Ask The GMs: Parting is such a frayed plot thread
GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players leave the game. |
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This question comes from Nic, who wrote (regretfully, more than 5 years ago):
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I don’t know whether Johnn offered Nic some guidance at the time, but I dashed off a quick note in reply that – in hindsight – was barely adequate. I think, at the time, we were acutely aware of our growing backlog, and had big plans to try and address the problem – at one point, we were talking about making one-in-four articles an ATGMs response until we got caught up (i.e. doing one a fortnight). For a great many reasons, those plans all eventually came to naught. Because these questions are completely unrelated, as Nic himself suggests, I intend to answer them properly in separate ATGMs posts. A little while back, I discussed all three questions with a number of my other GMs, and between us, came up with answers of… let’s just say, “varying” depth. Their thoughts have been folded into the response presented below. |
The Interweaving of Player and Character
It’s always traumatic when a player leaves a campaign. It’s even more traumatic when you have to actually ask a player to leave. I’ve experienced the first on a number of occasions, but only ever had to experience the second once, thank goodness. And, as a sort of intermediate between the two, on a couple of occasions, I’ve had to ask a player to remove a character from the campaign – even if that risked the player walking, too. At least twice, characters were able to take up solo campaigns in the same campaign world – and on one of those occasions, the player continued in the original campaign with a new character, as well.
There are all sorts of nuances and shadings to the whole question of player departure, and that makes this a difficult question to answer. And there are all sorts of repercussions; any plan for an exit has to at least consider these ramifications, and preferably to take them into account. So that’s the best place to start.
The Effects Of Departure
I counted up eight different types of effect when I outlined this section. When I was finished listing these ramifications, I found – unsurprisingly – that the RPG experienced a potential consequence at every level. It doesn’t matter what the reason for the departure is, there will be an effect of some sort at each of these levels.
At The Personal Level
The nature of these consequences will depend on the relationship between those at the game table and the departed player, and the cause of departure. I’ve had players leave for many different reasons over the years – everything from “I’m joining the army” to “It’s not fun anymore”, to a conscious act of campaign sabotage, to an argument over GM authority, to – sadly – the death of a player. Each of these had a deep emotional effect on me at the time, for the simple reason that the player was no longer at the table. But, if it comes to a choice between losing a friendship and losing a player, I’ll write the player out immediately, by whatever means necessary, and deal with the fallout within the campaign afterwards.
You need to keep a sense of perspective. Quite often, there will be a tendency to focus on the negatives of the situation; it can feel like a personal betrayal, a friend telling you that the effort you have invested into your game and relationship was wasted. Resist this, at all costs, and focus on what has been preserved, instead.
At The GM Level
In most campaigns, the players bring more than their presence, their characters, and their personalities to the table. It can be little things, but whatever contribution the player made to the game often goes with them – whether that’s an ability to solve puzzles, think laterally, remind you of the rules, or provide transport to the game! How you GM the game will change, and will have to change, as a consequence.
The reasons for the departure can also have a big impact on the nature of this effect. Acrimonious departures can either be a trigger for a proactive change (even if the other players were reasonably happy with the way things were going) or can cause a GM to become defensive and resistant to change (even if the other players are also unhappy with the way things were going). The most common reflex is a loss of confidence to at least some extent, as the GM begins to second-guess decisions that have been made in the past, asking whether these contributed to the situation, or whether there was something more that they could have done to prevent what subsequently transpired. I’ve seen GMs who suffered this effect so badly that they were never able to sustain a campaign again – they would start things off but eventually the doubts would overcome them leading to prep-paralysis and an abandoned campaign, often without warning.
On top of that, the other effects of the departure that are discussed below will mandate a sudden and unexpected increase in the amount of prep that you need to do. Everything needs to be reassessed and re-evaluated, and that takes time, and quite often that time will come at the expense of other aspects of game prep. It might be better to cancel a game session or two in order to gain the time required – but that possibility has to be weighed against the inevitable loss of momentum that results.
At The Campaign Level
Whatever plans you had for the campaign might need to change, depending on how central the departed player’s character was to those plans. A key departure can be the death-knell for a campaign.
