to pick their options. At the start of a new campaign — if you let them communicate with each other — players tend to negotiate things like combat roles, skill specialties, and archetypes. Someone might say, “I like to be a front-line dude so I’d like to play a fighter, paladin, or a cleric or I could play a barbarian, but that ain’t my first choice.” Someone else might say, “I want to be the wilderness guy; I want to have all the survival skills.” When you’re making a new character to join an existing party — either because your previous character died or because you’re new to the game — you just don’t have the opportunity to do that anymore. Players usually won’t go so far as to say, “Well, I was the wilderness dude so I guess I have to make a replacement wilderness dude,” — and if you hear a player saying that crap you should correct them — but they will say things like, “The party has too many melee guys already so I’m not going to bring another melee fighter to the table.” That’s fine — it’s good really — but it is limiting. It’s really the player limiting his or her own choices.

But there’s another kind of limitation that can crop up and that’s to do with how you built the campaign at startup. Lots of Game Masters give their players a lot of freedom during starting character creation and then build or adjust the campaign to fit the players’ choices. I do that myself. But once the campaign’s actually up and running, you — the Campaign Managing Scenario Designing Game Master — just don’t have the same kind of freedom. You can’t really change the campaign to accommodate some player’s dumbass character or insert new personal quests or whatever. Again, this is down to how much you prioritize the integrity of the campaign over other factors.

If that last paragraph didn’t make it totally clear, let me make it explicit that all this crap about choice ain’t just about the options on the sheet. It’s not just about races, classes, archetypes, careers, equipment, or whatever players pick from a list to make a character. Everything you had players do to make their startup character has to be done for the replacements too. If you asked the players to come up with backstories, lands of origin, or personal motivations, so too must you also ask for the players to come up with those things as well too.

Man, I really have to cut it out with the nonstandard sentence constructions. That one really got away from me. Sorry.

My point is just that replacement characters have to be complete characters and you should have decided what complete means when you figured out what character creation entails. Don’t worry, by the way, we’re getting to that part of Campaign Managery.

That said, there might be exceptions to all this nonsense. Maybe you forced each player to develop a personal quest for their starting characters and built your game around that, but you can’t rebuild your campaign every time some dumbass gets their character killed and so you decide that replacement characters don’t get new personal quests. Instead, the player has to tie his replacement character to an existing quest or plotline.

What’s important is knowing precisely what makes a character complete and making sure your Replacement Character Policy addresses that, one way or another. That means you’ve got to make another list.

The problem here is that, as noted, any limitations or constraints you might impose on your players’ freedom to build their replacement characters are highly situational and context-sensitive. A lot depends on what the game allows at the moment the replacement character’s needed. You can’t plan for every eventuality and so your policy might have to state, explicitly, that you’ll work out the details as and when you need to. Like, for example, “If you must make a replacement character, you’ll be told what options are available to you at that time. Be warned they will always be more limited than the options you had at startup.” Or, maybe, “If you must make a replacement character, you must sit down with me and we will agree together on a character that works in the campaign at that time. It won’t be as simple as you choosing whatever you want from umpteen dozen options.”

Sometimes — as I’ve made totally clear before — that’s how a Policy be. They can’t always provide explicit answers, but Policies must at least have a clear plan of action and, if they’re going to impose constraints, costs, or consequences on players, the players should know to expect some kind of restrictions.

He Will Enter Our Story in 30 Seconds and Say, “Hello, Arthur”

Between determining how advanced replacement characters get to be — if at all — and how much freedom the players have to design their replacement characters — if any — you might think you’ve got a solid Character Replacement Policy. I’m sorry to tell you, though, champ that we ain’t done here yet. And you’d know that if you’d paid attention because I expressly listed three issues we had to cover and that’s only two. But don’t go getting your panties in a wad, this is just a rhetorical construction I often use to segue to the final item of an enumerated list of discussion points. Especially if it’s been at least a thousand words since I provided the list. That way, I do a little bit of recap and a little bit of callback and this just further shows how awesome I am. As I mentioned above.

Anyway…

The above crap gets you as far as a complete replacement character but it doesn’t address how you get that character into the game. Fortunately, that’s also something I already brought up when discussing all that Character Death crap. See? I wasn’t lying when I said I’d already laid the groundwork for every point in this lesson.

This is down, again, to that push-and-pull between the campaign’s integrity and the players’ needs. Remember that? Depending on the in-game situation, it can be tricky to work a new character into the game. You might need to finagle the in-game events to create an opportunity for a meet-cute between the current party and the replacement newbie. Moreover, to manage it in a reasonable amount of time, you might need to negotiate with currently participating players to get them to drop what they’re doing, say, and return to town to pick up a new recruit.

