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 II

Today, I want to wrap up this Character Replacement Policy crap I started last lesson. I know some of you were expecting something different today, but that’ll have to wait…

Let me be straight with you: that title above? That’s a lie. This Feature ain’t about what it’s about and it’s really not even a True Campaign Managery thing. You can read it for what it is and take it at face value and it’ll totally work, but it might also come across to you like a pointless statement of the obvious. Either that or you’re just gonna hate it for suggesting there’s One True Way to run tabletop roleplaying games and it ain’t the way you’re doing things and I’m an asshole.

What this is really about is the intersection between Game Mastering, Campaign Management, Scenario Design, game mechanics, and the fundamental principles underlying all tabletop roleplaying games ever. So, you know, nothing major.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

The problem with being a galaxy-brained sexy gaming genius is that I always know the exact, correct answer to every gaming question anyone ever poses.

Why’s that a problem? Well, it’s a problem for two reasons. First, it’s a problem because most of the time, people who ask questions don’t want correct answers but, rather, they want validation. People are really insecure and they’d much rather be told they’re right than actually be right. Giving people correct answers just pisses them off most of the time. But that’s just my cross to bear. Especially on the Internet.

The second problem is that life is shit. Now, keep in mind that I only talk about tabletop roleplaying games. When I say, “Life is shit,” I only mean that in the context of pretend elf games. Real, actual life isn’t shit at all and it’s totally worth getting out of bed for every day. At least, that’s what my therapist keeps trying to tell me.

Correct answers aren’t actually super useful because they rarely work in the real-life world. At least, they rarely work in the real-life world of pretend elf gaming. So many things matter way more than truth in life. In tabletop roleplaying gaming life, that is. If a player’s angry, it doesn’t matter that you did things scrupulously fairly and by the book and defending your utterly unimpeachable position will get you a moral victory, but it won’t resolve the actual conflict. The real world is messy and people are people. At least, at the gaming table they are.

You might, for example, know the provably, self-evidently, objectively true and correct way to answer a question like, say, hypothetically, “What actual level should a replacement character start at and how many magical items should they get?” But if the dumbasses who designed the game system you’re running aren’t as smart as you — a problem I run into constantly — that correct answer might be totally freaking useless because you can’t actually implement it without breaking the game and making your players — and yourself — miserable. Worse yet, the correct answer might screw with the fundamental underpinnings of the entire tabletop roleplaying gaming medium.

Hypothetically.

You might think that makes correct answers totally useless. After all, if you can’t actually use the utterly, axiomatically, provably, unarguably correct solution to a problem, what’s the point in implementing any solution at all? You might as well just do nothing, right? In terms of your pretend elf game.

Yeah, that Perfect Solution Fallacy is a bitch, huh?

Seriously, though, it’s literally impossible — in gaming — to ever hit the perfect ideal for anything because you’re a mere human person Game Master. Ideals are always beyond your grasp and, to a lesser extent, mine. But, your reach — your Game Mastering reach; this isn’t life advice — your reach should always exceed your grasp. Ideals are important. You can’t ever really achieve them but you should get as close as reality lets you get.

The point is, that you should always approach any Game Mastering problem by first identifying the ideal, perfect solution, and only once you’re aimed in that direction should you look at the obstacles in your path. And here’s another problem I deal with as a brilliant gaming genius: I’m really tempted to brag about all of the different times and ways I’ve told you that over the many, many years I’ve been doing this shit. Fifteen years ago, for example, I launched this site by telling you to use your brain first and the rules second to adjudicate actions. A few months ago, I told you to start every Scenario Design with a vision of your Scenario and only when you had it should you consider the game’s rules and systems. I said the same thing about launching a Campaign, right? First, envision your ideal campaign, then see what real life — and real-life schedules — will let you get away with. And remember Game Design Über Alles?

But enough of my bragging — even though enough bragging is never enough when you’re as awesome as I am — and enough of this high-minded philosophical crap that only pertains to gaming. Let’s look at an actual, practical example. How about, I don’t know, let’s just pick a topic at random here… okay, I’ve got it… let’s use Advancement of Replacement Characters in tabletop roleplaying games to see this shit in practical action.

What Level Should a Replacement Character Start At?