Take my Shards Of Divinity campaign. Everyone involved knew that one player was the central focus of that campaign, and when that player decided to stop playing in the campaign, it lost its reason for continuing. That wasn’t exactly a surprise, however; there had been innumerable missed sessions in the year leading up to that point, making it clear that interest was waning, relative to other activities. Ultimately, though, I put a large part of the demise of that campaign down to the death of one of the players, and to the exuberance that he brought to the table; his absence changed the dominant tone of play, and the game became a lot less fun to play.
At The Plot Level
The absence will usually have a profound effect at the plot level. Entire plotlines might exist purely because of the character that is departing, antagonists existing for no other reason than to confront and confound that PC. All these need to be revisited and revised.
Sidebar:
That doesn’t mean abandoned, however. I have observed in the past how all the NPCs seem to miraculously know that a character has left the party! Doesn’t it make more sense that at least a few of these would retain their old motivations, show up expecting to confront the character, only to find that he’s not there anymore?
At The Tactical Level
Whatever abilities and traits the character brought to the party in combat situations, they’re gone. Not only will the other PCs need to cover any resulting shortfall, but they will also need time to adjust to the new game balance. Some may try too hard, some may not try hard enough; either way, the PCs combat capabilities are going to be experiencing upheaval for a while.
At the same time, the GM also has to adjust to the situation; whatever foes were appropriate to a challenging encounter in the past will now be relatively much stronger than the PCs. Flexibility in planning and even the occasional GM cheat to enhance or diminish the opposition may be needed for a while.
At The Player Level
I’ve touched on this already – the collective persona of the party will inevitably change with the departure of the player. Some types of gameplay will be revitalized, some will become less welcome, and others might now become possible. Picture a team whose “ideas man” has departed and you will get some notion of the level of impact that can be felt at this level.
On top of that, the players are all human, too, and will notice the absence of the player in other ways. It might be that the departed person was one half of a pair who continually engaged in side-chatter; with that player gone, the other will focus more on the adventures at hand, and expect to be entertained as much as if the departed player hadn’t left. Things that were tolerable because of the entertaining way the departed player handled them will become less so.
The entire dynamic on the player’s side of the game table will change – only the extent of change is in doubt.
At The PC Level
Was the character who is departed always the one who handled negotiations? Was he the character who the others relied on to spot Danger? Did he understand a particular race better than the rest? Did he cook the meals? Or was he the strongman who carried all the party treasure?
It’s not just in combat that the missing character would have made a major contribution. For an unknown period of time, the other PCs have been developed in a way shaped by the presence of the now-missing PC. Vital skills and knowledge might now be lost, and – for a while – they may struggle to make up the deficit.
At The Spotlight Problems
Finally, there is the question of rationing out the spotlight equally amongst the players. There have been times when a player’s departure has meant that another player came to dominate the game table, either through the competence of his PC or because the absent player was the one who created opportunities for the others to contribute. This can happen so easily and quickly that you don’t even notice it happening!
A Big Deal
That’s why a player’s departure is such a big deal, why the GM needs to take stock after it happens (if not sooner), and why specific advice on how to handle it is so difficult to offer. So, why I (and my fellow GMs) are going to do our best, it’s practically certain that our advice will be inadequate to cover all eventualities and situations. The only way to combat that is to make the advice so generic that it’s practically worthless, which won’t help anyone.
Why Is The Player Leaving?
Before you can plan for a departure, or rebuild the campaign after one, you need to understand the motivation behind the departure. Is it something that you were doing, or not doing? Is it because of real world circumstances? Is it because of a personal conflict? Are there changes that can be made to the campaign to prevent the departure? Is it worth making those changes, or would that only cause trouble with another player?
Why is the player leaving, can anything be done about that reason, and is the price of doing so worth the reward of keeping the player in the game?
Can the player simply be absent for a while, with his character either “in exile” or an NPC, until he returns?
On the other side of the coin, it’s my firm belief that a player who is not in attendance, because he wants to be absent, drags the whole game down – so if a player really wants to leave, I will accommodate him or her as quickly as possible. Note that this is a very different situation, and response, to that which obtains if the player doesn’t want to leave but has been left with no choice for some reason!
The more notice that you can be given, the better the planning that you will be able to put in place to deal with the situation. Departures that are sprung on you are the worst.
Staying with a new Character
Is staying in the game with a new character a viable alternative? Even temporarily? Will that mitigate and spread out the effects, giving everyone more time to come to grips with them, or will it simply drag out a bad situation?