The issue is urgency, right? You don’t want to eff with your game’s integrity — at least not more than you’re okay with — and you don’t want to strongarm the players into changing their plans to handle a metagame need — and you shouldn’t ever be totally okay with that — but you definitely don’t want to leave someone out of play for too long. And this is where the circumstances necessitating the replacement actually do matter.

If you’re just giving a player an opportunity to retire and replace an existing character, you can do that on your schedule. The same’s true if you’re adding a new player. Yeah, an eager player shouldn’t have to wait too long to start play — give them too long to think about it and they might decide not to dedicate hours of every week to pretending to be an elf in someone else’s basement instead of having a real, rewarding, fulfilling life — an eager player shouldn’t have to wait too long to join the game, but their need still isn’t as urgent as the dumbass who’s sitting out of play because they got their stupid character killed.

This is yet another one of those context-sensitive, highly-specific-to-in-game-situations things you can’t totally plan for and so the best you can do is just set some expectations. In this case, there are two expectations to consider. First, you’ve got to tell people who need replacement characters how long a replacement can take. Second, you’ve got to warn the players that, to facilitate that, in extreme situations, the characters might be forced to make certain decisions to get replacement characters into play. That ain’t as bad as it sounds.

For example, I warn my players that if someone dies, we will all together — me included — work out what the party does next to facilitate working a replacement character into the party. I also warn them that any player who gets his character killed may be asked to sit out no more than one full session — in addition to time lost in the session they die and in the session, they’re waiting in the wings to enter the scene — and no more than that. Whatever I have to do to make that happen, I will.

Players who want to retire and replace their characters and new players who want to join the campaign get no such consideration. Retirements can wait until we’re between adventures and new players can enter when I’m able to work them in, but generally, no one will be stuck waiting more than two or three sessions for either to happen.

In any case, the player and I will work out, together, the specifics of the replacement character’s introduction and the player should expect to make any compromises I demand to preserve the integrity of the game and the agency of the party.

Once again: if you can’t be specific, you at least have to prove you’ve got a plan and warn the players of any constraints you’re going to impose.

Writing Your Policy and the Optional Next Lesson

And there you are; that’s everything you need to develop the Character Replacement Policy that suits you best. You know the issues, you know the steps, and by this point, you really should know how to think this shit through.

Make sure you know everything that character advancement entails before you start working on your policy. Whatever might change on a character sheet over time is potentially advancement. Also, make sure you know exactly what comprises a complete character in your campaign as you’ve defined it. Replacement characters have to be complete, after all, though some character aspects might be moot for replacement characters. Identify those.

Your Character Replacement Policy should specify how advanced a replacement character should be relative to the other characters in the party, not relative to the character they’re replacing. Your previous analysis of your system’s Experience and Advancement Rules will help you figure out what the system expects with regard to Character Parity and where the game breaks down. Based on that, come up with a mechanical process for generating replacement characters and note that you might have to limit your players’ character options or you might require your players to work directly with you to create replacement characters depending on how you prioritize the integrity of your game.

Finally, figure out what your players can expect from you when it comes time to introduce a replacement character, both in terms of time-out-of-play and in terms of forced in-game actions to finagle the replacement character’s introduction.

Communicate all of that crap as clearly as humanly possible with your dumbass players right up front so they can’t claim later you didn’t warn them. They won’t listen and they will make that claim, but they’ll be wrong. Moral victories are all you get as a Game Master.

It’s that easy. And if you want the freedom to do what’s right for you and live your own truth, you’re done with this Character Replacement shit. You can skip the next lesson; you won’t like it.

See, True Campaign Managers know that there’s really no personal preference or right for the campaign bullshit when it comes to developing a Character Replacement Policy. In terms of advancement and equipment, there’s an objectively, provably correct approach for nearly every roleplaying game and campaign and system ever. But lots of Game Masters hate hearing that. Moreover, lots of players don’t like the correct approach and most Game Masters are spineless pussies who don’t want to give their players the whining sads. Even the few Game Masters who know what’s right usually ruin it by compromising. Worse still, most game systems fight you on the correct approach at every turn. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get as close as you can to the objectively correct, ideal approach.

Moreover, working through this whole thing can help you get better at learning when and how you have to compromise with your game system. So that’s what I’ll be telling you about next time. At least those of you who have the balls to be told that, yes, there is actually sometimes one true way.

After that, it’s a bunch of lessons about Character Creation.