Let’s do a little pop quiz, okay? I know you love those. Put your notes and rulebooks away and forget everything you know about your game system du jour. Let all of reality and all system-specific, context-sensitive concerns fade away until there’s nothing but your Game Mastering mind and the infinite void of Game Design space.

What level should a replacement character start at?

You and I both know there’s only one correct answer. Replacement characters should start at 1st-level. Or Novice Rank. Or whatever the hell passes for the lowest possible power level a character can possibly be in a given game. That is the unarguable, axiomatically correct power level for replacement characters.

It’s also the correct starting level for any campaign and any game ever, by the way.

How do you know that’s the right answer? Well, you know it because I’m saying it and I swore a vow long ago to never say anything wrong ever — it just makes it easier — and so, logically, nothing I say can be wrong, and therefore that answer must be right. But how do you think I know it’s the right answer?

Well, it’s down to simple logic.

Experience and Advancement Systems — as I’ve already covered — provide an extrinsic measure of a character’s gameplay progress. They aren’t about the players’ progress because, contextually, they represent the character’s growth in the face of myriad gameplay challenges and they aren’t about the character’s growth due to backstory and off-camera events because that shit’s not gameplay, it’s just fanfiction. The only way Experience and Advancement Systems make any kind of sense and fulfill any kind of gameplay purpose is if they represent the character’s growth as a direct result of the player playing the game through that character.

New characters — regardless of whether they’re new because it’s the start of the game or because they’re replacing a corpse — new characters have made zero gameplay progress under the players’ control. Definitionally, they can’t be anything other than 1st-level or Novice Rank or whatever. To say otherwise means denying — and therefore fundamentally misunderstanding — what Experience and Advancement Systems are for and what gameplay is and what games are. You can do that if you want, but now that you’ve been told the correct and clear and obvious answer, that’d just be willful ignorance on your part.

Why would you want to be purposely wrong and dumb?

When Reality Gets in the Way

Obviously, no one now is going to try to claim that replacement characters should start anywhere but 1st-level, but any of you out there running, say, modern Dungeons & Dragons are likely to point out that you can’t actually do the correct thing at the game table. It doesn’t work and you’d be totally right to point that out. After all, you’d just be repeating shit I already told you, and that pretty much guarantees you’re correct. At least, it does assuming you actually understood what I said and correctly repeated it, which often isn’t the case when people repeat me but I digress…

As I’ve now cited several times, the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014 Edition) states clearly that, while some variance between the player-characters’ Experience Levels is totally fine — even expected — the underlying math used to balance the game breaks down if that variance exceeds two Experience Levels or so. In other words, you can’t drop a 1st-level character into a party of 12th-level adventures or even a party of 4th-level adventurers. The game will break if you do. It won’t be fun. The replacement character will be at an unacceptably high risk of death and their meaningful contributions to gameplay challenges will be extremely hampered and the party, as a whole, will lack the resources the game expects them to have when facing otherwise appropriately-balanced challenges.

So, if you can’t implement the proper, correct, ideal solution to the Character Replacement Advancement problem, does that mean D&D is badly designed or broken? Well, statistically speaking, as a reader of this site, you’re likely to say, “Yes.” Most of my readers will seize on literally any excuse to call modern D&D a badly designed, broken-ass mess. But that isn’t actually fair.

Oh lawd, he be defending DnD again…

Listen, D&D 5E ain’t my favorite version of the game, but if you’re going to play a current, contemporary tabletop roleplaying game, it’s still the best choice from a game design perspective. It’d be intellectually dishonest of me to claim otherwise. Most other roleplaying games in the current market aren’t even trying from an actual game design perspective and that perspective is the only perspective that matters.

But that’s a topic for another time.

One of the ways modern roleplaying games set us free from the shackles of the olden-school games of yore is by implementing tools for balancing gameplay challenges — especially combat challenges — to the player-characters so that Game Masters can provide satisfyingly playable, properly challenging gameplay experiences for players of all skill levels. I ain’t saying D&D does that perfectly — I have a lot of complaints — but it’s gotten closer and tried harder than any other game on the market.

Yes, I know Pathfinder 2 exists. I didn’t misspeak myself. Shut up.