Does The Character Have To Stay?
If the character is too central to the campaign, one option worth considering is to have the character stay, even though the player that created him has departed.
Ex-PCs as NPCs?
The most obvious way of achieving this is for the character to continue in the campaign as an NPC, either indefinitely or temporarily.
In both the Zenith-3 and Adventurer’s Club campaigns, I consider the PCs to belong to the campaign and not to the player. They are part of the fabric and continuity of the game world, and while they might no longer be a part of the game on a day-to-day basis, they are always somewhere, doing something – and fully capable of making a “guest appearance” on occasion, or showing up to present the remaining PCs with some new problem to solve.
This is modeled on the fact that in comics, no-one ever seems to die forever. Any absence is temporary, at best, and the Zenith-3 campaign is a superhero campaign modeled on the style of Marvel Comics in the 70s and 80s. In the case of the Adventurer’s Club, it’s simple pragmatic verisimilitude – if a player leaves, their character gets written out of future adventures, but if the circumstances of the character’s departure are such that the character is alive and well somewhere, that’s where they can be found, should the need arise.
Even if the decision is that the campaign is better off if the character in question “retires” from the game in some fashion, these possibilities show that it is not necessary for the dates of departure of the player and the character to coincide. In fact, they can turn the impending absence of the character into a plot element under the GM’s control…
Old Character, New Player?
If keeping the character in the game would leave an NPC getting too big a share of the spotlight, that still doesn’t put the kibosh on the option. When Nick Deane decided to leave the Zenith-3 campaign, his character Blackwing was central to too many of the plotlines then underway, so a new player took over the character. Not only did Jonathon then steer Blackwing through those outstanding plotlines, he represented a whole new (and rather more homicidal) take on the character that generated a whole new slew of plotlines. When Jonathon, in turn, had to relinquish the character, another former player in the campaign, Saxon, generated (with assistance from Ian Gray and myself) a third incarnation in which he started to come to terms with his out-of-control personality elements and rebuild his life. Meanwhile, Nick’s absence didn’t last all that long, and he had returned with another character, one who is even more central to what is going on than Blackwing was. Both the characters being played and the campaign have emerged substantially healthier than they would otherwise have been from this little soap opera!
Departure as an opportunity
That’s because a departure also represents an opportunity to the GM. If a character isn’t quite working, if his baggage has grown stale, this is a chance to reinvent and revise the character, and the campaign elements with which the character to which the character is central. It’s even possible that when the player sees what you have planned, they might change their minds and stick around – it’s happened before!
When a player departs, the GM should always ask themselves “Is there a way that I can take advantage of this to make the game better?”
Contemplate, for example, the benefits in making a character (who the GM knows is soon to depart) even more central and important to the party, i.e. making them even more dependent on that character’s presence – throwing them in the deep end, in total dissaray. when the character departs at “the worst possible time” from the party’s point of view!
Who will step up to the plate?
Choosing the right player to take over an existing PC is a very important decision. You need a player with a strong vision of and for the character, and the roleplaying skills to take a character that was designed for someone else and make it their own.
That’s another truism that merits attention: I believe that every player creates his characters to play to his strengths and abilities. If they deliberately choose to “push themselves” in one area, they will usually ensure that the other areas are well within their natural scope so that they can give that focus the attention it needs and deserves. That, in turn, often means that the area in which the player is “pushing themselves” becomes the central defining fact of the PC in question. This is a phenomenon that I’ve witnessed many times, but one that a lot of GMs seem unaware of – recognizing it means that they can build campaign elements around the aspect of the character that the player wants to explore, rather than the more generic themes represented by the rest of the character.
I don’t think you can ever personalize a campaign to the tastes of your players too much, provided that you do so collectively and even-handedly, without favoring one character over another.
The Timing Matters
The more advance notice you’ve got, the more you can plan for the departure. It should be clear from the discussion so far that the timing of the departure matters – in fact, it’s critical to how you handle the situation. The less notice you have, the more you should contemplate preserving as much of the status quo as you can.
Immediate Departure
The most difficult situations are the ones that take effect immediately. “I joined the army, I deploy for basic training next week.” “I’ve got a new job in a different city, starting next week.” “I’m sorry, he has passed away.”
