Friday 8 October 2021

Introducing New PCs

The basic principle when introducing a new PC is to do it as rapidly as possible. This is the case whether a new player is joining or if a PC has died and a player needs a replacement, although it is probably all the more important in the latter circumstance. (Get back in the saddle!)

To this end, I have an expedited process for new PCs for my games:

  • Roll 3d6 for stats (assign to taste); choose a class
  • Roll hp
  • Roll a background on a 1d6 table
  • Choose up to two weapons
  • Choose up to one piece of armour and one shield
  • Choose up to seven other pieces of equipment (including containers, carriers, etc.)
  • Choose up to one animal
  • Note down that the PC has 25gp

This reliably takes less than 5 minutes and is very simple to deploy - the only work needed from the DM is the short table of backgrounds. (In the case of my current campaign this is: 1 - Carthaginian, 2 - Greek, 3 - Macedonian, 4 - Etruscan, 5 - Roman, 6 - Egyptian. Obviously in a more fantastical setting you would want some further elaboration, but not much more.)

It is almost always the case that a new PC can be inserted more or less straight away. If the existing PCs are on their way back to town, or in it already, the new PCs is at the inn or wherever seems appropriate. He can be a relative or friend, or simply a likely-looking fellow to take the place of poor Cedric. If the PCs are in the wilderness, they stumble across the new guy and it turns out he's going where they're going. Otherwise, on a deep dungeon delve, he is a fellow adventurer out of his depth and in need of comrades.

Of course, the absolute easiest way of introducing new players or replacing dead PCs is to make use of a hireling or henchman. This is often the way of things: a PC is killed during combat, and his player takes on one of the NPC retainers and keeps him. 

The deadliness of traditional D&D when played correctly is much ameliorated by these expedited processes for replacements. 

11 comments:

  1. In re replacement PCs, I love the weird Ship of Theseus thing you get with high mortality campaigns. Over time, the whole party gets replaced (some PCs more than once). From the players' perspective, it remains the same party, but the PCs are usually oblivious to the whole campaign narrative. One game I played went completely off the rails (in a good way) when the players realised their replacement characters owed no allegiance to the instigating events of the campaign.

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    1. Yeah, you have to keep reminding yourself sometimes that the current PCs might not actually know things that their predecessors did!

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  2. In my current game, we've got some good mileage out of replacement PCs being relatives - usually cousins - of surviving ones, the logic being that once people know a member of the family is off adventuring someplace, that person becomes a magnet for the restless and desperate among their extended kinship network. It gives the party an excuse for letting this total stranger hang around with them ('but he's family!'), and an instant connection between the new PC and at least one of the old ones...

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    1. Yeah, and that also can lead to PCs coming up with elaborate family trees, backstories, etc., which is fun.

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  3. I always find captives of the baddies a good source of replacement PCs *in the dungeon*. And it might just be that the hobgoblin slavers have captured someone that someone in the current party knows. A useful variation is the fugitive - someone stumbles into the PCs' path with orc arrows whizzing behind him.

    Last year, I worked out a mechanism for using unnamed lantern-bearers as a source of continuity in high-lethality games (http://hobgoblinry.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-last-lantern-bearer-mechanism-for.html). We've used it a lot in the 'filler' sessions we've played when we don't have a quorum for the regular campaign, and it works well. It means we can have an extremely high attrition rate and still have all the new PCs aware of the dungeon explorations to date - because they were all there for at least some of it. And it frees up the PCs from some of the more tiresome logistics.

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    1. Yes, captives is good, as is fugitives. Introducing a new PC in media res also helps with the hand-waving for explaining why the new guy is suddenly friends with everyone.

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    2. I once flipped that on its head during a TPK-in-the-making by having the few folks who weren't definitely dead yet get petrified, then introducing the replacement PCs (for the folks whose PCs had died outright) as their rescuers who'd broken the curse more or less by happenstance several hundred years later. The formerly-stoned PCs were temporal fish out of water and the new blood had to bring them up to speed on current events, but knowledge of what was now the distant past meant the older PCs had a lot to offer, conveniently explaining the two groups deciding to work together. Worked pretty well since the campaign had been headed for a reset anyway and this let me mix elements of old and new for a bit of continuity.

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  4. I dont know how much fantasy your setting has, but 2 and 3 are the same :)

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  5. If you're using Christian metaphors, maybe each expedition to the Underworld is like a crusade. When a PC is 'martyred', one of the party clerics gains the ability to convert a captured humanoid. Hilarity ensues when a party full of redeemed orcs returns to town though.

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    1. The idea of adventurers as crusaders is a nice one - and also a good excuse for having a regular stream of new PCs and retainers (maybe 3d6 volunteers arrive each month in game time, or something).

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  6. I really like the character creation procedure described! The faster the easier. I have a couple questions. Does removing the classes make a difference? How do you define the classes (classic b/x or adnd or your own rules?) Is race an option or is that covered by background?

    My initial reaction to the first question is that classlessness makes a major difference; players don't have a skeleton to 'hang' their expectations on, as it were.

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