Unfortunately, to pull off that vital stunt, the game’s designers had to come up with a framework for building properly challenging combat encounters and, ultimately, that means there’s going to be a mathematically defined space within which lie properly designed challenging encounters and working outside that space means taking a wrecking ball to the gameplay experience and you kind of have to be an ignorant dumbass to think it could be any other way. Mouthbreathers complaining that “monsters should be relevant at all levels,” are just that: mouthbreathing idiots. It can’t work that way if Experience and Advancement represent any kind of meaningful growth.

To that end, the designers weren’t wrong to prioritize their gameplay balance systems over letting 1st-level characters join 6th-level parties to fight 20th-level monsters. And the rules for building satisfyingly balanced encounters are far more impactful than the rules for replacement characters and come up far more often.

My point is that, even though it’s right and correct and proper to start all replacement characters at 1st-level, most game systems make that impossible because they correctly prioritize other design elements over that fact. In fact, any game that would allow a 1st-level character to rub shoulders with a party of 10th-level characters is probably one I wouldn’t enjoy running because I’d have to give up so many game design elements I value more.

So what do you do? You do the next best thing. In this case, in any system you’re running, you start replacement characters at the minimum viable level that you possibly can without breaking the game. In D&D, that means starting them two levels below the highest-level party member with no magical gear. That’s what D&D says is the weakest viable character the game can tolerate.

And that brings me to the subject of equipment. Just not in the way you think it does.

Whatever Are We To Do With a Dead Character’s Stuff?

In discussions about replacing dead characters — specifically — much handwringing and pissing and moaning is made over the dead character’s advanced magical equipment. I see it all the time in online discussions about Character Replacement Policies and I’m sure that if I let a little time pass between the last lesson and this one, someone would eventually ask me why I forgot to bring it up. But I didn’t forget to bring it up. I left it out because there’s actually nothing you — the Game Master or Campaign Manager — can do about the dead character’s equipment.

Let me clarify the issue…

Some roleplaying games — especially some prior editions of D&D — consider characters’ equipment to be part of the whole mathematical, mechanical balance thing. Basically, characters pick up stat-boosting magical gear at a steady rate during their adventures. This sets equipment up as a sort of separate but parallel character advancement track. Which is totally fine. In fact, it’s cool. Two advancement tracks are better than one.

I should note that current D&D does not work this way and the rulebooks are very clear about that. Magical items in D&D just don’t affect the game balance enough to factor into the encounter design system and so Game Masters can do whatever the hell they want with magical items in modern D&D. That’s the book talking, not me, but the book is right. That’s how it be.

In systems with a rigorous Equipment Advancement Track that runs alongside the Experience Advancement Track, the underlying game math expects characters to have a certain amount of stat-boosting gear. In such a system, then, creating an advanced character means also giving that character advanced gear. A 5th-level character in Pathfinder, for example, is expected to have the equivalent of 5th-level gear.

So, let’s say your 5th level-character dies and you have to make a new 5th-level character. You’d be allowed to equip it with magical weapons, armor, and other toys and trinkets appropriate to a 5th-level character. There’s tables in the book to walk you through that crap.

Meanwhile, there’s a 5th-level corpse in the world that’s also outfitted with 5th-level gear. What stops the party from picking all that crap off your corpse and handing it off to your new character and thus allowing you to start with twice as much gear as you should have. Or just sharing it around amongst the party members to enhance the surviving characters. Or selling the gear and using the money to buy other, useful, desirable gear if no one needs your corpse’s suit of +1 plate armor or whatever. And that’s assuming you — being the clever shit that you are — don’t game the system by relying on the party to deliver your former character’s big-ticket items to you, thus freeing you to spend your advanced starting wealth on second-tier valuable gear you’d never buy if you had to spend your cash on a magical weapon and magical armor.

The point is, in such systems, every death puts the party a little further ahead of the Wealth by Level curve the system assumes. That’s true even if no one’s trying to break the game.

The correct answer, obviously, is to make a rule that says, “When a character dies, their equipment dies too.” Of course, you’d probably make an exception for plot-vital gear like that lich’s phylactery or the only sword in the world that can strike down Tharizdun forever or whatever, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that equipment is part of the character’s advancement in such systems, right? You wouldn’t let the surviving characters gather up their dead ally’s experience levels and share them around so you can’t let them do the same with his magical equipment.