As with most situations, surprise is not the friend of well-thought-out and implemented planning. You have to do something right away, regardless of how full of holes it is. That makes it important to seize any opportunities presented by what you have already got planned.
When Stephen Tunnicliff passed away, we were in the early stages of an adventure in which he was to receive a noble title; he had paid the character points for this perq, and he had asked us to write in such a plotline. Rather than abandoning the plotline unfinished, we tweaked it slightly to make it a memorial to all the things that Stephen had brought to the campaign, and asked another mutual friend (and an ex-player in the campaign) to handle the character until the end of the adventure. It didn’t take much adjustment to the planned conclusion to have the character retire at the adventure’s end – he was now a nobleman, with new responsibilities, and resident in the castle of Vlad Dracul in what was once Transylvania! It was a fitting end for the character, and tribute to the player.
Temporary Departure
A temporary departure is another substantively different question entirely. Different options are on the menu. One key question is whether or not the character can wait until the player returns. It’s not fair to give the character to a new player and then ask them to relinquish it, so some negotiation and discussion is definitely in order.
One of the few advantages of the once-a-month schedule that most of my campaigns are on is that for a handful of game sessions, a lot of real-world time can pass. This makes a temporary solution to a temporary departure more practical to implement – six game sessions later is half a year, and a lot of things can change in that time!
Inevitable Departure
Almost as easy to manage is the situation in which you are told that by the player that they have to depart the campaign on a fixed date. It doesn’t happen often, but even a couple of game sessions’ notice can make a big difference. This is the counterbalancing downside to only playing each campaign once a month – a month’s notice is one game session, possibly less. If we played weekly, that would be four or maybe five game sessions advance warning, lots of time to design and implement an exit strategy for both player and character.
Eventual Departure
The most relaxing version of possible circumstances are the ones that both Nick and Saxon presented when they decided (separately and at different times) to leave the Zenith-3 campaign: “I’d like you to write me out sometime soon, when it’s convenient to do so.” I’ve already described how those worked out, so I won’t go into it again. This means that you can design an exit strategy and implement it at the point that is most convenient and least-harmful to the campaign.
That doesn’t mean letting the grass grow under your feet; it means that you can take as long as you have to, within reason. The point that I made earlier about a player who doesn’t want to be there remains valid and in effect.
Why Does The Character Leave?
Having looked at things from the player point of view, it’s time to turn to the actual subject of the question – handling things from the character’s point of view.
Even if you are handing the character over to a new player, it should not be a case of the new player taking the still-warm seat vacated by the departing character; there should be some sort of life-changing experience for the character concerned to provide an in-game justification for the inevitable change in style that will result. It’s easier (and more accurate) to think of this as the old character departing and a new one (who just happens to be a new version of the old character) taking his place.
So you will need some event that triggers the need for a change in the PC. That change can either lead him down a different path to that of the party (if he’s being retired) or simply to become a slightly different person (in the hands of a new player).
Viewing this event as a transformative one opens up a great many more options than the stock-standard “the character gets killed” or “he just left” that Nic complains of in his letter – even without getting especially creative. Assuming that he’s departing: Adventuring with the party has been the character’s job – now he has a different job.
A very important note
It’s very important that the transformation, the opportunity to change, and the acceptance of that opportunity, all happen in-game and not be the subject of hand-waving. If hand-waved, it will seem contrived; if the players see it happen in-game, it will seem like the natural outgrowth of the character’s circumstances and actions. If that requires you to insert a mini-adventure or even revise the adventure you have planned in order to achieve these new goals, so be it – that’s part of the planning of an exit strategy that I’ve been talking about.
Stock Reasons
Why does someone change their lifestyle, or their job descriptions, or where they live, in the real world? Illness (mental or physical), changing or finding religion, getting promoted, falling in love, getting married, family problems, an offer too good to refuse, falling in with the wrong crowd, or going to prison. Did I leave anything out? Oh yes: job satisfaction, personal conflicts, professional jealousies, internal politics, stress, having achieved everything the character set out to achieve, or just being in a rut.
“Real Life” presents all these options, and they are all valid reasons for the character to change, or depart, the adventuring party. But, for the most part, they are all still fairly mundane unless dressed up a bit with some added drama. Which is why I tend to label them all as “stock reasons”, and only use them as a last resort, and when I need something in a hurry.
