When Players Kill the Campaign

Players inevitably do the unexpected. A good DM anticipates the most likely options and plans for them. After all there are only so many choices during a dungeon crawl. But what happens when the unexpected scenario involves the characters themselves and not the choices they make? How can a DM prepare for players who want to changes their characters without warning? How is the long-term camping affected when the players decide that they want to try something new?

We recently returned to a campaign that’s been collecting dust since 3.5e. Everyone was really excited about starting up again because we ended it on a cliffhanger. With over a year already invested in the camping there was substantial foundation already in place for the next chapter. During the down-time I’d plotted out the campaign progression through the entire paragon tier. But before we could proceed everyone needed to re-imagine their character using 4e mechanics.

4e D&D presented the players with a lot of new character options. Not only are the classes full of variation in and of themselves, but there are new classes and new races not previous available in 3.5e. After about 10 sessions into the campaign four of the five players decided that they wanted to play different characters. Some of them said that their character just didn’t feel the same in 4e as they did in 3.5 and others just wanted to try some of the new mechanics – both of these being perfectly acceptable reasons as far as I was concerned.

As the DM I want the players to have fun. If they don’t want to keep playing their current character, I have no objection to letting them change PCs. But this is the first time that more than one player decided to change his character at the same time another player.

That puts me, as the DM, in a strange situation. How do I proceed? My original story assumed that the party makeup would be unchanged. A lot of my plot points and interesting role-playing encounters were tailored to the specific PCs, their abilities, and more importantly their previous and continuous involvement in the greater story. By throwing new PCs into the mix a lot of the reasons for why things are happening don’t make a whole lot of sense any more.

My initial thought was to scrap the current campaign and just start something new. After all, none of the characters have a shared history and only one of them knows the campaign history. Forcing the newcomers down the path of the existing story seems difficult and unfair to them. But when I broached this topic with the players they all said they like the current campaign story and they all want to keep playing it.

For the past two weeks we’ve been trying to figure out how and why these PCs would come together and stay together as a party. For now we’ve used the most boring and typical motivation – treasure. But my gaming group is very experienced and very hard-core. They generally want something more out of their role-playing game experience. So we struggle to find a common goal and still stick to the campaign as originally envisioned for a totally different group of characters. So far we haven’t resolved this issue.

This entire experience has me looking at the way I design my campaigns. As the PCs are developed through game play and become more recognizable as actual characters, I try to incorporate a lot of that into my game. The rewards are tremendous and the players feel really connected to the campaign. But using this campaign development strategy has come back to bite me. I’ve tailored the game so much to those characters that it just isn’t he same with a new party. In a way it’s almost impossible to proceed without them.

For the first time in a long time I actually see the value in the short, one-off adventures like the RPGA Living Forgotten Realms (LFR) games. The biggest complaint I’ve heard from people playing these adventuress is that there is no senses of continuity. They adventures are designed to accommodate a party of six PC, regardless of their classes or races. Because you will likely play with different people and different character every week, you loose the camaraderie gained by playing a long-term home game. The complete containment of the adventure week-to-week means that changes like the one we’re experiencing now have no impact to the game. The players show up, play the PC they want to play and the game moves ahead.

So I’m in a situation where I need to find some happy middle ground. I think the LFR example is too far away from where I want to be, but the methodology I’ve used up to this point might be to restrictive. I suppose I need to try and design the campaign to play to the current party, but not to do it to such as extreme that the loosing a PC will destroy the campaign entirely.

Have other DMs experienced this problem? How have you handled mass exodus of characters form a campaign? Do you design your adventures so closely to the party’s current make up that roster changes would essentially kill the campaign?

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