Makes perfect sense, right?

Oops, You Broke The Underpinning Of Your Whole Game

Think for a moment what a Your Equipment Dies With You rule would actually look like in play. How would you pull that off? It’s easy enough to destroy a character’s equipment if they’re considerate enough to fall into Mount Doom or take a blast of dragonfire to the everything, but what if they just get stabbed a few too many times? What if they succumb to exhaustion or poison or disease or whatever? How does their equipment die with them?

Essentially, what you’re really doing is forbidding the players from treating a dead ally’s equipment like real, tangible equipment. You could make some sort of excuse for that bullshit — “In this world, if you don’t bury the dead with all their gear, the gods will curse you forever” — but that’s all it would be: an excuse. It’d just be an arbitrary limitation demanded by the game mechanics justified by a bit of flavor text that falls apart if you think too hard about it. Is it okay, then, for the characters to loot dead orcs or raid crypts? What if the druid’s player says, “Screw the gods! I don’t respect the gods! I’m keeping those Boots of Striving and Sproinging!” At that point, you’d have to say, “Look, that curse thing is just an excuse because really it’d unbalance the game if I let you keep those boots so let’s say your druid respects this tradition, okay?”

This is a roleplaying game, bucko. You can’t mess with the players’ choices or the reality of the world in arbitrary ways for purely game-mechanical reasons. The dead character’s boots are real, tangible things that exist in the imaginary game world. They have to work like boots. Anyone can pick them up or put them on or whatever. If you stop treating boots like boots, then they aren’t really boots anymore. They’re just an arbitrary level-up mechanic with būts scribbled on them in crayon. That’s a bunch of bullshit.

The point here, again, is that the correct answer is just not a thing you can do. You can’t break the underpinning of the world because it’s just too damned important to the whole roleplaying game thing. You also can’t deny the replacement character the proper equipment even if there’s some extra kit in the world they might be able to bum off their new employers because, if the equipment’s not right for the character or the surviving characters decide to sell it or keep it for themselves, they’ll be shit out of luck and that’ll break the game’s balance.

In this case, you’re just kind of stuck with the problem. Every death is technically gonna bump the entire adventuring party higher on the Equipment Advancement Track. Oh well.

You Really Can’t Win

I said at the start that this Feature isn’t actually a lesson in building Character Replacement Policies. I’m absolutely not trying to tell you how you must handle Character Replacement in D&D or Pathfinder or any other game system. Of course, I actually did tell you exactly that and you’d be pretty stupid to do it any other way, but far be it for me to deny anyone their God-given right to be stupid.

This Feature also isn’t a lesson in how to analyze a Game Mastering problem and arrive at a practical, actionable solution. Sure, I did demonstrate how to do exactly that, but that’s not what I set out to show you. What I really wanted to show you is that correct answers are often immaterial because you — as a Game Master or Scenario Designer or Campaign Manager — are just kind of screwed. Whatever you do, you’re screwed. That’s how it be.

Lots of y’all get twisted in knots hunting for The Right Answer and I’m happy to give you any The Right Answer you ask for even though I know you’re going to give me hell for it. The trouble is, the moment you stumble on — or accept from me — The Right Answer, you realize it doesn’t work for one reason or another. Then, you either assume The Right Answer is wrong and go looking for another righter answer, or else you drive yourself nuts tearing your system down and rebuilding it so The Right Answer works.

Neither approach will get you anywhere.

You have to learn to recognize The Right Answer when you’ve got it and then to accept that you’ll never be able to implement it in any game ever because real games are just giant-ass piles of compromise. There is not one, single roleplaying game system in the world that is actually just a set of The Right Answers that work together in perfect harmony. Such a game would be impossible to make.

The best you can ever do is ask yourself, “How close can I get to this The Right Answer with the actual system I’ve got in front of me.” Sometimes, you’ll get lucky and the answer will be, “Pretty damned close, actually.” Other times, the answer will be, “Hahahahahaha! No!”

Fortunately, in the end, it really doesn’t matter because — and I can’t stress this enough — it’s all just pretend elf games anyway so who really gives a crap?