It’s far better to have the character’s leaving be an exit strategy built into the character from the very beginning – or from whenever people read this article!
Trapdoors – Inbuilt
Many characters will have a trapdoor built into them by the very game system. Others will have one inbuilt by the combination of game setting and particulars of the character in question – an elf might be seduced by hints at a “final solution” to the “Drow Problem”, for example, or if the Elves had been defeated and scattered by some enemy, a means of reuniting the Elves and restoring their former Kingdom.
To activate the trapdoor, one need only dangle the opportunity to achieve the quest or goal before the character as the outcome of an adventure with the other PCs, while ensuring that the others have too many irons in the fire to contemplate coming to the character’s assistance. This presents the character with an “offer he cannot refuse” – even if it means departing from the adventuring party.
Trapdoors – Player Created
My personal preference is to build a trapdoor into each character during construction. A quest or mission to which they are willing to devote their lives, but which they cannot see a way to achieve. This could be something deeply personal or emotional in nature – finding true love, for example – or something more palpable, such as discovering who murdered the character’s parents and why. The number of permutations are almost endless.
These are more deeply personal and more derivative of the character as he has been portrayed in play, and hence have a greater impact and greater plausibility.
Trapdoors – Imposed & Exotic
A poor fourth choice is to impose a solution from the outside. Revealing that the character was replaced with a Doppleganger at some point in the past, for example, or utilizing a dues-ex-machina. There may be times when this is the only choice available, short of the possibly-worse “he died” or “he left”, but that’s usually a result of the combination of surprise timing and inadequate advance planning.
Vanishings
Perhaps the least used option is simply to have the character vanish without warning or explanation. The mistake most GMs make when they contemplate or use is that they don’t let the PCs make a fuss about the disappearance, permitting metagame knowledge to direct the course of play. This is a devastating wound to the plausibility of the situation.
If one of your friends wasn’t heard from for a couple of weeks, stopped going to their usual haunts, with no answer on their telephone, how would you react? If they had simply seemed to vanish from the face of the earth, and you were someone used to solving problems and doing your own detective work, what would you do?
Having a PC vanish without a trace, and permitting – even encouraging – the PCs to react appropriately solves the verisimilitude problem. All you now need to do to complete this underused 5th solution is to insert, at some later point in the campaign, a solution to the mystery. If the PCs have some secret enemy who they are to confront in the grand conclusion, having the PCs rescue a weak and long-tortured long-lost member of their number in the process, for example!
Who will step up to the plate?
Another way to have the departure be more immediate without seeming contrived is to have the character killed in the adventure, leaving their life’s work unfulfilled – but giving them a death scene or post-death scene in which the burden of finishing those tasks gets laid upon one or more of the other PCs. This provides an unexpected twist that makes the stock-standard death scene far more interesting.
He Faked It
One final option to contemplate is having the departing PC fake his own death for some reason. It needs to be a good reason, but by re-framing the question in this way, you open up a whole new category of ‘trapdoors’ to use!
When does the Character leave?
So, given that it can be a date and time completely separate to the departure of the player, when should the character leave the adventuring party?
There are essentially four options here, excluding the “maybe never” that results from a new player taking over the character.
Between Game Sessions
This, for me, is the worst possible choice, because it takes the choice of how to react away from the other PCs. The only way that it works, in my opinion, is when you use the “Vanishing” solution – but the surprise factor would be even stronger if the player who was leaving was at the game table, in on the joke, and watching the fun unfold!
Unless you use this method to turn the situation into an asset, it’s nothing but a liability, a random bolt from the blue that undermines the credibility and realism of the game world.
One Final Session
This is only marginally better (if I exclude those cases where this overlaps one of the later categories). It does enable some sort of motivation for the retirement to be put forward, but that’s as far as the advantage goes because of the exclusions – by definition, this can’t be an opportune time (that would be “when the time is right”) and can’t wrap up the current adventure, either. That means that rather than the departure seeming contrived, the justification put in place for the departure seems contrived.
One Final Adventure
Waiting to the end of the current adventure works rather better, provided that your games tend to be at least reasonably episodic. That’s because there is inherently a sense of endings that comes with the resolution of a plotline and of new beginnings at the start of the next adventure, and both are appropriate to the out-of-game situation. Even if the real-world situation mandated an immediate-departure situation for the player, I would strongly consider keeping the character around as an NPC until the end of the adventure still in progress, even if that new adventure was due to begin at the next game session.
For those whose campaigns are more strongly stream-of-consciousness daily-lives in nature, with no strong divisions between “adventures”, I would define an arbitrary number of game sessions – two to three – in which to develop and implement a planned exit strategy – with the “clock” starting at the end of the game session in which the GM is first informed of the desired departure.
When The Time Is Right
This is the best option of them all, because it enables the GM to fold the motivation for the character’s departure into some other event that was already going to be a watershed in the lives of the PCs; all the departure does is up the ante.
Signaling A Change
It’s equally important for a new owner to take charge of the character only after some significant event in the character’s personal life that can justify the change in personality. An intermediate period when the character is handled as an NPC might be the best choice – the GM has a clearer idea of how the character will behave than a new player will, at least in theory.
Compounding the Problem: A New PC & Player?
So there are many possible justifications for an exit, and many combinations of timing and circumstance in terms of presenting that justification in-game. The best choices are those that spread the shocks over a period of time – giving the other players a chance to get used to the idea that one of their number is leaving, or has left, and giving the characters a chance to adjust to the forthcoming departure of the character (or to run around in search for him if he’s just vanished).
The alternative – having it all land on the game table like a ton of bricks – only compounds the problems and shock. However, that can sometimes be preferable to having the game dynamic change twice in short succession – as would be the case if one player left and a new player took over the character a short time later. So there needs to be either a very short interval between these two events or a lengthier one. It’s hard to get specific because there are so many variables to consider.
General Advice: Have A Plan In Advance
The best advice that can be offered, beyond outlining the many options that need to be considered, is to have a plan in advance. Every six months, sit down with your campaign plan and ask yourself, for each of the players, “What will happen if [Player X] decides to leave? What’s the best way to handle it?” You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this – a minute or so each will usually more than suffice, and with most campaigns, that’s five or six minutes total.
That’s a pittance in game-prep terms, but it can save hours of angst when you aren’t in a condition to think as clearly should the circumstance manifest.
General Advice: Be appropriate to the Genre
A consideration that should always form part of your thinking is the manner in which departures take place within the genre of stories that are taking place within the game. “He died” works, and means something quite different, if you are running a Zombie Apocalypse!
General Advice: Be Dramatic
Because of the emotional baggage that comes with a player departing the game, we tend to underplay the concurrent departure of the character. In the process, it’s easy to do more damage to the campaign than the departure itself inflicts. There can also be a tendency to lash out at the shortcomings (real or imagined, but usually exaggerated) of the departed player or character, which is also damaging. I strongly recommend avoiding both these; acknowledge, without over- or under-playing it, the impact of the departure of the player, while reassuring the other players that you have a plan for this eventuality that you are putting into effect, and making a big deal out of the departure of the character. This is a momentous event in the lives of the PCs – set circumstances in place that are commensurate with that, and you turn the departure into a milestone that celebrates what the player had brought to the table.
And that eases the pain of departure for everyone.
Past Advice
I’m going to end this discussion by pointing to some past advice relevant to the issue. There are a few articles here at Campaign Mastery, and there are a few examples in media worth looking at.
Previous Articles
There are a couple of previous articles that are worth mentioning in this context.
- I specifically want to point people to The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player in which I consider what a GM has to consider when he loses a player. Is the campaign still viable? What can be done about it? And, what should be done about it? I go on to review my campaigns in light of the then-recent passing of my friend and player, Stephen.
- Interviewing Potential Players – “Filling the empty chair” was written by Johnn during the time when he was working on Campaign Mastery, and I contributed to it. In response to a question raised by a review of the book, Johnn added this extension to the book on how to use an interview to screen prospective players for a good gaming ‘fit’ and potential problems.
- This Survey For New Players Ensures A Good Fit – Roleplaying Tips reader Zerfinity sent Johnn the player recruitment survey that he used to build his new group. Johnn offers the survey in this article because it answered the question of a reviewer of “Filling the empty chair” (paraphrased): How do you select a new player if you get multiple responses to your ‘gamer wanted’ ads?
- Missing In Action: Maintaining a campaign in the face of player absence – How do you maintain a campaign when several players are unable to attend regularly?
My Original Answer
Here’s my original answer to Nic, presented verbatim:
Complicated. The main thing is making sure that for every plot thread revolving around that character that is crucial to the overall plot, you have some other character who can step in. If a plot thread is not critical to the overall plot, it can be dropped or perhaps reconditioned and recycled. Watch the five seasons of B5 (and especially the commentaries) for more on techniques for handling this.
You can see why I described it as “barely adequate” at the start of this article!
Appending to my original answer
There are a couple of other examples in media that are worth looking at.
- “Stargate: SG1” – the departure of Teryl Rothery (Dr Janet Fraser) in Season 7 was made a big deal by a two-part episode, “Heroes“. This is an example of how to do it right.
- “Major League 2” – (you will need to have seen Major League for context) – look at the way the characters evolved in between the two seasons. This gives an idea of the degree of change that a new player can bring to a character (even though these were all played by the same actors!)
- “Stargate: SG1” – the departure of Don S. Davis (General George Hammond) after Season 7. It is now known that he left for health reasons, at the time this was not made clear. They also managed to bring the actor back a time or two before his death to reprise the role. But at the time this was very badly handled; they didn’t seem to have a trapdoor planned for the actor’s possible departure at all. It would have been better to have shot, sometime in one of the preceding seasons, a scene that provides a reason for George Hammond to have gone incommunicado – a secret mission of some sort, or an offer of a promotion – that could have been inserted into the plot of the Season Eight opening episode. Instead, they “told” instead of “showing” – and the whole thing felt contrived. This is an example of how not to do it.
- “Bewitched” – Arguably the most famous case of one actor replacing another occurred when Dick Sargent (who had originally been offered the part) replaced Dick York (who was ill) in this TV series. The show ran for eight seasons, last for three with the new “Darren”. This is an example of successfully pretending that there had never been a change of cast at all – nevertheless, there were differences between the two actors’ portrayals of the role. The success of the substitution is a landmark in television history.
- “Return Of The Jedi” – The replacement of the image of Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker with that of Hayden Christensen remains one of the greatest sources of vitriol directed at George Lucas’ revisions to the original trilogy. Another example of getting it wrong.
- The James Bond franchise – the ultimate example of one actor replacing another in the same role. ‘Nuff said.
In conclusion
The loss of a player, for any reason, is always traumatic. There’s no need to make the trauma worse by being ham-fisted in handling the loss of the character as well. For obvious reasons of that trauma, when it’s happening is probably the worst possible time to plan and implement an exit strategy; so have a plan in advance, even in very rough draft. That plan should be an outgrowth of the character and the genre. Get the player who runs the character involved and together, prepare a contingency plan or two.
About the contributors:
I have to thank my fellow GMs for their time and their insights. This time around, the contributors are the usual gang of five (who are all players in the Zenith-3 campaign, making it easy to pick their brains in a social-conversation way).
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Mike: |
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Blair: |
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Saxon: |
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Nick: His second time around, things went better, and his Marvel campaign turned out “halfway decent”. That group broke up in 1995 when a number of members moved interstate. Three years later, Nick heard about what is now his regular group while at a science-fiction bookstore. He showed up at one of their regular gaming Saturdays, asked around and found himself signed up for an AD&D campaign due to start the next week. A couple of weeks later, He met Mike, and hasn’t looked back since. From ’98 he’s been a regular player in most of Mike’s campaigns. There’s also been some Traveller and the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, amongst others. Lately he’s been dipping a tentative toe back into the GMing pool, and so far things have been going well. He is the least active on social media of the gang of five. |
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Ian: Over the last couple of years he has been dirtying his hands with game design. He was a contributor to Assassin’s Amulet, the first time his name appeared in the credits of a real, live, RPG supplement. Recently he has taken to GMing more frequently, with more initial success than he was probably expecting (based on his prior experiences). Amongst the other games he now runs, Mike and Blair currently play in his Star Wars Edge Of The Empire Campaign. Ian haunts his Facebook page very occasionally, and it’s rumored that he might also have a twitter account – a rumor that he has neither confirmed nor denied. |
Next in this series: The answer to Nic’s second question: The use (and abuse) of Handouts in RPGs.
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December 11th, 2015 at 1:02 am
[…] I have been answering them properly in separate ATGMs posts – here’s a link to Answer #1 and here’s Answer #2. A while back, in preparation for these articles, I discussed the […]